Domestic destinies: colonial spatialities,Australian film and feminist cultural memory work

Elsa and Charles Chauvel's 1955 film Jedda was the first Australian feature film to cast Aboriginal actors in lead roles. The film was also unusual in the context of Australian film of the time for its rural domestic setting. Because the film explored the experiences of its lead character – Jedda – as an Aboriginal child adopted by a white woman, it is also one of the few films of the period to deal with colonial legacies in its attention to policies and practices of assimilation. The twin processes of racialisation and gendering of space in Jedda have been responded to by Tracey Moffatt in her surrealist short film Night Cries. This article uses the notion of intimate geographies to examine the production of relationships of power within domestic space that both films explore. The temporal and spatial practices deployed by the female figures within each film make visible a set of possible transformations of, as well as continuities within, enduring colonial power relations. Moffatt's retelling and respatialising of the Jedda narrative, however, is ultimately understood as a specifically feminist practice of cultural memory work, suggesting that struggles over memory are also struggles over place.     

Frozen Film and FOSDIC Forms: Restoring the 1960 U.S. Census of Population and Housing

In this article, the authors describe a collaboration of the Minnesota Population Center (MPC), the U.S. Census Bureau, and the National Archives and Records Administration to restore the lost data from the 1960 Census. The data survived on refrigerated microfilm in a cave in Lenexa, Kansas. The MPC is now converting the data to usable form. Once the restored data are processed, the authors intend to develop three new data sources based on the 1960 census. These data will replace the most inadequate sample in the series of public-use census microdata spanning the years from 1850 to 2000, extend the chronological scope of the public census summary files, and provide a powerful new resource for the Census Bureau and its Research Data Centers.     

Using blended learning to facilitate large room seminar provision in the era of TEF: reflections from a year two cultural geography module

The introduction of the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) in 2016 has placed the practice and quality of teaching centre of the UK university agenda, with concerns around contact, delivery, research/teaching balance and facility support framing debates within institutions. Situating the implementation of blended learning on a year 2 cultural geography in the broader context of these discussions, this paper explores some of the challenges and opportunities this approach has in addressing some of these broader concerns, whilst improving student engagement and performance.     

For What Are Whites to Hope?

Before directly addressing the titular question, this chapter examines how conceptions of hope often lead us astray, reaffirming rather than challenging the status quo. In analytic philosophy, hope is often understood as a desire that is not entirely justified with reasons. In critical theory, hope has recently been looked upon suspiciously, as an affect the circulation of which is intensified by neoliberal economics. In mid-twentieth-century German theology and theory, hope is viewed as entirely other-worldly. In liberation theology, the object of hope is identification with the poor. This article argues that each of these views produces antinomies, and each of these views ends up perpetuating the status quo: in a racial context, white supremacy. After exploring the antinomies of hope, the article urges that whites are to embrace these antinomies. They are to hope for despair.     

Praying for Independence

The establishment of the Presbyterian Church of the New Hebrides in 1948 as an independent church was viewed by some participants as a step towards the independence of the nation, which occurred some 32 years later. This paper argues that the church was slow to promote an anticolonial perspective through the 1950s, though, as Indigenous clergy took on more senior roles in the church, there was a corresponding increase in political consciousness. The trans-colonial experiences of many young clergy – for education around the region or for meetings in the newly formed Pacific Conference of Churches in the 1960s – exposed participants to anticolonial theologies and the decolonising Pacific. When Indigenous clergy gained full control over the Presbyterian Church in 1973, they simultaneously demanded the end to the Condominium.     

Textiles as the Face of Modernity: Artistry and Industry in Mid-Century America

This article examines the rise of a new profession of textile designer-intermediary in mid-twentieth-century America in light of the nation’s advancements in textile production, design, display and promotion. Unlike William Morris’s nineteenth-century call for a return to handcrafts to combat the evils of the British Industrial Revolution, American textiles were promoted as the face of modernity to reflect and exploit the miracles of technology. Emerging from these developments came the ‘Super Designers’ and ‘Techno-Craftsmen’, as designers Jack Lenor Larsen and Boris Kroll referred to them, who united handcraft sensibilities with good design and mass production.¹ These traits were also shared by weavers such as Anni Albers, Dorothy Liebes and Marianne Strengell, and designers of printed textiles such as Alexander Girard and Alvin Lustig. Despite an increasing reliance on mechanization, their textiles provided a human element — through texture, colour, pattern and connections to the past — to foil the threat of robotic mass production and mindless monotony. Working as corporate heads, industrial consultants, cultural ambassadors and textile collectors and connoisseurs, these designers emphasized in their work and writing the value of well-designed textiles for both visual and utilitarian purposes, collectively advancing contemporary textiles as ideal representatives of modern American design.