Goldie Osuri

White diasporas : media representations of September 11 and the unbearable whiteness of being in Australia

While contemporary media studies in Australia has focused on theories of race and representation across different media, research on the intersection of whiteness and media studies is still an emergent field. Theorising whiteness within media studies also requires taking account of the national–local formation of whiteness within Australia. Furthermore, Joseph Pugliese has pointed to the importance of theorising whiteness as an embodied, historical construct that needs to be localised within specific racialised social formations. It is important to note here, as many ethnicity studies theorists argue, the formation of whiteness in the United States as opposed to Australia and other settler countries is quite specific and differential in its effects (Ang 1995). Consequently, whiteness within the Australian media has to be theorised within the context of “white teleologies” (e.g. assimilative scripts, narratives of the foundational status of the Anglo nation, and the attempted erasure of Indigenous ownership) as well as whiteness as lived realities and visualities. Situating whiteness within these theoretical narrations, this paper will attempt to read productions of whiteness in Australian print media representations of the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. How is whiteness expressed as transnational loyalty? How were the attacks constructed as a threat to whiteness in terms like attacks on “democracy” and “freedom”? These are some of the questions that this paper will attempt to address.

Silences of the media: whiting out Aboriginality in making news and making history

This article examines the disjunctures in representations of indigenous Australian histories in the Australian media. In this article we attempt to align stories of the past with present narratives of nationhood in a radical manner so as to uncover the modes of institutionalized silences which govern public discourses with regard to Aboriginal histories. By focusing on the media coverage of the Port Arthur incident in Tasmania, where a lone gunman killed 35 people, we examine the construction of silences around Aboriginal massacres in the public sphere.

Ash-coloured whiteness : the transfiguration of Aishwarya Rai

This paper seeks to discuss the matrix of elements that enable the transnational circulation of Aishwarya Rai, Bollywood actress and former Miss World, in the context of embodied notions of gendered beauty and skin‐colour. Reading beauty contests, advertising campaigns and blog sites, this paper explores how representations of Rais beauty and skin‐colour appear to resonate with investments in an aesthetics of whiteness, which govern gendered notions of beauty especially in Western locations. This paper addresses the following questions: How is an Indian cosmopolitan femininity as represented by Aishwarya Rai circulated and transfigured in a transnational context? How do racialised ideals of white beauty shift as well as entrench, include and exclude ‘multicultural’ ‘cosmopolitan’ femininities? How do transnational discussions of the privileging of light skin in the Indian context transfigure the politics of race, skin‐colour and whiteness?

Necropolitical complicities: (re)constructing a normative somatechnics of Iraq

This article theorizes the concept of necropolitical complicities in the construction and writing of ethno-sectarian identities in the context of the war in Iraq. Drawing on Mbembes concept of necropolitics in relation to the (re)construction of a normative somatechnics, the article argues for an acknowledgment of operative colonial epistemologies and techniques of governance that have fuelled contemporary sectarian violence in Iraq. The interplay between these epistemologies and techniques of governance and the violent assertions of Iraqi ethno-religious identities are theorized as necropolitical complicities.

Imperialism, colonialism and sovereignty in the (post)colony: India and Kashmir

Abstract Examining a classic formulation of the relationship between colonialism and postcolonial nationalisms in postcolonial theory, as well as its recent critiques, this article puts forward a thesis that contemporary colonialisms and imperialisms may be best diagnosed through the lens of identifying forms of sovereignty rather than relying on the geopolitical framework of West/non-West recognisable in the conceptual vocabulary of postcolonial theory. Focusing on the disputed issue of Indian sovereignty over Kashmir, this essay asks the following questions: What forms of occupation by postcolonial nation-states remain concealed by ways in which extant postcolonial approaches assume geopolitical divisions? Why is it necessary to rethink the parameters of imperialism and colonialism for a contemporary era?

HOW TO STOP WORRYING ABOUT THE NEOLIBERAL PRESENT AND START ENGAGING WITH IT

When I began reading Transnational America: Feminisms, Diasporas, Neoliberalisms and Pedagogies of Crossing: Mediations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred, I experienced what I can only call a Dale Carnegie moment. I stopped worrying about the neoliberal present and began to think about the future of the political, in so far as it could be engaged with from neoliberalised institutional locations. Let me say that I am not optimistic about this future. However, it is perhaps more useful to engage with the neoliberal present, theorise it, and learn to strategise rather than simply worry. I keep reminding myself that this is perhaps the only way to work through the future to come* in other words, to stop worrying and start living (which, if I may suggest, involves jesting in the face of sometimes fascist institutional directives). In this sense, it was encouraging to read Transnational America and Pedagogies of Crossing together, to see that the labour of thinking through and tracking the itineraries of social movements in the present is being done within the field of transnational feminist studies. Both Inderpal Grewal and M. Jacqui Alexander interweave the ways in which race, sexuality, class, nationalisms, state practices, transnational capital, and empire building inflect and fracture the category of ‘woman’, enabling readings which make visible the constitution and operation of contemporary neoliberal relations of power and its implications for a transnational feminist scholarship. In other words, these are two important texts which trace a genealogy of a neoliberal present, but also point to some enabling ways in which to think through questions of politics and social justice. As a study of the formation of subjectivities through transnational connectivities in the context of neoliberal imperialism, Grewal’s Transnational America is as fascinating and rich as it is astute. Grewal’s text follows postcolonial texts like Stoler’s Race and the Education of Desire (1995) or Gauri Vishwanathan’s Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity and Belief (1998), which track the constitutive ways in which the colonies were imbricated in European genealogies. In Transnational America, however, it is a genealogy of the neoliberal imperial present and its itineraries that are traced meticulously. Barbie’s travel to India in the context of economic deregulation; the governmentalisation of human rights; neoliberal uses of the grammar of human rights and its role in the formation of feminist First World subjects as saviours of their non-Western counterparts; the traffic of

Imploding Singularities: For a Critique of Autoimmunity as Political Future

This paper traces the resilience of Orientalist representations in contemporary political and popular cultural constructions of space and time. Derridas deconstruction of universalist notions of space and time enables a challenge to these mechanisms. However, our contemporary political era in the context of the war between terrorisms is marked by an implosion of the Enlightenment concept of universal space and time and the attempt to negate multiple spacetimes. In this sense, Derridas concept of autoimmunity appears to be a necessary theoretical tool in reading our political future in relation to wars between state and other terrorisms.

Sovereignty, vulnerability, and a gendered resistance in Indian-occupied Kashmir

ABSTRACT Drawing on Iffat Fatima’s documentary film, Khoon Diy Baarav or Blood Leaves its Trail (2015), this paper explores how a gendered Kashmiri activism against human rights violations allows for reenvisioning the concept of an authoritarian and violent Westphalian sovereignty concerned with exclusive political authority and territory. Previous studies of gendered resistance are examined as are reformulations of sovereignty through feminist and Indigenous critiques. Through these examinations, the paper offers a way to rethink sovereignty through the theoretical concept of vulnerability. Such a rethinking of sovereignty may point to an interrelational model of sovereignty where the vulnerability of gendered bodies and the environment may be emphasised. In the context of human rights violations in Kashmir, this reenvisioning of sovereignty may be a necessary counter to the repetitious cycles of necropolitical sovereign power.

India/cinema : an archive of politics and pleasures

Since the last two decades and coinciding with India’s period of economic liberalization, interdisciplinary studies of Indian cinemas appear to be an expanding field (Dudrah 2012, 2). If the 1980s witnessed prolific scholarship in the field of post-colonial literary studies (referencing India and the South Asian region), we could argue that some of those energies of post-colonial investigation have been diverted to cinema as an archive of changing social, political and economic times. One might be tempted to describe this shift as the ‘Bollywood’ turn. But the term ‘Bollywood’ has already been dissected for its derisive aspect, its exclusion of other Indian film industries, its signifying capital acquired through the desire to traffic as part of global modernity (Prasad 2003; Rajadhyaksha 2003; Mishra 2008; Dudrah 2012). Most scholars of Indian cinemas tend to engage in a customary explanation of the term ‘Bollywood’ while writing on Indian cinemas, presumably to explain this category to a non-literate readership. And while some embrace the term as a description of Indian cinema from Mumbai, Bollywoodized since India’s neoliberalization (Rajadhyaksha 2003), it is also important to acknowledge the problematic use of the term. As Rajinder Dudrah suggests, while the field of ‘Bollywood studies is now growing’, it also ‘renders problematic any easy use of the term as a catch-all for all of Indian cinema in its varied multiplicities’ (2012, 4). If this is the case, why do we begin an issue on Indian cinemas with reference to Bollywood? Perhaps we do so in part to gesture towards the inextricability of this sticky term and its global recognition factor in any discussion of Indian cinemas. We also refer to Bollywood to signal the idea that some of the essays in this collection address Bollywood, and others don’t. This is not a case of going ‘beyond Bollywood’, but to illustrate the multiplicity cited by Dudrah (2012). Of interest to us, in this collection, is the intersection between India and cinema as an archive; an archive that appears to provide fertile ground for an exploration of the politics of nationalism and transnationalism, socialism and neoliberalism, corporeality, aesthetics, affect, race, gender, sexuality, queerness, pleasure and desire. This intersection allows for an investigation of social, economic and political contradictions of Indian modernity at the moment of its arrival on the global scene. India/cinema, in this gaze, illustrates the becoming of a post-colonial archive. This archive has now been read in a number of ways: a gauge of social, economic, cultural and political

reflections on witnessing with the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons, Kashmir

‘Memory is not a victim but a survivor’. Uzma Falak’s (ibid.) razor-sharp poetic observation claims for Kashmiris a specific kinship with memory in the context of conflict, violence, trauma and the dream of freedom. Memory, in turn, is wound, as wound becomes memory, becomes witness and is part of the becoming of freedom. Falak’s poetry, on this published occasion, is interspersed with and comments on the artist Rollie Mukherjee’s powerful tapestries of a wounded yet resistant Kashmir. One powerful and distinctive site where wounds and resistance, memory, history and witnessing are interwoven in an embodied manner is the monthly protest regarding the over 10,000 enforced disappearances of mainly Kashmiri men at Pratap Park, Lal Chowk, Srinagar. The Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons (APDP) organises the sit-in. APDP was co-founded by Parveena Ahangar with Parvez Imroz, human rights lawyer and defender, in 1994. Parveena Ahangar’s son, Javed Ahmad Ahangar, had been enforced disappeared by