(Re)asserting Indigenous Rights and Jurisdictions within a Politics of Place: Transformative Nature of Native Title Negotiations in South Australia

Australia's dominant politics of place has largely failed to give meaningful recognition to Indigenous peoples. The Native Title Act 1993 required governments, industry and others to (re)consider the basis and extent of their authority, unsettling the non‐Indigenous systems’ assumed dominance. While Indigenous hopes about Native title have diminished as a result of subsequent judicial, legislative and administrative responses, Native title negotiations have been pivotal in redefining politics of place and Indigenous–settler relationships in Australia at several scales. Focusing on South Australia's Statewide Indigenous Land Use Agreement Negotiation Strategy, this paper considers such a redefinition. The paper identifies four strategies as critical to success in transformative spatial politics: getting process right; recognising and supporting Indigenous jurisdictions; engaging and transforming non‐Indigenous scales; and shifting Native title process away from legalities, towards people and relationships. Since 1999, these strategies have transformed the politics of place and built more equitable inter‐cultural relationships and networks based on mutual recognition and respect between Indigenous and non‐Indigenous rights and interests in land and waters.     

Recognition,power and coloniality

Recognition has emerged in recent decades as an almost universally valued moral and political horizon in intercultural contexts. Recognition claims underpin myriad social struggles, and forms and practices of recognition also animate the management of alterities within both formal and informal arenas. Recently, critical Indigenous scholars Audra Simpson and Glen Coulthard have posed a fundamental challenge to this moral and political horizon. Writing particularly in response to North American settler colonialism, they argue that the politics of recognition has functioned, not to ameliorate colonialism’s negative effects, but to reproduce them. We seek here to respond to the important provocation posed by Simpson and Coulthard’s scholarship, and to extend their critiques into new geographic and empirical terrains. Specifically, we draw on the notion of coloniality to establish a comparative frame that can bring both settler and non-settler postcolonial contexts into dialogue. Doing so highlights a multiplicity of forms of recognition relationships, as well as of sites and structures of power beyond the settler state. It also illuminates a complex, unstable middle ground that can exist between recognition and its absence, which provides a productive ground from which to engage with the possibilities of being against, or beyond, recognition.     

Settler colonialism and cultural policy: the colonial foundations and refoundations of Canadian cultural policy

This article aims to reintegrate the colonial history of Canada as part of the grids of analysis for understanding the evolution of its Federal cultural policy. Building on the notion of settler colonialism and its implication for Indigenous population (For the purposes of this paper, the term ‘Indigenous’ is used in place of, perhaps, more popular or familiar terms – such as ‘Aboriginal’ or ‘Native’ – in order to remain consistent with current Indigenous politics. In particular, some Indigenous scholars are reluctant to accept the label Aboriginal because they feel it is consistent with the colonial order imposed by the Canadian government [Alfred and Corntassel 2005, p. 599]). The term Indigenous also alludes to a global political awareness and to forms of alterity between different populations from North America, South America, Asia, and the Pacific. in Canada, this paper documents different transformations in cultural policy and illustrates some of its paradoxes and challenges. Building on principles developed by Indigenous scholars, this article highlights some of the components for decolonizing cultural policy in Canada. It is argued that a post-colonial cultural policy must build on the grounds of ethics (and ethos).     

Popular culture,post-truth and emotional framings of world politics

ABSTRACT

With the election of US President Donald Trump, the separation between high and low politics and the line between fiction and reality has become fundamentally blurred. Yet popular culture offers an important vector through which we might make sense of this political turmoil. The purpose of this essay is two-fold: conceptually, I examine how television provides opportunities for the insight into the visual and emotional registers of the post-truth era. I illustrate this empirically by examining two popular television series – Homeland and The Good Fight. I argue that the power of popular culture is derived from its visuality as the intersection of image and sound, through which emotional registers related to anxiety and outrage can be elicited and visually narrated. Even more so, the visual nature of popular culture has a strong affective component that shapes how we experience representations of reality and reveals the power and political significance of popular culture.     

Pluralising political legitimacy

Does the Australian state exercise legitimate power over the indigenous peoples within its borders? To say that the state’s political decisions are legitimate is to say that it has the right to impose those decisions on indigenous peoples and that they have a (at least a prima facie) duty to obey. In this paper, I consider the general normative frameworks within which these questions are often grasped in contemporary political theory. Two dominant modes of dealing with political legitimacy are through the politics of ‘recognition’ and ‘justification’. I argue that in order to address the fundamental challenges posed by indigenous peoples to liberal settler states today we need to pluralise our conceptions of political legitimacy.     

The ruse of consent and the anatomy of ‘refusal’: cases from indigenous North America and Australia

This article takes the notion of ‘refusal’ to be an alternative to recognition politics in settler colonial society. This is argued as alternative with recourse to ethnographic examples that highlight the way in which ‘consent’ operates as a technique of recognition and simultaneous dispossession in historical cases from Indigenous North America and Australia. Attention is paid to the ways in which Indigenous life in these cases refused, did not consent to, and still refuses to be folded into a larger encompassing colonising and settler colonial narratives of acceptance, and in this, a governmental fait accompli. It is those narratives that inform the apprehension and at times, the ethnography and governance of Indigenous life and are pushed back upon in order to document, reread, theorise and enact ways out of the notion of a fixed past and settled present.     

An irreconcilable first-place: the precarious life of tourism and heritage in a southern European historic centre

Abstract

This article discusses the ambiguous relationship between heritage tourism and everyday life in the historic centre of Naples. This area, long characterised by a lower-class residential population and intermittently considered off-limits to tourists, has over the last two decades become the focus of a burgeoning heritage tourism industry. The article adopts the idea of precariousness – understood contra conventional formulations as a condition that elicits both anxiety and emancipatory release – in order to make sense of the allure and repulsion that the historic centre exerts in tourist encounters with the city. Through three examples – a bus sightseeing tour, online responses to a New York Times article about Naples and local people’s perceptions of a pedestrianised piazza as a tourist contact zone – the article illustrates how the historic centre as a tourist destination is constituted by a mix of foreboding and excitement; where affective experience tends to trump the monumental gaze. Thinking in terms of precariousness not only underlines the contradictory role that this area plays in the local production of cultural heritage but also poses a challenge to those accounts that see in the advent of a visitor economy the inevitable ‘museumification’ and gentrification of historic centres.     

George Woodcock and the Doukhobors: peasant radicalism,anarchism, and the Canadian state

For the British-Canadian writer and intellectual George Woodcock, the Doukhobors – a persecuted radical Christian sect, many members of which emigrated from Russia to Canada at the turn of the twentieth century – were a continual source of fascination. A cause célèbre for a host of nineteenth-century thinkers, including Leo Tolstoy and Peter Kropotkin, the Doukhobors were frequently portrayed as the exemplars of the viewer’s particular ideological beliefs. The present article examines Woodcock’s shifting interpretation of the Doukhobors, mapped onto the development of an intellectual career that saw him emerge as a leading anarchist thinker, and his broader transition from a British writer to a Canadian public intellectual. Where once he saw the Doukhobors representing anarchism in action, as his politics matured his view of the sect became more complex. Rather than living anarchists, he came to see the Doukhobors’ experience as a powerful reminder of the forces of assimilation at work in modern democracies that threatened the liberties of dissenters. Reflecting Woodcock’s revised anarchist politics, the Doukhobors’ story now became a key component of an intellectual vision that cast a probing light on Canadian history and Canadian cultural politics.     

Conditional Belonging: Farm Workers and the Cultural Politics of Recognition in Zimbabwe

This article examines Zimbabwean land politics and the study of rural interventions, including agrarian reform, more broadly, using the analytical framework of territorialized ‘modes of belonging’ and their ‘cultural politics of recognition’. Modes of belonging are the routinized discourses, social practices and institutional arrangements through which people make claims for resources and rights, the ways through which they become ‘incorporated’ in particular places. In these spatialized forms of power and authority, particular cultural politics of recognition operate; these are the cultural styles of interaction that become privileged as proper forms of decorum and morality informing dependencies and interdependencies. The author traces a hegemonic mode of belonging identified as ‘domestic government’, put in place on European farms in Zimbabwe's colonial period, and shows how it was shaped by particular political and economic conjunctures in the first twenty years of Independence after 1980. Domestic government provided a conditional belonging for farm workers in terms of claims to limited resources on commercial farms while positioning them in a way that made them marginal citizens in the nation at large. This is the context for the behaviour of land‐giving authorities which have actively discriminated against farm workers during the politicized and violent land redistribution processes that began in 2000. Most former farm workers are now seeking other forms of dependencies, typically more precarious and generating fewer resources and services than they had accessed on commercial farms, with their own particular cultural politics of recognition, often tied to demonstrating support to the ruling political party.     

Kaleidoscopism: The Circulation of a Mid-Century Metaphor and Motif

Abstract

This essay traces the mid-century revival of interest in a particular nineteenth-century optical technology – David Brewster’s kaleidoscope – following P. B. Shelley’s coining of the term ‘kalleidoscopism’ to describe the broad popular appeal and enthusiastic uptake of the device in the late 1810s. Through an examination of mid-nineteenth-century fiction, journalism, and scientific writing, this essay explores what it meant to be ‘kaleidoscopic’ in this period and demonstrates how the mechanical structure and physical manipulation of the device informed this meaning. Controlled by the hand of the user, its display offered regulated surprise: a visual environment that did not overwhelm but rather enthralled viewers through its creation of abstracted, symmetrical forms and harmonious colour palettes led by individual taste. Contemporary reference to the kaleidoscope’s display and operation reveals it was increasingly aligned with notions of a stable, controlled, and unified visual environment in which mobility was valued but digression was mechanically impossible; it signalled the mastery of sensory data and the creation of meaning from fractured forms. My discussion uncovers new contexts for its popularity c. 1840–1865 in Victorian fiction, journalism, physiological science, and the fine arts, and discusses two under-studied examples of the kaleidoscopic in the visual art of the Pre-Raphaelites. The essay concludes by exploring Brewster’s speculative application of the kaleidoscope as an early form of cinematic media, contending that this simple optical device provokes a reconsideration of the categorization of Victorian pre-cinematic technologies.     

Dwelling in Diaspora: Judith Butler’s Post-secular Paradigm

Abstract

This article aims to present Judith Butler’s theory of diaspora as a theological paradigm for post-secular social existence. Her accounts of dispossession, statelessness, and exilic identity all afford us a normative challenge for how to think politics and the theological together. We begin by framing Judith Butler’s diasporic theory of politics within Adriennes Rich’s poetic perspective on ecstatic identity. We proceed to argue that by emphasizing both the precariousness and interdependency of social life, Rich and Butler’s shared commitments to universalizing queer forms of collective belonging and affective relations offer an alternative post-secular paradigm to that offered so far by theorists such as Charles Taylor or Jürgen Habermas. Achieving a post-secular “state” may ultimately be a matter of embracing the failure of our own representations, particularly the failures of contemporary religion to represent either the divine or the human, or to constitute a society with its own political theology. It is paradoxically this kind of failure that can open us up to look at ourselves, and to focus on the precariousness and vulnerability of human existence that we see with our very eyes and reproduced by our very own hands.     

Personal lives: narrative accounts of Irish women in the diaspora

The burst of writing about Irish women in the diaspora after the 1980s, led by Mary Lennon, Marie McAdam and Joanne O'Brien's Across the Water: Irish Women's Lives in Britain, coincided with the ‘narrative turn’ in the social sciences and literary representation. This paper uses Carol Smart's concepts of Personal Life (2007) – memory, biography, embeddedness, relationality and the imaginary – to examine a range of ways in which personal narratives have become central to our understandings of Irish women and their descendants in both written and visual representations. It interweaves disciplines, bringing together a wide range of sources including academic and public accounts in which Irish women appear both as main characters and in walk-on parts. It explores constructions of these ‘fictions’ and their connections with the biographies of authors.     

Colonial Australia,the 1887 Colonial Conference,and the Struggle for Imperial Unity

ABSTRACT

For historians interested in the settler colonial world, one of Professor John Darwin’s most important interventions has been to argue for the reintegration of the dominions into the wider history of the British empire. In re-engaging with the history of Britain’s white settler colonies in North America, Australasia, and South Africa, Darwin’s work has sought to emphasize the place of the dominions in relation to the rise and fall of the British world system, as well as their value as vantage points from which to consider imperial and global history more generally. In this regard, Darwin’s systemic approach has encouraged a more dynamic conception of ‘British world’ history – one deeply embedded in a series of overlapping imperial, regional, and international contexts. This article focuses on a particular moment in imperial history where some of the internal dynamics of the late-Victorian British world system, and the changing place of the settler colonies within it, were brought into sharp relief: the 1887 Colonial Conference. It argues that we might look to the conference as a valuable window onto the impact of Anglo-Australian relations upon the wider struggle for imperial unity in the 1880s.     

Confronting the settler legacy: Indigenisation and transformation in South Africa and Zimbabwe

This article examines attempts to negotiate a perceived residual dominance of settler populations in South Africa and Zimbabwe by means of developmental and cultural policies deemed necessary to restore sovereignty to Africans. Indigenisation has become a preferred strategy for reconstructing post-colonial states in Africa: indigenisation of the economy as part of a Third Chimurenga in Zimbabwe and Black Economic Empowerment in the socio-cultural context of Ubuntu in South Africa. These are issues arising from the regional legacy of contested and uneven transitions to majority rule. Identifying how governments frame the ‘settler problem’, and politicise space in doing so, is crucial for understanding post-colonial politics. Indigenisation in Zimbabwe allows the government to maintain a network of patronage and official rhetoric is highly divisive and exclusivist although couched in terms of reclaiming African values and sovereignty. Revival of Ubuntu as a cultural value system in South Africa facilitates a more positive approach to indigenisation, although Black Economic Empowerment displays elitist tendencies and cultural transformation remains controversial and elusive. The perceived need to anchor policy in socially acceptable (i.e., ostensibly indigenous/traditional) contexts has become a prominent feature of post-colonial politics and is indicative of an indigenous turn in Southern African politics.     

‘Our Sense of Beauty’: Visuality,Space and Gender on Victoria’s Aboriginal Reserves,South‐Eastern Australia

European colonisation of Australia depended upon a culturally specific imagined geography comprising a visualised and spatialised conception of the land and its peoples. In establishing a system of Aboriginal reserves in the south‐eastern colony of Victoria around 1860, these principles were fundamental to the goal of transforming indigenous people, through creating idealised landscapes intended to teach through example, performance and the creation of an individual subject – with its success measurable through observation and documentation, especially photography. Central to the administration’s conception of these settlements, and to its vision for the Aboriginal people of Victoria, was a reformed gender and class order that would appropriately locate the indigenous population within modern settler society. But this regime overlooked or denied disjunctions with the residents’ profoundly different cultural orientation, in which vision was subordinated to aurality, and in which collective forms of personhood took precedence over the individual, allowing for the persistence of tradition.     

Trauma,Male Fantasies,and Cultural Capital in the Films of Pablo Larraín

This paper explores the visualization and intersection of trauma, male fantasies, and cultural capital in the first four feature-length films of Chilean director Pablo Larraín: Fuga (2006), Tony Manero (2008), Post Mortem (2010), and No (2012). Larraín’s first feature sketches out these themes in individual and familial terms; the subsequent three, forming what Larraín has called an ‘unintentional trilogy’ of the Pinochet dictatorship, visualize them in a more collective, historical, and political register. Categorizing these films as examples of ‘posttraumatic cinema,’ I demonstrate how Larraín images the fantasy scenarios that structure Chile’s ‘true horror’: namely, the weaponization of male fantasies and of cultural capital – the combination of which induced indelible traumas during the dictatorship. The attendant institutionalization of injustice, impunity, and neoliberalism – which, as Larraín shows, was conserved during the country’s transition to democracy – has limited the possibilities of working through the recurring traumas ever since.     

China’s Exchange Rate Policy Making: International Pressures Meet Domestic Politics

With China’s economic rise and in particular its massive international trade surplus with the rest of the world, the exchange rate of its currency has come under increasing scrutiny in the new millennium. Based on a critical review of existing International Political Economy (IPE) theoretical approaches on exchange rate politics – the Innenpolitik approaches and the international-domestic interaction approach – this paper argues that two-level game theory is a suitable tool for explaining the development of China’s exchange rate policy. By specifically examining the external factors and domestic sources of China’s exchange rate policy, this paper develops a complete analytical framework in which China’s central decision makers are understood to strive to reconcile international pressures and domestic bargainers when making decisions on exchange rate policy. After offering a theoretical review, revision and synthesis, the paper provides an empirical study of China’s 2005 exchange rate reform to specifically show how international factors played an agenda-setting role in China’s exchange rate policy making and how China’s domestic politics determined the pathway of the exchange rate reform in July 2005.     

Exploring the Backstage of Victorian Respectability

This paper shares Andersson’s interest in exploring the ‘backstage’ of Victorian civility and respectability. The adroit media manipulation of high-status leading reformers and their associations and societies, with their often overlapping membership, has accorded them an inflated importance as a representation of the Victorian Age, and can distort our understanding. The argument here begins by problematizing the ways some historians have made use of contemporary statistics and terms such as ‘respectability’ or ‘vice’. For the Victorians these carried multiple meanings and cultural resonances, partially dependent on identities of class, gender, generation, Tory or Liberal political orientation, attitude to faith, and ethnicity. This meant that the complex nuances of understanding attached to activities sometimes labelled as unrespectable ‘vices’ such as drinking, sexual transgression and gambling could make them acceptable in a variety of cultural contexts despite the opposition of vociferous anti-‘vice’ groups. The paper concludes with a brief exploration of the potentiality of visual and digital resources for delving deeper into such issues.     

Diva Las Vegas: queering space in the entertainment capital of the world

After a spate of demolitions and a 1990s building boom, the values of neoliberalism – deregulation, privatisation and innovation through competition – have shaped an entirely new topography in Las Vegas, developing in perfect harmony with the former’s rise to global dominance. The Strip, however, has come to capture more than free market economics in building form. The fabric of this desert suburb is also unmistakably gendered, and embodies normative sexuality throughout its unique arrangement of casino-hotels. This article proposes that neoliberalism and heteronormativity are closely intertwined and manifest through the spatial composition of Las Vegas Boulevard. It uses the area’s orientation towards entertainment to consider performance as a central element to this spatiality, and thus as a lens through which to approach analysis of the Strip in spatial terms. Under the Strip’s twin spatial regimes, queer entertainers, and drag performers in particular, have historically marketed both themselves and their acts in order to attract revenue from a conservative, heterosexual audience. Despite its all-pervasive heteronormativity, however, I also argue that the Strip contains a queer disruption at its core. The drag revue Divas Las Vegas hosted by the Strip’s longest-running headliner, Frank Marino, marks a break with local drag traditions, and provides a queer interrogation of gender politics for its audience of predominantly heterosexual tourists.