Transnational Cultures
The study of transnational cultures is that of the distribution of things, people and cultures beyond national boundaries. It considers the relation between global economics and diaspora, migration and refugee flows; the intensification of local cultures in the global and transnational contexts; the valuation and revaluation of objects, and the creation of new identities in transnational spaces.
With this particular conceptual approach, contemporary studies of globalisation, transnationalism, world trade and local and international strategies of contestation and protest can be given historical perspective; while studies of contemporary cultures (such as popular music or film), can be discussed without reduction to their origins.
TfC is strongly committed to cross-boundary, interdisciplinary work, and most of our research projects relate to other program areas, and to TfC Events.
Current TfC projects in this area include:
Ancient & Modern: time, culture and indigenous philosophy
Culture and Commerce in the Indian Ocean
Liminal Sounds and Images: transnational Chinese popular music
Local Noise: indigenising Australasian hip hop
Struggle for Change: black and white activists talk to Kevin Cook
Voyages of Myth: Captain Cook in the Popular Australian Imagination
Selected completed TfC projects in this area include:
Clara Law's Trilogy of Migration
Isabel Flick: the many lives of an extraordinary Aboriginal woman
The 'lost' manuscript of David Unaiponn
Ancient & Modern: time, culture and indigenous philosophy
Researcher: Stephen Muecke
The analysis of Australian culture can be based in 'indigenous' ideas, both local and Aboriginal ones. One project in cultural theory involves an emphasis on place rather than time While in Australia there is a surface debate about the meaning of history, deeper narratives have a logic of space rather than time. Strong elements of antiquity constantly erupt into the present; for whitefellas in the form of 'primitive' rituals like ANZAC day. And there is a strong tendency to identify Australia's blackfellas only with their antiquity, with their traditions, while white Australians imagine they are the essence of the modern.
The Western world no longer has a monopoly on modernity. When other cultures and nations assert their own modes of being modern, it is not just in response to the West, it is by way of their independent cultural development. This project argues that since the nineteenth century indigenous modernity has existed in Australia, defined as radical cultural invention in the face of the pressures of colonialism. Despite this, indigenous people are rarely admitted into cultural or economic contemporaneity, but are typically recognised as being 'still' in a state of development. Even now, there is continued resistance to the acknowledgment of the achievements of indigenous modernity. This analysis is the thesis of a new book: Ancient & Modern: Time, Culture and Indigenous Philosophy (UNSW press, forthcoming 2004)
Photo: Max Pam © 2004
Contingency Theory
Researcher: Stephen Muecke
This project seeks to develop 'contingency theory' for application in new ethnography and as cultural theory: [L. contingens: touching, bordering on, reaching, befalling].
Contingency is that which touches: it is the risk of the event which calls for a singular response. Related to Deleuze and Guattari's rhizome, it may be a concept useful for a new method for cultural study, but it demands concrete specificity. It is a method which abandons the anthropological 'field', the bounded 'community', and even the 'social' as it stresses the transformative potential of lines of connection as they weave geographically, linguistically and historically. The traveller moves in a complex system where connections unfold and disperse, then more suddenly knot and bind in rituals. Can there be any consistency in this method alert to the complexity of open systems? What sticky contagion is transmitted or brought home?
I am touched. Feelings count, not distance from the 'object' and consistency of the gaze. Feelings can enflame or chill; they are a gauge of what is at stake in this situation. The gaze becomes the glimpse, the click of the shutter motivated by intuition.
Having worked with photographer Max Pam in Madagascar, Contingency in Madgascar will be published by Les Imaginayres (Toulouse) in 2006. See also, Stephen Muecke, 'Choreomanias: Movements Through our Body', Performance Research, Volume 8/Issue 4 - December 2003, pp. 6-10., and 'Contingency Theory: the Madagascan experiment', Interventions (UK, forthcoming).
Culture and Commerce in the Indian Ocean
Researcher: Stephen Muecke, Devleena Ghosh; Michael Pearson, UTS
Partner: Asia Research Institute
This project examines trade cultures in a region which was the hub of the major world economic system in the pre-colonial period, and is now restrengthening. It thus links the earliest global system with current globalisation studies, giving those analyses historical depth. It is the first cultural studies project in Indian Ocean studies, and it aims to match new theory to the empirical diversity of the region, analysing the way cultural forces add value to commodities, while creating diverse forms of transnational culture and identity. The project will make major contributions to cultural/historical and postcolonial thought, with the potential to create a new field of study. The project has room for new researchers, and is in partnership with the Asia Research Institute in Singapore for the planning of an international conference in 2006.
Ecocriticism
Researcher: Stephen Muecke
Waste is a key category for understanding cultural value. It is not just the 'bad stuff' we dispose of, it is material we constantly redeem. Cultures, it seems, spend as much energy reclassifying negativity as they do on establishing the negative itself: recycling, antiques, and funerals are all part of this process.
The huge 'tertiary sector' of waste management converts waste into money, and ecological movements continue to stress human values and 'the natural'. But the problems posed are never simply economic, and nor are they simply moral.
The international contributors to this area consider the complex ways in which cultural values get attributed to things. Their diverse approaches-in ethics, cultural studies and politics-are at the forefront of the new field of "ecohumanities".
The role of waste in the attribution of cultural value was explored in a book edited by Gay Hawkins and Stephen Muecke Culture and Waste: the creation and destruction of value, Rowman and Littlefield, 2002.
Racism display, National Museum of Australia, Canberra, 2001
Photo: Andrew Jakubowicz
Fair Go: Racism in Australia
Researcher: Andrew Jakubowicz, Julie Browning
Partner: Fair Go Australia and Alan Gold
This project researches the capacity of Australian governments to determine the extent and nature of racism and racist attacks in Australia. It focuses on data sources and what conclusions can be drawn from the material currently in government organizations and in the public domain. Reports are produced in conjunction with Fair Go.
Stephen Muecke at Roland Barthes' grave, Urt, France, 1992
Photo: Pru Black
Fictocriticism
Researcher: Stephen Muecke
Fictocriticism deforms the limits of literary genres, working both within and beyond them. Post-romantic in conception, it is driven less by the individual imagination and more by the material and attitudes thrown up by the writer's encounter with everyday political emergencies. At its simplest it makes a persuasive argument while telling an engaging story; at its most complex it is a surrealist montage of different styles and media. Fictocriticism can label a wide variety of styles - the tradition of the Essay (from Montaigne to Barthes); the New Journalism of Joan Didion; the travelling philosophy of Alphonso Lingis; the hallucinatory ethnographies of Mick Taussig.
Stephen Muecke's No Road (bitumen all the way), 1997, was the first ficto-critical monograph published in Australia. It has been characterised as "a radically new way of writing about Australia" (Amanda Lohrey), and as such recasts narratives of nation, as did Muecke's 'Australia, for Example' with Ann Curthoys in W Hudson and D Carter (eds.) The Republicanism Debate, 1993. An introduction to fictocritical writing, "The Fall: Fictocritical Writing" is available in Brenda Walker, ed. The Writer's Reader (Sydney: Halstead Press, 2002).
Another fictocritical book, Selfportraits: fictocritical essays will appear with Local Consumption Publications in 2004.
Hong Kong Films of Migration
Researcher: Tony Mitchell; Lisa Leung Yuk-ming, Department of Cultural Studies, Lingnan University
A research collaboration with Dr Lisa Leung Yuk-ming, which will be initiated in September 2004. This will involve collaborative work on refereed articles about (a) themes of migration in the films of Hong Kong director Fruit Chan, (b) on the reception of Cantopop throughout Asia, with particular reference to Faye Wong, and (3) on the development of hip hop and urban music in Hong Kong and its representations of the city. Most of this will be carried out in March and April 2005, while Tony is on PEP at Lingnan University in Hong Kong.
Jewish graves, Warsaw Jewish cemetery, April 2003
Photo: Andrew Jakubowicz
Jewish Memories of Poland
Researcher: Professor Andrew Jakubowicz
A "still open wound" in the New Europe is the unfinished business between Jewish and Christian Poles over their relations under the Nazi occupation. This project examines the literary work of a number of Jewish refugees from the Polish city of Lodz who came to Australia after the Second War. They form a group of memorialists, whose writing and story-telling helps to sustain current attitudes among Polish Jews and their descendants in Australia and elsewhere. The project involves interviews with literary practitioners among the group, and their children who are also writers or publishers. Current narratives can contribute to a deepening of the impasse or a resolution of the tensions; the project therefore examines the interaction between contemporary politics and cultural memory.
Liminal Sounds and Images: transnational Chinese popular music
Researcher: Tony Mitchell
Collaborators: John Erni, Fran Martin, Jeroen De Kloet, J. Lawrence Witzleben, David Stokes
This project explores different notions and manifestations of liminality or 'inbetweenness', transition, hybridity and syncretism in popular music in the PRC, Hong Kjong and Taiwan. Manifestations of border-crossing liminality, hybridity and syncretism can be detected in the transnational, intra-Asian cultural flows of popular music genres and influences between the PRC, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, Korea and Tibet, between Chinese forms of popular music and the Western forms of popular music that genres such as Cantopop, Cantorock and Mandapop derive from, between the industrial, ideological and generic divide between 'mainstream' and 'alternative' popular music, between similarly established oppositions between rock music and pop music, and rock music and rap and hip hop, between cinema and pop music (especially in Hong Kong where many prominent film actors are also Cantopop stars), between traditional masculine and feminine gender roles, and gay and straight audiences for pop music, between local and global formations, genres and styles of music, and related notions of home and the world, and between live performance and the various forms of musical simulation in film, music video and on the internet, which include virtual pop stars.
Local Noise: indigenising Australasian hip hop
Researcher: Tony Mitchell; Alastair Pennycook, Faculty of Education; UTS and Sarina Pearson, University of Auckland
An analysis of the development of hip hop as a youth subculture in Australia and New Zealand, as a vernacular expression of indigenous and multicultural concerns, hybrid identity formations and socially resistant discourses by Aboriginal, Maori, Pacific Islander and second generation non-Anglo practitioners, and its reception and use by non-practitioners. This investigation is based on interviews, ethnographic inquiry and textual analysis of songs, performances, and media use and activities, of why hip hop has become a crucial and wide-ranging form of expression of identity and locality, home and belonging for socially disadvantaged young people, and how it challenges conventional music industry structures and conventions. Important pedagogical dimensions of hip hop will also be discussed in the production of crucial new knowledge about the self-direction and self-management of marginalised youth.
The project also involves research for a book which will be published by Curtin University Press in 2006, as well as broader, ongoing research project for which Tony Mitchell received a UTS Incentive Grant in 2004, and applied for an ARC Discovery grant in conjunction with Professor Alastair Pennycook in the Faculty of Education for 2005-7 and Dr. Sarina Pearson of the University of Auckland. Tony has already published refereed articles related to the project, and is currently involved in a proposal for a documentary film on Australian hip hop for SBS to be directed by Boyd Britton, entitled Word of Mouth.
Lontano Blu
Researcher: Tony Mitchell
This is a cross-cultural performance project with Parallelo (Adelaide) and the Cordova Theatre Company of Argentina. Tony has been engaged as a writer on this project by Teresa Crea of Parallelo. It has developed from research in Adelaide on the history of migration to Australia by ship since 1900, and expanded into a joint project for the 2005 Cordova festival and the 2006 Adelaide festival exploring similarities in Italian migrations to Argentinia and Australia. Initial workshops are being held in Adelaide with members of the Cordova Theatre Company from July 26-31.
Paddy Roe in Roebuck Plains
Photo: Stephen Muecke
Narrative and Locality
Researcher: Stephen Muecke
Stephen Muecke has had a long-standing research interest relating to narrative and locality. Reading the Country (1984 and 1996, with Paddy Roe and Krim Benterrak), was a pioneering 'postmodern' ethnography which also exemplified full participation and co-authorship of Aboriginal researchers in publishing. It investigated the investments of truth and power in the various rhetorical forms people use to 'read' a place called Roebuck Plains in North West Australia. The book has recently been used in land-rights claims, since it is an archive of place-names, maps and images and 'statements' about country. His earlier Gularabulu, edited for Paddy Roe (1983) invented a technique for the transcription of oral narrative which has been often reproduced.
Muslim girl, Eid Mubarrak, Fairfield, December, 2002
Photo: Andrew Jakubowicz
S11 and Community Relations
Researcher: Andrew Jakubowicz, Paul Ashton, Devleena Ghosh; Jock Collins, Faculty of Business, UTS; Nicky Solomon, Faculty of Education, UTS; Jamila Hussein, Faculty of Law, UTS; Pauline O'Loughlin, The Shopfront, UTS
Partner: Community Relations Commission for a Multicultural New South Wales
Immediately after the September 11 attacks in 2001, the NSW government set up an emergency hot-line to take calls from community members who may have experienced harassment due to their perceived ethnicity or religion. A whole-of-government strategy was put in place to support people in distress as a result of overseas traumatic events. This project, carried out under contract to the government, analyses the hot-line calls, follows up with senior government officials involved in managing crises, identifies community responses both within ethnic communities and more widely, and looks for best practice ways of responding to similar crises.
Kevin Cook in characteristic conversation, Tranby College, 1979
Photo published with permission of Tranby Archives.
Struggle for Change: black and white activists talk to Kevin Cook
Researcher: Kevin Cook, Heather Goodall
This project is a unique window into a dynamic time in the politics of Australia. The three decades from 1970 have seen the emergence of a very new landscape in Australian indigenous politics. There have been struggles, triumphs and defeats around land rights, community control of organisations, national coalitions and the international indigenous movement. All the significant legislation affecting Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people today has been forged in these decades. Experiences have ranged from the powerful assertion of the Bicentennial, to the ambivalence of Reconciliation and the frustration of dealing with the backlash exemplified by Hansonism and the Howard Government. The changes of these decades have generated unprecedented roles for Aboriginal people. Leaders have had to grapple with demands to be administrators and managers as well as spokespeople and lobbyists. The challenges have been personal as well as organisational, with a central one being how to retain personal integrity in the highly politicised atmosphere of the 'Aboriginal industry'.
Kevin Cook has been a key activist at many of the most significant turning points in politics in these decades, from the union organising which shaped the anti-racist movement of the early 70s to the Land Rights struggles of the 80s and the push for an international indigenous presence in the UN and other world bodies. The project arises from the request by the Rona-Tranby Foundation for Kevin to tell his life story. Characteristically, he has chosen to research, not his own story, but the story of the momentous political campaigns in which he participated and to do it through conversations with his comrades and fellow activists, black and white. Together, these conversations paint a portrait of the movements for social justice during challenging times and of the strengths and dilemmas of the network of relationships which powered those movements.
Voyages of Myth: Captain Cook in the Popular Australian Imagination
Researchers: Stephen Muecke and Katrina Schlunke
Captain Cook appears in Australian culture not as one but as many. This project asks who Cook IS rather than who he WAS, and this emphasis broadens the field of Cook studies significantly. It intends to assess his cultural impact from the moment he ceased being 'simply' an historical actor. His celebrity made him a public figure of popular imagination: as romantic traveller, hero-scientist and mythic discoverer of a continent. But he also became the source of endless material for popular culture and the continuing of national conversations about the constitution of Australia's past.
The approaches and writings that will be produced from this project can be taken up by national institutions such as museums and libraries and used as a vehicle to promote a different kind of national debate beyond fact or fiction or even right and wrong. Our outcomes should influence the collection design of national archives and suggest original and incisive frameworks for staging national displays of identity and the past. Providing a contemporary account of how Cook was, and is currently, understood qualitatively by a cross section of Australians will provide a powerful set of national connections between an iconic historical figure and the everyday world.
Clara Law's Trilogy of Migration
Researcher: Tony Mitchell
Undertaken in 2000 and 2001, this project set out to analyse three films by the Hong Kong-Australian film-maker Clara Law, Farewell China, Autumn Moon and Floating Life. This resulted in the publication of four refereed articles between 2000 and 2003 in The UTS Review, Hybridity, Cultural Studies Review and Ethnic and Racial Studies, and may be further developed into a book proposal on Clara Law for Wallflower Press, as well as a chapter in a book on Hong Kong Cinema related to the Hollywood/Hong Kong conference at Hong Kong University in April 2004. Tony has also completed an article on music in Clara Law's Australian films, which is being published in an edited volume on Australian film music, edited by Rebecca Coyle.
Isabel Flick
Photo: Heather Goodall
Isabel Flick: the many lives of an extraordinary Aboriginal woman
Researcher: Isabel Flick and Heather Goodall
Partner: The Union of Australian Women
The life of Isabel Flick is the story of an Australian hero. A hero who fought injustice with every breath, every minute of her life. Isabel Flick did not just take up the battles of her own people, but she took up the battles of decency and fairness for all.
Isabel's story is also a reflection of the treatment, policies and life experiences of Indigenous People in North Western New South Wales. It captures experiences of shocking racism, injustice and incredible pain but also the importance of family and community. It shows her wonderful humour, her love of life and her great humility mixed with an iron will. The collaborative effort of Heather Goodall and the Flick family in putting this book together strengthens our collective narrative (excerpt from the foreword by Linda Burney, NSW Member Legislative Assembly).
The 'lost' manuscript of David Unaiponn
Researcher: Stephen Muecke
Stephen Muecke and Adam Shoemaker 'repatriated' to South Australia the work of 'the man on the $50 note' and the first major Aboriginal writer, David Unaipon, by restoring the text to the original manuscript form. It was appropriated by William Ramsay Smith in 1930 who produced his own book without any reference to Unaipon. The new edition of David Unaipon's writings, published for the first time under his own name, is Legendary Tales of the Australian Aborigines (University of Melbourne Press, 2001).
Art Gallery of NSW, Artists: Liu Xiaoxian, "China Our Gods"; Dadang Christanto "They Give Evidence" exhibition, November 2003.
Photo: Andrew Jakubowicz
Multicultural Arts Policy
Researcher: Andrew Jakubowicz; Helen Meekosha, Social Work, UNSW
Partner: Australia Council for the Arts
The Arts in Multicultural Australia policy of the Australia Council seeks to support the innovative development of the arts and support arts practitioners from culturally diverse backgrounds. This project covered a number of issues relevant to the policy - including a response to a study on the employment opportunities for non-Anglo performers, and a report on research into the issues and proposals developed by the national peak body, the Federation of Ethnic Communities Councils of Australia:
Jakubowicz, A. 1999 'Response: Accent-uate the positive', in S. Bertone, C. Keating and J. Mullaly (eds) The Taxidriver, the Cook and the Greengrocer: the representation of non-English speaking background people in theatre, film and television, Sydney: Australia Council.
Jakubowicz, A. and Meekosha, H. 2004 'FECCA and Arts in a Multicultural Australia: A report on the issues and their implications for the arts raised in the Federation of Ethnic Communities' Councils Conference, December 2003', Sydney: Australia Council.
