Pal Ahluwalia

Australia's Ambivalent Re-imagining of Asia

This article argues that ‘Asia’ has tended to function as an ambivalent ‘sign’ in Australian political discourse, signifying both fear and hope. That ambivalence is reflected in Australian government policy. The article focuses on the period from Gough Whitlam on, tracing the links between debates over Australian relations with Asia and key issues in Australian domestic politics, including debates over immigration, the economy and Australian national identity. Key differences are identified between the views of John Howard and those of recent Australian Labor Prime Ministers. However, it is pointed out that Kevin Rudd also has ambivalent attitudes towards Asia, both encouraging Asian engagement as a path to future prosperity and fearing that Australia will be left behind in an increasingly ‘Asian Century’.

Afterlives of post-colonialism: reflections on theory post-9/11

The world of Antiquity and Middle Ages was replete with monsters and satyrs. Modernity and civilisation is shadowed by monstrous figures that constitute ‘the abject’ and ‘discontent’. This paper examines the question of representation and the manner in which the figure of the monster reappears after the events of 9/11. It discusses the way production about the other has been disciplined and policed and offers some reflections on theory in order to consider how a post-colonial ethical stance might offer a better way to engage in the production of non-coercive knowledge.

Frantz Fanon and Steve Biko: Towards Liberation

(2001). Frantz Fanon and Steve Biko: Towards Liberation. Social Identities: Vol. 7, No. 3, pp. 455-469.

Towards (Re)Conciliation: The Post-Colonial Economy of Giving

Paper for presentation at the Wits History Workshop, June 1999, on truth, reconciliation and memory. Draft not to be cited without authors permission.

Post-structuralism's colonial roots: Michel Foucault

Post-colonial theory is many different things to many different people. It serves many different purposes. It is drawn from the unique conditions which its adherents inhabit and from the unique experiences upon which they draw. For many commentators, Michel Foucault is at the heart of post-colonial thinking or, at the very least, his work contributes the embedding of the post-structural in the post-colonial. But there is an alternative reading, and closer analysis demonstrates how the relationship between the post-structural and the post-colonial can be read as the inverse of one which embeds post-structuralism at the beginning. Looking at the range of experiences that were formative in the development of Foucaults ideas, it can be argued that the post-colonial is embedded deeply at the root of post-structural thinking.

Negotiating Identity: Post-colonial Ethics and Transnational Adoption

This paper examines the overwhelming desire of transnational adoptees to establish a connection with their origins in order to both come to terms with the past and develop an understanding of their identity. It considers the ethical ramifications of the commodification of human bodies. It is suggested that the idea of displacement is most helpful in approaching questions of transnational adoption. In this way, we can look at transnational adoption as a ‘beginning’—one that disappears into the present moment, becoming the constitutive reality underlying Derridas concern with displacement—rather than its origin. For, what does the quest for a return to the point of origin entail? Transnational adoptees, when they embark on the journey of reclaiming their past, of coming to terms with their sense of loss, realise that there is no simple comfort in returning—that they are inevitably caught in the two worlds in which they co-exist. It is through this recognition of the traces that are contained in them, through this displacement, that they are able to negotiate identity.

Reconciliation and pedagogy

Reconciliation is one of the most significant contemporary challenges in the world today. In this innovative new volume, educational academics and practitioners across a range of cultural and political contexts examine the links between reconciliation and critical pedagogy, putting forward the notion that reconciliation projects should be regarded as public pedagogical interventions, with much to offer to wider theories of learning. While ideas about reconciliation are proliferating, few scholarly accounts have focused on its pedagogies. This book seeks to develop a generative theory that properly maps reconciliation processes and works out the pedagogical dimensions of new modes of narrating and listening, and effecting social change. The contributors build conceptual bridges between the scholarship of reconciliation studies and existing education and pedagogical literature, bringing together the concepts of reconciliation and pedagogy into a dialogical encounter and evaluating how each might be of mutual benefit to the other, theoretically and practically. This study covers a broad range of territory including ethnographic accounts of reconciliation efforts, practical implications of reconciliation matters for curricula and pedagogy in schools and universities and theoretical and philosophical considerations of reconciliation/pedagogy. It will be of great interest to students and scholars of peace and reconciliation studies, educational studies and international relations.

Origins and Displacement: Working Through Derrida's African Connections

This paper seeks to understand the effects of Derridas colonial origin upon his theory and considers, the implications, for his theory, of the suppression of that origin? It examines his Algerian locatedness. It questions the impact of his formative years on his later work and the implications of this for deconstructive theory or Derridean logocentrism. It questions whether his overall project reflects his colonial roots and the tensions which arise out of being relocated within a new culture. Is the fate of Derrida of belonging and not belonging in both French and Algerian culture, of occupying that in-between space, part of his own alterity which inevitably makes its way into his writings relevant to understanding his work? It considers his profound influence on contemporary thought and asks if it needs to be contextualised against the backdrop of Algeria and the experience of colonisation.

The prosumer [Editorial]

Of all the social identities discussed in the pages of our journal, one of the newest, at least in terms of popular usage, is that of the prosumer. This concept was invented by Alvin Toffler, a lapsed leftist Reaganite public intellectual in the US. Toffler was one of a merry band of male futurists who emerged in the 1960s and 1970s (think Ithiel de Sola Pool, Daniel Bell, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and Herman Kahn). They made reputations and money through predictions about broad social, cultural, political, and economic trends. Toffler coined the term ‘prosumer’ in 1980 to describe the vanguard class of a technologized future. In the 30-odd years since, but especially the decade of the World Wide Web, it has become a favored word (Ritzer & Jurgenson, 2010; Toffler, 1980). But rather than being entirely new, in Toffler’s view, the prosumer partially represented a return to subsistence, to the period prior to the Industrial Revolution’s division of labor – a time when we ate what we grew, built our own shelters, and gave birth without medicine. The specialization of agriculture and manufacturing and the rise of cities put paid to such autarky: the emergence of capitalism distinguished production from consumption via markets. Toffler discerned a paradoxical latter-day blend of the two seemingly opposed eras, symbolized by the French invention and marketing of home-pregnancy tests in the 1970s. These kits relied on the formal knowledge, manufacture, and distribution that typified modern life, but permitted customers to make their own diagnoses, cutting out the role of doctors as expert gatekeepers between applied science and the self. Toffler called this ‘production for self-use.’ He saw it at play elsewhere as well: in the vast array of civil society organizations that emerged at the time, the craze for ‘self-help,’ the popularity of self-serve gas stations as franchises struggled to survive after the 1973– 1974 oil crisis, and the proliferation of automatic teller machines as banks sought to reduce their retail labor force. The argument Toffler made 35 years ago, that we are simultaneously cultural consumers and producers, i.e. prosumers, is an idea whose time has come, as his fellow reactionary Victor Hugo (1907) almost put it. Internally divided – but happily so – each person is, as Foucault put it, ‘a consumer on the one hand, but ... also a producer’ (Foucault, 2008, p. 226). Toffler acknowledged the crucial role of corporations in constructing prosumption – they were there from the first, cutting costs and relying on labor undertaken by customers to externalize costs through what he termed ‘willing seduction.’ This was coeval with, and just as important as, the devolution of authority that would emerge from the new freedoms (Toffler, 1980, pp. 266, 269–270, 275). Translation: get customers to do unpaid work, even as they purchase goods and services. Just as Toffler imagined prosumers emerging from technological changes to the nature and interaction of consumption and production, he anticipated that these transformations would forge new relationships between proletarians and more educated Social Identities, 2014 Vol. 20, Nos. 4–5, 259–261, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13504630.2015.1004830

Editorial Note: Journal of Tendency/Journal of Record

There’s a productive tension between the two main kinds of academic journals. On the one hand, journals of tendency have avowedly political projects. They seek to intervene in social space, seeing themselves as situated in particular*/and partial*/ coordinates. On the other hand, professional journals claim a disembodied, timeless truth, part of the earnest search for a universal knowledge that purports to come from nowhere and is, above all, disinterested. Journals of tendency generally rely on manuscript readers who are alive to politics and style, whereas journals of profession are more wedded to models derived from social-scientific and humanities desires for scientific validity, via double-blind refereeing undertaken in terms of disciplinary adherence and falsifiability. The former are open to quick responses to contemporary social problems and open calls for papers, whereas the latter often restrict access to members of professional associations and favour process over product. The former seek to change the social conditions they find, the latter exercise hegemony within professions. One approach is about change, the other about normal science. Social Identities is in the first group, alongside such other collaborative projects as Third Text , Social Text , Public Culture , History Workshop Journal , Radical History Review, the Sarai Readers , Metapolı́tica , Index on Censorship , Culture & Psychology, Cultural Studies, and New Left Review. The second group is comprised of such periodicals as International Sociology, American Political Science Review, American Sociological Review, Journal of Economic Issues , Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, Cinema Journal , American Behavioral Scientist , Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, PMLA , Journal of Communication , Contributions to Indian Sociology, and Current Anthropology. Journals of tendency no doubt have their own normal-science manifestations, where homilies are trotted out to satisfy academic protocols. And of course, venues designed to attract new critical ideas can quickly become subordinated to administrative and careerist academic drives. Once a journal is widely read and cited, it becomes a place to be published within the higher-education industry. This is perhaps most obviously true of the United States, but increased forms of scrutiny and competition as per the precepts of neoliberal managerialism are popular across the globe. One of the dispiriting things confronting those of us working in the