Jane Stadler

Redrawing the Map : An Interdisciplinary Geocritical Approach to Australian Cultural Narratives

In this chapter we seek to interrogate the methods and assumptions underpinning geocriticism by engaging with and reframing dominant ways of analysing mediated representations of Australian space in cultural narratives, specifically film, literature, and theatre. What, we ask, might geocriticism contribute to the analysis of Australian texts in which location figures prominently? We argue a geocritical approach may provide an interdisciplinary framework that offers a way of identifying tropes across geographic regions and across media representations. Drawing on scholarship spanning Australian cinematic, literary and theatrical narratives, this chapter surveys published work in the field and posits that a refined geocritical mapping and analysis of the cultural terrain foregrounds the significance of geography to culture and draws different traditions of spatial enquiry into dialogue without privileging any particular textual form. We conclude by scoping possibilities for future research emerging from recent technological developments in interactive online cartography.

AIDS ads: make a commercial, make a difference? Corporate social responsibility and the media

South Africa has one of the highest incidences of HIV/AIDS in the world, but lacks a prominent, effective, publicly funded media information and education campaign.1 The absence of adequate government communication in this area of health education has created a space for innovative community and corporate interventions. This article brings together arguments about the functions of advertising, the socio-political dynamics of sexual behaviour change and the semiotic impact of media representations. It analyses corporate social responsibility initiatives in which a commercial advertising agency, a multinational corporation, and a television broadcaster have become involved in public service communication and have taken responsibility for publicizing AIDS-related issues. The three intersecting case studies undertaken here focus on pro bono advertising work by Saatchi and Saatchi; the Levi Strauss Foundation’s support for AIDS concerns (including Levi’s own advertisements featuring HIV models); and the ‘Vuka Awards’, a national competition for public service announcements (PSAs) funded and broadcast by MultiChoice Africa.2 While the public awareness campaigns launched by these corporate citizens represent worthwhile social interventions, analysis reveals a range of competing interests, persuasion strategies and communication objectives. The production of commercial advertisements and public relations campaigns entails different aims, responsibilities and requirements. Conflating the goals and techniques of each can result in a confused message and in the misdirection of communication efforts, particularly if the audience that might benefit most isn’t necessarily attractive to the corporate sponsor. The following analysis of these progressive initiatives is not intended to detract from the campaigns themselves. Instead, it aims to foreground areas in which collaboration between academic researchers and organizations involved in social investment projects might be beneficial, and to question whether commercial advertising techniques can serve the function of a well-researched PSA.

Distinct Cerebellar Contributions to Cognitive-Perceptual Dynamics During Natural Viewing

Abstract The crucial role of the cerebellum in motor learning and coordination is very well known. Considerable interest has recently shifted toward its contribution to nonmotor tasks, such as working memory, emotion, and language. However, the cognitive role and functional subdivisions of the cerebellum, particularly in dynamic, ecologically realistic contexts, are not yet established. By analyzing functional neuroimaging data acquired while participants viewed a short dramatic movie, we found that posterior and inferior cerebellar regions are reliably engaged in dynamic perceptual and affective processes with no explicit motor component. These cerebellar regions show significant relevance to visual salience and unexpected turning points of the movie. Our results demonstrate that distinct functional subdivisions of the cerebellum are robustly engaged in real‐life cognitive processes, playing specific roles through a dynamic interaction with higher order regions in the cerebral cortex.

Never-Never Land: affective landscapes, the touristic gaze and heterotopic space in Australia

ABSTRACT This article explores how the imaginative use of the landscape in Baz Luhrmanns Australia (2008) intersects with the fantasy of Australianness that the film constructs. We argue that the fictional Never-Never Land through which the films characters travel is an, albeit problematic, ‘indigenizing’ space that can be entered imaginatively through cultural texts including poetry, literature and film, or through cultural practices including touristic pilgrimages to landmarks such as Katherine Gorge (Nitmiluk), Uluru and Kakadu National Park. These actual and virtual journeys to the Never-Never have broader implications in terms of fostering a sense of belonging and legitimating white presence in the land through affect, nostalgia and the invocation of an imagined sense of solidarity and community. The heterotopic concept of the Never-Never functions to create an ahistorical, inclusive space that grounds diverse conceptions of Australianness in a shared sense of belonging and home that is as mythical, contradictory and wondrous as the idea of the Never-Never itself. The representations of this landscape and the story of the characters that traverse it self-consciously construct a relationship to past events and to film history, as well as constructing a comfortable subject position for contemporary Australians to occupy in relation to the land, the colonial past and the present.

Oreo, Topdeck and Eminem Hybrid identities and global media flows

A B S T R A C T • The slang terms Oreo (someone who looks black but acts white) and Topdeck (someone who looks white but acts black) draw on the language of popular culture to signify racial hybridity, superseding slurs such as ‘black honkie’ and ‘wigger’. Using the terms Oreo and Topdeck to frame the analysis, this article investigates how identity politics finds expression in language, youth media and popular culture. It questions how global media flows affect conceptions of black masculinity by contrasting cinematic representations of African-Americans and black Africans in Shaft and the South African film Hijack Stories, and by examining class, ethnicity and rap culture in 8 Mile. I argue that, as South African media culture reflexively reworks messages about black identities, it produces terminology and texts that neither simply reinforce nor resist racial stereotypes, but legitimate the diversification of blackness by making cultural transition and difference visible. •

Cultural value and viscerality in Sukiyaki Western Django: Towards a phenomenology of bad film

Cult film director Takashi Miikes hybrid homage Sukiyaki Western Django (2007) can be critiqued in terms of its derivative nature, its overstated affect, and its lack of psychological and thematic nuance – characteristics that are associated with ‘bad film’ genres such as the spaghetti western that Miike emulates and valorizes. The classification of texts as ‘bad film’ is often related to their exaggerated affective qualities and the cultural devaluation of emotion and bodily sensation by comparison with aesthetic and intellectual engagement. This article analyses Sukiyaki Western Django in terms of a phenomenology of affect, contending that the film deploys a kinetic, visceral cinematic aesthetic that is central to its meaning and to the relationship between the audience and the screen. The phenomenological method is used to level hierarchies of value, reappraise conceptions of bad film, and strip back the ingrained presuppositions of film theory. I argue that by bracketing traditional ways of understanding, phenomenology prompts a reassessment of how we make sense of cinema and a revaluation of the embodied role of the spectator.

Redrawing the Map

Space, place, and landscape are long-standing themes in Australian literary and cultural studies and, from the colonial era to the present day, Australian cultural narratives have proven fertile ground for spatial analysis. In his influential 1986 book on Australian film and literature, National Fictions,1 Graeme Turner argues that narrative forms are, in the Australian context, profoundly tied up with national myths of land, landscape, and identity. Moreover, Turner argues, Australian filmic and fictive texts “invite us to accept that the land is central to a distinctively Australian meaning.”2 This concept of the “land producing its literature” has, he continues, in turn influenced both Australian literary and film criticism, though the former more strongly than the latter.3 This carries through into theatre for, as Joanne Tompkins argues in her landmark study Unsettling Space,4 spatial tensions driven by anxieties about contested land, nationalism, colonial settlement, and Aboriginal reconciliation play out as narratives on the Australian stage, where the performance of nationhood and identity is dramatically enacted: “Australian theatre not only contests conventional Australian history and culture; it also stages alternative means of managing the production of space in a spatially unstable nation.”5

Experiential Realism and Motion Pictures: A Neurophenomenological Approach

This article sets up a neurophenomenological approach to understanding cinema spectatorship in order to investigate how embodied engagement with technologies of sound and motion can foster a sense of experiential realism. It takes as a starting point the idea that the empirical study of emotive, perceptual, motor, and cognitive processes involved in film spectatorship is impoverished without a phenomenological account of the lived experience under investigation. Correspondingly, engaging with neuroscientific studies enriches the scope of phenomenological inquiry and offers new insights into the film experience. Analysis of diverse films including Interstellar, Leviathan, San Andreas and The Thin Red Line reveals how technological innovations dating from Hales Tours (pre-1910) to contemporary D-BOX and Dolby Atmos systems have enhanced the audiences sense of immersion and corporeal investment in the film experience. Building on the research of Vivian Sobchack and Vittorio Gallese, I argue that aesthetic techniques including the use of low frequency sound effects and wearable cameras facilitate shared affective engagement and a form of embodied simulation associated with kinaesthetic empathy and augmented narrative involvement.

Conceptualizing and Mapping Geocultural Space

This essay seeks to critically conceptualize the term geocultural space and the emerging field of study with which it is associated by exploring the various ways in which such space is currently being mapped by researchers using digital humanities tools and methods. In drawing together intersecting interests in Geographic Information Systems and spatio-cultural narratives and experiences, this work defines an interdisciplinary field of research that is gathering momentum as geolocative technologies that shape and reshape the ways in which we perceive and experience the world become increasingly prevalent in academic life and in the cultural mainstream.

A cultural atlas of Australia: mediated spaces in film, literature, and theatre

An online interactive map including textual extracts and audiovisual material of film/novel/play locations in Australia.