Jane Haggis

Rethinking difference and sex education: from cultural inclusivity to normative diversity

This paper aimed to problematise what is meant by ‘difference’ and consider what such a reinterpretation might mean for methodological interventions in sex education research. Our concern is the tendency for sex education research to treat difference as a set of categories to be ‘added-on’, such as religious difference, cultural difference and sexual plurality. The danger of this is that it leaves the normative unchallenged, confirming the hegemony of the heteronormative, unraced subject. Constructing difference as an ‘add-on’ fails to address how young people locate themselves in a world in which they negotiate their sexualities through complex ‘glocal’ routes in popular and youth culture. We argue that decentring methodological strategies are required which draw on critiques made by post-colonial and decolonising methodologies. In the first section of the paper, we review the problem of difference, and how it is considered within current debates in youth and sexualities research. This frames a reflection on rethinking our own methodological practices through a consideration of two research moments. In the conclusion, we propose a metaphorical framework to scaffold a reimagining of methodological approaches to ensure that the normative is always a question mark.

Postcolonialism, Identity, and Location: Being White Australian in Asia

In this paper we explore the nature and degree to which Australian imaginings of self in Asia have altered since the 1960s. We do this in two ways. First, an analysis of Christopher Kochs two novels, The Year of Living Dangerously and Highways to a War, is used to establish the parameters of change in Australian imaginings of themselves in Asia. This analysis of literary texts, we argue, can be used to develop an analytical framework for considering Australian aid policies to Asia as cultural texts, and the extent to which such policies can be seen to be part of a redefinition of Australian settler society towards a postcolonial understanding of the ‘white self’. In the second part of the paper we offer a preliminary analysis of how Australian overseas-aid policies have begun to acknowledge the fact of Australias geopolitical location. We argue that these cultural texts reveal a repositioning of Australian identity which remains caught within a terrain of whiteness.

WHAT AN ‘ARCHIVE RAT’ REVEALS TO US ABOUT STORYING THEORY AND THE NATURE OF HISTORY

Abstract This paper takes the work by Professor Margaret Allen on the transnational connections between India and Australia in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to reflect on the relationship between history, facts and fiction. It does this by discussing recent contributions by David Christian, Dirk Moses and Carolyn Steedman to debates over history as an empirical science or a literary genre. The article draws on Joan Scotts recent explication of storytelling as a way of doing decentred history to describe and analyse how Professor Allens work demonstrates an historical method that bridges these debates in constructive ways. Along the way, her work is shown to add depth and complexity to feminist historiographies of imperialism, modernity and transnationalism.

The politics of friendship and cosmopolitan thought zones at the end of empire: Indian women’s study tours to Europe 1934–38

Abstract This article considers one of the first series of study tour groups for young Indian women in the mid-1930s, organised under the auspices of the Geneva-based International Student Service. Led by Mrs Alexandrena Datta, wife of the Indian Christian nationalist leader S.K. Datta, the tours took groups of 20 women students and young professionals from diverse faith, caste and ethnic backgrounds on four-month study tours across Europe, visiting progressive social and educational programmes and reform-minded people. Combining albums of the tours assembled by Mrs Datta and the published accounts of the 1935 tour by a participant, Mrs Kuttan Nair, images and text are deconstructed to identify how a politics of friendship within a global imperial social formation emerges. The article argues that the politics of friendship discernible in the remnant archive of the tours was part of a cosmopolitan thought zone that linked a nationalist and structuralist critique of imperial modernity to a vision of Indian women as agentic anti-colonial subjects.

The Cosmopolitan Biography of the English Religious Liberal, Feminist and Writer, Sophia Dobson Collet

This chapter explores the cosmopolitan life of the little-known English religious liberal, feminist and writer, Sophia Dobson Collet (1822–1894). It examines Collet’s close connection with members of the Brahmo Samaj, a movement founded in 1820s Calcutta by Ram Mohan Roy to promote religious and social reform among Hindus. It shows her pivotal role in shaping a ‘cosmopolitan thought zone’ connecting Brahmos with British and American Unitarians, Transcendentalists, Theists and liberal Christians. Collet, it argues, enacted spiritual fellowship and a shared commitment to social reform within a respectful trans-racial and trans-faith affective community. Although she did not articulate an anti-imperial politics, she was committed to bridging the racialised divisions and hierarchies that characterised the ‘imperial social formation’ between Britain and India.

The Limits of Cosmopolitanism on the Cusp of Empire

The lives, friendships and encounters charted in this book reveal partial, uneven and contradictory processes at work in individual lives and across political and social movements. Engaging with knowledge and culture from around the globe at the same time as mediating its impacts through the spiritual and ethical consciousness that emerged out of everyday life was both a practical and a utopian pursuit. It was undertaken, as we have argued, in ways that were not straightforwardly derivative of Europe but which called into question the West’s claims to provide a universal template of rights and conditions that was beneficial and applicable to the world as a whole.

Friendship, Faith and Cosmopolitan Thought Zones on the Cusp of Empire

The legacies of colonialism continue to resonate, in a new era of intensified globalisation that once again places race and religion at the centre of a search for peaceful co-existence. This book looks back to the period 1860–1950 in order to grasp how alternative visions of amity and co-existence were forged between people of faith, within but resistant to imperial contact zones. This chapter contextualises our argument that networks of faith and friendship played a vital role in forging new vocabularies of cosmopolitanism that presaged the post-imperial world of the 1950s.

Provincialised Cosmopolitanisms: Jehangir P. Patel and Marjorie Sykes

Sometime in the 1980s, two elderly people embarked on a collaboration; a collaboration that affirmed half a lifetime of political fellowship and personal friendship. The result was an English-language book Gandhi. His Gift of the Fight. The lives of Marjorie Sykes and Jehangir P. Patel gain historical timbre in the interstices of the larger tale they seek to tell. Two lives take shape in ways that unravel the binaries informing taken-for-granted assumptions about the colonial. They offer a case study of cosmopolitanisms that provincialises the European concept. These provincial cosmopolitanisms did not need to reject a sense of patriotism as a pernicious parochialism. Instead, they inscribed patriotism and nationalism into universalisms that challenged the assumed universalism of European imperialism.

Cosmopolitan Modernity and Post-imperial Relations: Dominion Australia and Indian Internationalism in the Interwar Pacific

In the penultimate chapter, this book turns to a range of cosmopolitan internationalisms active in transnational networks of the interwar Pacific. Indian and Australian cosmopolitans who were visitors in each other’s countries and delegates at the same international conferences epitomise the mobility and interpersonal exchange that characterises many of the cosmopolitan thought zones discussed in previous chapters. While their international activities in the interwar Pacific, linking interpersonal cosmopolitanisms with the ideal of world government in this era, offer further insight into the range of shared if also divergent grounds upon which cosmopolitanism thought zones formed and through which a variety of interconnected post-imperial worlds continued to be imagined following World War 1.

Henry Polak: The Cosmopolitan Life of a Jewish Theosophist, Friend of India and Anti-racist Campaigner

Henry Polak (1882–1959), a British-born lawyer, journalist and editor of Indian Opinion, campaigned with Mohandas Gandhi against restrictions on South African Indians and against the indentured labour system. Founder of the Indian Overseas Association in 1920, he worked with Indians across the diaspora against racism and discriminations. Most in tune with Indian political liberals, he worked with them for Indian independence. His life of border-crossings and his affective cosmopolitanism were inspired by his spiritual cosmopolitanism. His reading across cosmopolitan thought zones saw his embrace of Theosophy and universal equality. He drew strong links between Theosophical beliefs and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.