Sneja Gunew

Introduction: Multicultural translations of food, bodies, language

As a result of several decades of work in critical and comparative multiculturalism, I ® nd myself constantly stumbling over the conjunction of multiculturalism and food and, periodically, I try to explore this nexus (Gunew, 1999). A current study takes the chain of signi® cation: food, bodies and language, into other geo-political arenas beyond Australia, and was precipitated by a frustration which I had expressed on several previous occasions (Gunew, 1993, 1994) in which the notion of multiculturalism as food is often the most benign version of accommodating cultural difference in various national contexts. Intersecting with both food and cultural difference is the charged image of assimilation and this set me wondering about the relationship between food and subjectivity, particularly in the domain of subjugated selves where the subject is positioned at a tangent to the dominant culture. These thoughts-inprogress are also the result of a research project that occurred over the last year around the rather long-winded topic of `Cross-cultural perspectives on women, identity, food’ . The team, based at the University of British Columbia, was a highly interdisciplinary one, comprising quite a number of scholars working in literary studies (not only English but also in Japanese and South East Asian studies) as well as geography, anthropology, nutrition, clinical psychology, philosophy and women’ s studies. While my examples in the paper here are literary ones, the interpretations themselves draw upon a range of critical readings from all these ® elds. The work I am pursuing considers three broad themes: the body as food (dealing with `classic’ cannibalism, including the self-consumption associated with eating disorders); food as body (predominantly in the sense of the social and national body); and, ® nally, the contest between food and language as analysed, for example, in Kristeva’ s work, particularly, her classic study of abjection Powers of Horror. The following will draw upon the work in the second section.

Realism And Romance

Although representations of the everyday and the familiar, as distinct from the extraordinary and the exotic, are as old as art itself, the term ‘realism’ to identify these does not seem to have been used in English until 1856. In that year, coincidentally the same that Flaubert shocked the French public and authorities with his anti-romantic ‘scenes from provincial life’ in Madame Bovary, George Eliot extended Ruskin’s use of ‘realism’ in Modern Painters to literature that presented social life with meticulous attention to detail, and in the United States Emerson used the word to describe Swift’s style. As a reaction against the romanticism of the earlier nineteenth century, realism—or a range of realistic subjects and styles- came to characterise new developments in fiction (and later drama) in Europe, the United States and, by the last decades of the century, when a new generation of predominantly native-born writers emerged, Australia.

Technologies of the Self: Corporeal Affects of English

I grew up in Australia in the s on the outskirts of Melbourne. Land was cheap enough to be settled by postwar immigrants, like my family, ‘‘flooding’’ into the country. We struggled to acquire English, a notoriously difficult enterprise since, according to my parents, it did not abide by the usual linguistic rules of logic. There were far too many exceptions, for example, in the disjunction between pronunciation and spelling. In revenge, my mother informed us, only semihumorously, that the idiosyncratic Australian intonation would result in thin lips and protruding chins—as we could easily observe everywhere around us. This was my first exposure to the idea that there could be somatic and

Place and People

‘Australia’, ‘literature’ and ‘Australian literature’ exist as subjects in discourse by virtue of substantial agreement about certain conventions. In order to talk at all we have to begin with some assumptions: assumptions about the general or rough-and-ready meaning of key terms and assumptions about what is worth discussing. While it is obvious that the value judgments of someone who has never heard of Australia will differ from those of someone who is either proud or ashamed of living in Australia, and equally obvious that the value judgments of a dispossessed Aborigine will differ from those of a large white mining or pastoral company, discourse can nevertheless proceed through agreement about the signi-ficance (if not the exact meaning or implication) of certain concepts. Geographical concepts such as the land, its features and contents may be referred to; historical concepts such as convictism, colonialism, pastoralism, or the gold rushes; sociological concepts such as urbanisation, racism, ethnic origin or multiculturalism; psychological concepts such as exile, loneliness, renewal and self-discovery; moral concepts such as mateship, endurance and fair play; socio-legal concepts such as equality and democracy; or linguistic and literary concepts such as laconicism, scepticism, the dismantling of expectations and hyperbole or the tall story. Qualities or demands (or, perhaps, inventions) such as these go to make up what is said to be Australian culture, and this culture is assumed to be overt or latent in writing in and about Australia.

Authenticity and the writing cure: Reading some migrant women's writing☆

Abstract In the wake of postmodernist theories of the decentred subject, how might feminist criticism argue for gendered difference in relation to cultural difference without returning the authenticity of the humanist subject? What safe passage exists between the Scylla of biological essentialism which haunts explorations of ecriture feminine and the Charybdis of textual analyses which depoliticize the reading/writing process? The insertion of non-Anglo-Celtic women writers into the context of Australian Literature raises intriguing possibilities for reassessing the positioning of writers and readers and for rethinking the processes whereby cultural values are created.

Is academic sisterhood an oxymoron

Abstract This article examines the contradictions which occur when women try to work together as a feminist collective in an academic situation which promotes individualism and hierarchies. Rather than seeking a model based on family relationships [mother-daughter or between sisters] I suggest that women must develop new forms of professionally-based friendships and go on to exemplify this with the situation of an all-woman course team preparing an interdisciplinary, off-campus course on feminist theory. The differences which existed amongst the members were constructively channelled into illustrating the differences amongst various kinds of feminism.

“Mouthwork”: Food and Language as the Corporeal Home for the Unhoused Diasporic Body in South Asian Women’s Writing

You ask me what I mean By saying I have lost my tongue. I ask you, what would you do If you had two tongues in your mouth, And lost the first one, the mother tongue, And could not really know the other, The foreign tongue. You could not use them both together Even if you thought that way. And if you lived in a place where you had to speak a foreign tongue – your mother tongue would rot, rot and die in your mouth until you had to spit it out. I thought I spit it out But overnight while I dream. . . It grows back, a stump of a shoot . . . It pushes the other tongue aside.2

Stammering 'Country' Pedagogies: Sickness for and of the Home

The machinery of nostalgia is not simply benign but releases the uncanny, as is found when the process of memory and its legitimations are scrutinised. Memory is referred to as a mediating link between objects and their referents and it is this gap between resemblance and identity that nostalgic desire arises.

Inflexões subalternas nos cosmopolitismos vernaculares

Resumo: O conceito sobre o termo relativamentre novo, “cosmopolitismos vernaculares”, identifica as responsabilidades e os contextos globais ao mesmo tempo que reconhece que eles estao sempre enraizados e enredados em interesses locais, os quais incluem os grupos minoritarios que competem dentro da nacao. Este artigo examina o termo “europeu” com o objetivo de desnudar os debates revisionistas sobre o cosmopolitismo, especialmente em relacao aos “cosmopolitismos vernaculares” que funcionam como uma maneira de incluir os “cosmopolitismos subalternos” por meio da desagregacao do cosmopolitismo, num movimento analogo a nocao de “processo democratico agnostico” de Stuart Hall. O paradoxo da frase acima reflete o movimento duplo desses debates: no termo cunhado por Homi Bhabha o “domestico” ou “nativo” vernacular esta sempre em uma relacao dialogica com a “acao a distância” do cosmopolitismo global. Exploro essa dinâmica ao focalizar os significados discrepantes de “europeu” e dos termos a ele associados. Neste artigo, meu argumento central e: os termos “oeste” e “europeu” devem ser desconstruidos para que nao possam mais ser invocados, nos debates pos-coloniais, como incontestaveis categorias heuristicas como, por exemplo, o “oeste e o resto.” Os novos debates sobre cosmopolitismo abrem caminho para se reconhecer, como estados-nacao e como parte da Uniao Europeia, a heterogeneidade cultural de tais entidades geopoliticas. Reconhecer o cosmopolitismo dos grupos subalternos facilita esse empreendimento e ajuda a restabelecer uma perspectiva “planetaria.” Palavras-chave: cosmopolitismo; diaspora; Australia. Abstract: The concept of the relatively new term “vernacular cosmopolitanisms” acknowledges global contexts and responsibilities at the same time that it recognizes that these are always rooted in and permeated by local concerns that include competing minority groups within the nation. This paper examines the term “European” as a way to unpack revisionist debates in cosmopolitanism –specifically, in relation to “vernacular cosmopolitanisms”, which is a way of including “subaltern cosmopolitanisms” by disaggregating cosmopolitanism in ways that echo Stuart Hall’s notion of an “agnostic democratic process.” The paradox of the phrase reflects the double movement of these debates: in Homi Bhabha’s coinage of the term, the vernacular “native” or “domestic” is always in a dialogic relation with the global- cosmopolitan “action at a distance.” I explore this dynamic by focusing on the discrepant meanings of “European” and associated terms. My central argument in this paper is that “European” and the “West” are terms that need to be deconstructed so that they can no longer be invoked as self-evidently heuristic categories in post-colonial debates, for example, the “West and the rest.” The new cosmopolitan debates provide avenues for recognizing the cultural heterogeneity of such geo-political entities as nation-states and the European Union. Recognizing the cosmopolitanism of subaltern groups facilitates this enterprise and helps to reinstate a “planetary” perspective. Keywords: cosmopolitisme; diaspora; Australia.

The Writing Process

While other parts of this Anthology have paid attention to the way writers deal with what used to be called ‘their material’ or the way in which they respond to the world or participate in it, this Section turns to the essential inwardness of writing, the process of writing. It shows how texts reflect upon their own situation; how writing is often about writing.