Fiona Nicoll

We Shall Fight Them on the Beaches: Protesting Cultures of White Possession

The way in which the patriarchal white sovereignty is exercised through protest is explored in relation to a space of everyday culture. The events at Cronulla is argued to be a protest which had rules and was a form of organised violence underpinned by a rationality of possession although it is described as riots because of the unruly behaviour of predominately white males.

Bad Habits: Discourses of addiction and the racial politics of intervention

This article considers how racialised discourses of addiction have been mobilised in debates over the lawfulness of the Australian government’s Northern Territory Emergency Response Act 2007 (NTERA), or ‘Intervention’. After showing how academic support for the Intervention has become linked to questions about the legitimacy of Indigenous Knowledge, it considers whether the treatment of addiction is being posited as lying within or outside of values of justice and institutions of law. To address this question, I revisit Jacques Derrida’s essay, ‘Force of Law’. His reflections on Walter Benjamin’s writing on ‘bloodless genocide’ are used in conjunction with Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s concept of ‘patriarchal white sovereignty’ and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s essay, ‘Epidemics of the Will’, to illuminate the racial politics of ‘intervention’. The conclusion turns to creative works by Fiona Foley and Romaine Moreton to engage with Indigenous Knowledge about willpower on the ground of Australian race relations - both past and present.

Gambling drivers: Regulating cultural technologies, subjects, spaces and practices of mobility

Abstract In this article, we analyse intersections between gambling and driving as everyday cultural practices of mobility. Building on Nikolas Rose’s argument that subjects in post‐industrial democratic societies are governed through appeals to ‘freedom’ rather than through overt forms of coercion or organised campaigns of state propaganda, we explore the different ways that producers, regulators and consumer advocates involved in gambling and driving appeal to our ‘powers of freedom’. We demonstrate that promotional and regulatory discourses of driving and gambling rely on a concept of freedom as self‐regulation. And we argue that the cultivation of social responsiveness is needed to address some of the problems created by individualising practices, spaces and technologies of mobility currently offered by automobiles and poker machines.

Finopower: Governing Intersections Between Gambling and Finance

Regulatory distinctions between “problem” and “recreational” gambling have contributed to the neglect of important discursive and cultural practices at the intersection of finance and gambling. This intersection is now sufficiently formative of everyday life and popular culture to warrant closer scrutiny within cultural studies research. Through a range of examples, I elaborate the concept of “finopower” as a specific kind of governmentality through which individuals negotiate the mutual imbrications of gambling and finance. The final part of the article draws on theories of “post-disciplinary” societies to explore social and political implications of cultural distinctions between skill and chance-based games.

Indian Dreaming: iconography of the zone/zones of iconography

This article connects ‘the zone’, a subjective state associated with electronic gaming machine (EGM) consumption, to the racial state formations which generate and govern this cultural technology. It does so by addressing the role of visual iconography and audio features in producing EGMs appeal. My case study for this research is the iconography and soundscapes presented by a popular Native American genre of games in Australian gambling venues. I draw on semiotics, postcolonial and critical race and whiteness theory and critical studies of financialization to present the ‘Indian sign’ as a figure which interpellates individuals through transnational cultural technologies of gambling. This contributes to a richer understanding of issues associated with ‘problem gambling’ – on the one hand – and racial formations in white settler-colonial societies – on the other.

Convincing ground: Learning to fall in love with your country, by Bruce Pascoe,Canberra, Aboriginal Studies Press, 2007, 304 pp.,

While it has been rightly criticised by some within Australia’s Indigenous communities, On Rage is a passionate and powerful essay. In it, Germaine Greer examines the rationale for continuing feelings of worthlessness and uncertainty among many Indigenous Australians. As she sees it, the major cause is overwhelming rage; the result of loss of land, cultural identity, and self worth. One of the key assumptions in Greer’s essay is that this rage is gender specific. Indigenous men, Greer claims, are victims of impotent rage. This has resulted in selfharm, alcohol and substance abuse, even suicide. Feelings of powerlessness have also led Indigenous men to lash out at those closest to them their women and children a cycle of abuse which continues with each generation. Women, Greer says, are much better at grief than rage: a woman who gives in to her anger is at best a ‘man-woman, a virago’ (p. 23). Greer obviously has no problem including herself in this latter category. At one point in the essay, she admits that she was ‘suffocated with rage’ when a fellow guest at a dinner party a man ridiculed her views on the rights of Indigenous people (pp. 4 6). But it seems that she has underestimated the role that rage also plays in the lives of Indigenous women. According to Hannah McGlade, a human rights lawyer, Indigenous women, especially those suffering from abuse at the hands of their menfolk, do experience rage (Australian, 15 August 2008). If Greer had acknowledged this, her essay would have conveyed more of the complexity of issues concerning rage in Indigenous communities and taken a less simplistically gendered approach. Greer’s claim that Indigenous men are the victims of rage leads to certain baffling inconsistencies. At one point she appears to suggest that male violence is an appropriate response to a real or perceived injustice. As she puts it: ‘a red-blooded man is not supposed to take insult and humiliation lying down’ (pp. 12 13). Elsewhere, however, she asserts categorically that no provocation such as a nagging wife or abusive husband is an excuse for violence (pp. 23 26). Greer goes on to clarify what she means by the word rage, claiming it is not the same emotion as that generated by a nagging spouse or ‘road rage what Greer calls ‘feeble bad temper’ no, the rage experienced by Indigenous Australians is the ‘inevitable consequence of a series of devastating blows inflicted on a victim who is utterly powerless to resist’ (p. 28). It is paradoxical that Indigenous men go on to vent their rage on other powerless victims, namely their women and children. Greer’s view that Indigenous men are especially incapable of controlling their rage is one of the key reasons that On Rage has attracted criticism among those working in the Indigenous arena. Notably, Indigenous academics Marcia Langton

39.95 (paperback), ISBN9780855755492

Fiona Nicoll and Melissa Gregg met on the job at a new university having both moved from Sydney to Brisbane to take up their appointments. Here they share reflections on teaching a cultural theory course that they inherited from a prominent Australian Professor of Cultural Studies, offering the perspectives of two consecutive generations of cultural studies theorists now teaching in the field since the early 1990s. This situation gives rise to new interpretations regarding the value and uses of theory in the classroom. Noting the subtle differences involved in teaching the same theoretical material in different cities, the ironies of teaching radical cultural theory in a conservative institutional environment, and the specific opportunities and challenges of teaching cultural studies theory as opposed to others, the article considers some of the silences teachers must also contend with in their classroom practice, drawing on and expanding the terrain established by Thorkelson’s thesis.