TfC Cultural Frictions Seminar Series
Cultural Frictions is a project of the Trans/forming Cultures research centre. The project seeks to examine how modern societies increasingly experience tensions between claims to secularism, equality and rationality, and the realities of cultural hierarchies, social inequalities and resurgent social movements, some based on religious affiliation. The project will place these questions in comparative settings in order to explore the everyday, productive nature of these frictions, and varying governmental and cultural responses to them.
Current Events
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Between the Walls: Professor Russ West-Pavlov, Professor of English Literature at the Free University of Berlin (currently visiting Professor at the Australia Centre, University of Melbourne) will be presenting the second Cultural Frictions seminar on:
Date: Thursday, 8th March, 11:00 - 1:00
Venue: Room CB02.07.005 (City Campus, Building 2, UTS)
For further information contact Transforming.Cultures.
Summary:
This paper takes as its point of departure two Berlin monuments to the Berlin Wall (built 1961, dismantled 1989): the Wall Memorial at Bernauer Strasse, the site of many early escape attempts, and the Parliament of the Trees installation near the newly established German parliament on the banks of the River Spree. It looks at the spaces configured by these two monuments to meditate upon the new borders which have divided up the world after the end of the Cold War. It suggests, firstly, that these borders are now aligned along a North-South axis, rather than the East-West axis of the Cold War period. My reading of the two memorials continues by scrutinizing the internal spaces of these monuments to suggest that the new North-South borders are not so much lines of demarcation as (following the Dutch theorist Inge Boer) densely populated broadband territories which take the peripheral border right to the hearland of the late-modern Western nation-state - as I demonstrate by looking at some contemporary walls: the Palestine Wall and the fences at the erstwhile Woomera internment camps in Australia. The border, I claim, is a space which effectively envelopes the entire nation, creating an unsuspected community of insiders and outsiders, natives and refugees, legals and illegals alike.
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Past Events
