Odette Kelada

Dancing the Transcultural across the South

In ‘Dancing the transcultural across the South’, Fensham and Kelada argue for the importance of incorporating the contribution of Dance Studies when examining the complex ‘entanglements’ of migration, interculturalism and globalisation. The article locates dancing within current intercultural debates, in particular utilising the idea of transculturalism to inform a concept of ‘trans/dans’, and foreground movement as localised expression. Culturally specific readings of dance as the articulation of moving bodies and site for experiential and artistic expression, can speak to the intricacies of social and political mobility. Embodiment is posited as central to examining how dance expands understandings of corporeal transmission and intercultural exchange in ways that are not restricted by monolithic categories of history, nation or culture. In this article, key scholars from Intercultural Studies and Dance Studies scholarship are referenced in order to map the rich territory offered by this productive interdisciplinary approach.

Is the personal still political? Contemporary Australian women writers waltzing to a different tune

This article asks the question of whether the personal is still political in Australia. Through the 1960s, 70s and 80s, feminism was at the forefront of new ways of thinking and defining social and political relations. Making the political personal meant that womens experiences were deemed as worthy as mens of being translated into literature, politics and the public domain. Many contemporary Australian women writers produce writing encompassing this personal as political approach. As marginalised identities, female voices may offer alternative perspectives that undermine the stakes prized by dominant western powers. However as the expansive spaces forged for minority voices diminish in the current political context, with Anne Summers The End of Equality (2003) exposing the hypocrisy of equality of opportunity, womens right to abortion back in the headlines and publications such as Keith Windschuttles Fabrications of Australian History (2002) indicating conservative groups are re-instigating what sho...

Love is a battlefield: ‘maternal’ emotions and white catharsis in Baz Luhrmann's post-Apology ‘Australia’

In Baz Luhrmanns Australia (2008), audiences encounter emotive scenes including depictions of an Indigenous child stolen from a white ‘mother’ in a time of war. Given that the film is framed with reference to the history of the Stolen Generations and the Apology, this paper explores the functions of such a narrative in constructions of the white imaginary. Inverting truths around the destruction of Indigenous families and policies of assimilation, management and control requires in this instance the appropriation of the maternal domain of the Indigenous mother by the white female body; an English woman reclaiming ‘her’ land. Through such a repositioning, anxieties around belonging and guilt may undergo a form of catharsis via the apparent empathetic engagement with a ‘stolen’ maternal love. Drawing on Ghassan Hages insights into the possessive logic of the ‘white’ nation and Sara Ahmeds analysis of emotional politics, this article analyses the connection between the films Australia and Jedda (1955), critiquing the potential for such a cinematic catharsis to assuage shame, and reify national virtue. I contend that there is a violence inherent in colonising ‘love’ through such fantasies that inhabit the locus and stories of ‘the other’ at the moment of ‘Apology’, neutralising threats to negative conceptions of self as benevolent bodies at ‘home’ in the imaginary landscape of Australia.

Histories of passion and indifference

As suggested by their titles, Indifferent Inclusion and Passionate Histories approach Indigenous Australian histories from antithetical sides. However, both include content that re-examines ideas of assimilation and how the past impacts on nation formation and memory. When reading them together, questions emerge around how assimilation is understood, the inclusion or exclusion of Aboriginal voices and the place of ‘passion’ in historical writing. While McGregor’s text is standard in its historical approach, presenting documented archival facts and providing historical framing and analysis, Passionate Histories positions itself in a more challenging stance. The combination of the terms ‘passion’ and ‘histories’ counters the notion that studies of history must cultivate a dispassionate position to gain credence as objective truth. In this sense such a title can read as a provocative subversion, foregrounding as it does the emotional stakes and the value of all that passion may conjure up*commitment, vigour, excitement*but also exposing complicities. Can history be passionate and credible? What are the politics of an objective, ‘disembodied voice’ telling stories of the past? Is passion in fact vital to deconstructing the ways history is written and can such emphasis perform an invigoration of the past? This review essay looks first at McGregor’s approach and then examines how Passionate Histories offers a contrasting perspective on these questions. Russell McGregor states in the preface to Indifferent Inclusion that one of his purposes is to promote a nuanced understanding of what assimilation meant in mid-twentieth-century Australia. He goes on to say that ‘This is a book about the transformation of the Australian nation as it made faltering steps to come to grips with the endurance of the Indigenous People and as Indigenous People themselves strove to secure a place within the nation’ (p xii). He makes it clear that there will be no attempt to convey ‘the lived reality of how Aboriginal people experienced’ exclusion or inclusion in the Postcolonial Studies, Vol. 15, No. 2, pp. 295 304, 2012

The urban frontier and the abduction of the racialized body: Nyungar artist Dianne Jones's Men's Business

Abstract Through a discussion of Nyungar artist Dianne Joness photographic series Mens Business, this essay examines how Joness images connect with themes of Aboriginality, occupation and place. Set in Perth, Kojunup and Northam, the series is a response by Jones as an Aboriginal woman to the representation of Aboriginal men in Australia around the Northern Territory Intervention. Drawing on Fanons concept of racially marked bodies abducted from specific time and place, the essay argues that pervasive depictions of Aboriginal men as violent are having an impact throughout Australia. These negative depictions reignite the archive of colonialist imaginings of the black male body as ‘terror’ and a legitimized object for classification and dissection. Jones photographs the men in her family to reinscribe the specifics of locality and counter the effect of stereotypical perceptions. The essay explores how the images in Mens Business can be read as loaded ‘family portraits’, engaging with dominant racialized representations of family while foregrounding suburbia as the ‘urban frontier’ of contemporary place-making and place-taking. The exploration of locality and subjectivity in this analysis queries imperialist constructions of landscape and history central to the creation of Australian national identity.

Situating the Body: Choreographies of Transmigration

This paper aims to ask questions about how interculturalism might be informed by thinking through choreography. It examines the techniques and strategies of two Malaysian-Australian artists, Chandrabhanu and Yap, whose transmigration has constructed new forms of subjectivity from the memories and histories of dancing bodies. It asks how embodied experience, that includes dance knowledges, adapts before and after other social and political adjustments? It will examine how their choreography develops as a means to imagine the self beyond hegemonic political and social models of identity. In this regard, we have utilised the work of Stoetzler and Yuval-Davis to theorise the concept of the situated imagination and Sara Ahmed to complicate an understanding of diasporic experience in relation to home and belonging. We ‘trace the cross-pollination between various states’ in migratory bodies as forms of intercultural embodiment. Through discussion of two productions we consider in what ways Chandrabhanu and Yap establish modes of performative, and thus affective belonging, to place and nation.