Cultural diplomacy: beyond the national interest?

The field of cultural diplomacy, which looms large in present-day cultural policy and discourse, has been insufficiently analysed by the cultural disciplines. This special issue engages with the task of filling the gap. The present essay sets out the terms in which the authors have taken up this engagement, focusing principally on Australia and Asia. Distinguishing between cultural diplomacy that is essentially interest-driven governmental practice and cultural relations, which is ideals-driven and practiced largely by non-state actors, the authors pursue a twofold aim. First, to demystify the field, especially when it is yoked to the notion of ‘soft power’; second, to better understand how actually-existing discourses of cultural diplomacy and/or cultural relations operate in different national contexts. The essay seeks in particular to scrutinize the current confusion surrounding cultural diplomacy and, in the context of the changing role of the nation-state, to explore its possibilities as an instrument for going beyond the national interest.     

Decentring the state: perspectives from the encounter between India and Australia

This introduction makes a case for assembling an archive of approaches taken individuals and groups independently of the state to rethink the nature of the Indo-Australian relationship. It situates the project in the scholarship of different knowledge formations – most of all international relations – about the future of the nation-state and the modern state system. Our contributors write from a postcolonial standpoint in support of minority knowledges, subordinated peoples and reform of the global system. It is argued that postcolonialism has a natural affinity with the everyday, although in practice the relationship is not so cut and dried. This essay concludes by suggesting some of the ways in which each essay contributes to the collective project.     

A River Runs Through It: Morphological and Landowner Sensitivities Along the Upper Missouri River, Montana, USA

Landowners along the Missouri River in Montana believe that the operation of Fort Peck Dam has initiated bank erosion, thus threatening agricultural development within the region. Their concerns have been heightened by proposals to increase discharge in order to enhance fisheries and wildlife interests. Geomorphological evaluation indicates that bed degradation and bank erosion have declined since construction of the dam, and the channel is now approaching dynamic equilibrium; public sensitivity to the proposed change is greater than the morphological sensitivity of the river. Sustainable management of the Missouri is now based on strategies that place more emphasis on partnership with local citizens.     

‘Everyone Searches,Everyone Finds’: Moral Discourse and Resource Use in an Indonesian Muslim Community

In the Banda Islands, understandings of tanah (land/earth) draw on a vision of emplaced moral order linked to idealised forms of sociality. Islam provides a fundamental idiom through which these are envisaged by local Muslims. The everyday rigours seen as a concomitant with being Muslim provide a means through which a population of in-migrants is able to actively engage the spirits of autochthonous founder-figures as the ontological ‘source’ of locality. This has implications for conceiving the legitimate terms of sovereignty which may compete, but are not necessarily always at odds, with those disseminated by government authorities. Though examining the activities of residents in respect to key resources, particularly ideas if theft, generosity and equality of access, local conceptions of moral community and its relation to diverse sources of governmentality are explored. A critical aspect of local subjectivity emerges as the operation of moral governmentality which involves the management of the subject through its constitution as an agent in relation to others (Foucault 1997:300).     

Flâneurie on bicycles: acquiescence to women in public in the 1890s

Although scholars have established the publicity of all types of nineteenth-century women, their public actions are still regarded as morally constrained. We offer one group of public women, bourgeois cyclists, who after encountering public skepticism only briefly were given free rein of the streets and country roads. This propensity of women and men to ride the thoroughfares 'a-wheel' we refer to as flâneurie on bicycles, a technology-mediated form of the pedestrian variety. Similarities and differences necessarily abound because of the requirements of safe cycling and the long-distance rambling capacity of cyclists. We argue, however, that flâneurie of the bicycle kind is largely faithful to the original in that cycling promoted peripatetic individualism, for female as well as male riders.