Queering the pitch: race,class, gender and nation in the Indo-Australian encounter

Recent cricket contests between Australia and India offer a fascinating theatre to examine issues of race, class, nation, and gender. I chart their protean character as they are performed and deployed in these encounters. Instead of exploring relations between already extant and singular entities called “India” or “Australia,” it might be more useful to see the performative practices of those situated at different loci of enunciation by which those categories are momentarily congealed and given meaning or content. While there is a surfeit of charged cricketing encounters between the two nations, I focus on two in this essay: (a) Rahul Dravid's speech at the annual Bradman Oration in 20111, and (b) what has come to be called ‘Monkeygate’ – a bitter and acrimonious cricket test match between India and Australia in 2007 played in Sydney.     

Putting the border in place: customs regulation in the making of the Irish border, 1921–1945

This paper explores the historical geography of the making of the Irish border through a focus on the practices of customs regulation through which it was constituted and on the impeded, permitted and concealed mobilities of people and objects across the customs boundary after 1923. It traces how legislative change at the level of the state – in this case the governments of the Irish Free State, Northern Ireland and the United Kingdom – was translated into the routine practices of those trying to regulate the movement of people and objects across the customs boundary, and considers the responses of those subject to, and regularly subverting, these efforts. Drawing on recent interests in the prosaic practices of the state, and in materiality and mobility more widely, our focus is both on the work of political power at the border through the practices, texts, tools and techniques of customs regulation, and on the experience and effects of customs control for those living near the newly defined line between Northern Ireland and the Irish Free State.     

Defining the nation: Recent historiography and Irish nationalism

This article considers problems raised in recent historical scholarship concerning the definition of Irish national identity. Catholicism's growing importance in this identity is shown by comparing the eighteenth century United Irishmen, who combined secular and sectarian republicanism, the romantic nationalism of the nineteenth century Young Ireland movement, and the almost exclusively Catholic Irish Republican Army of this century. However, this Catholic, Gaelic, separatist identity excluded Protestant, non‐Gaelic and unionist Irish people. The author concludes by rejecting the notion of ‘an immemorial Irish nation, unfolding holistically through the centuries’, to stress discontinuities over time and the wider geographical setting of the British Isles.     

Homeland,territory, property: Contesting land,state, and nation in urban Timor-Leste

This article considers contestations over land, state and nation in Aitarak Laran, an urban settlement in post-independence Timor-Leste. Since 2010 the settlement has been resisting eviction by the East Timorese state, which wishes to use the land it occupies to build a National Library and Cultural Centre. In exploring the contestation, the purpose of this article is two-fold. Firstly, it explores the nature of social connection to land within postcolonial state- and nation-building. Here, the contestation at Aitarak Laran reveals counter-posed imaginings of land as homeland, territory and property. Secondly, the article draws out the implications of these counter-posed imaginings for thinking about the ‘right to the city’, a notion first theorised by Lefebvre (1996 [1968]) and subsequently developed to encompass a range of modes of urban protest. In the settlement, the promises of independence—unity, equivalence, and inclusion within the sovereign nation-state—are at odds with residents' experiences of what independence has in fact brought. Land, in its multiple imaginings, becomes a crucible upon which this painful disjuncture plays out. Reading Aitarak Laran as an instance of ‘right to the city’ struggle, these tensions emerge as well not only in practice but also in theory, reflected particularly in the limitations and ambiguities of rights discourse.     

Remembrance as remaking: memories of the nation revisited

This article revisits Anthony Smith's landmark collection Myths and Memories of the Nation (1999) from the perspective of recent developments in cultural memory studies. It argues for a more clearly demarcated distinction between myths and memories which acknowledges cultural memory as a site of new experiential perspectives that often work against the authority of myths, seen as the unquestioned truths about the collective past. Drawing on studies of modern memory cultures, it presents a dynamic and generative model that construes memory in terms of cultural practices of remembrance. It shows that memory is not an unchanging legacy but rather a malleable resource for making shared stories about the past. Where Halbwachs (1925) presumed that social frameworks precede and shape memory, remembrance is presented here as a cultural force that helps to redefine social frameworks and to create links between hitherto unconnected imagined communities.