Vijay Devadas

The framing of climate change in New Zealand newspapers from June 2009 to June 2010

We investigated the framing of climate change science in New Zealand newspapers using quantitative content analysis of articles published in The New Zealand Herald, The Press and The Dominion Post between June 2009 and June 2010. The study sample of 540 articles was collected through the electronic news database Factiva, using the search terms ‘climate change’ or ‘global warming’. Frames were analysed deductively according to an experimental frame typology. Sources were also coded and basic descriptive data recorded. Content analysis showed the Politics (26%), Social Progress (21%) and Economic Competitiveness (16%) frames were the most prominent in coverage. Political actors (33%) and Academics (20%) appeared most commonly as sources, while Sceptics represented just 3% of total sources identified. The results suggest that New Zealand newspapers have presented climate change in accordance with the scientific consensus position since 2009, focusing on discussion of political, social and economic responses and challenges.

Postcolonial Interventions: Gayatri Spivak, Three Wise Men and the Native Informant

Abstract This article responds to Terry Eagletons claim that Spivaks latest book, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, works against the intent of postcolonial criticism. Reading the work as a search for a just representational strategy, we explore the implications of Spivaks engagement with philosophy - Kant, Hegel, and Marx. As a disciplinary machine, philosophy produces Western subjects who are engendered by simultaneously including and excluding the other. Working through this production of the double location of the ‘other’ we suggest that systematic thought is inhabited by an absence that is present within, a disturbing otherness that ultimately questions authority and stability, and opens up the question of politics and representation. Drawing Spivak into the representational problematic opened up by Lyotard, we suggest that a responsible postcolonial intervention can be performed in the difficult exergue between representability and unrepresentability. In this account, representation is open to invention, to finding new idioms for articulating otherness.

Postcolonial popular cultures

In 2008, the Postcolonial Studies Research Network at the University of Otago held a conference entitled ‘Postcolonial Popular Cultures’. The conference theme emerged partly in response to Simon Featherstone’s claim in Postcolonial cultures (2005) that the field of postcolonial studies has shown insufficient attention to popular cultural forms as productive sites for exploring the kinds of questions that animate it. While Paul Gilroy (1993), Arjun Appadurai (1998), and Kobena Mercer (2000), amongst others, have produced scholarly engagements with popular cultural practices of diasporic and migrant communities, a survey of the anthologies and major collections that inform the field of postcolonial studies suggests that Featherstone’s point is in many ways a legitimate one: popular culture is one of those neglected domains of enquiry for postcolonial studies, in comparison to elite cultural formations or practices. This is all the more surprising, Featherstone contends, ‘given postcolonialism’s stated interest in reconfiguring dominant cultures, and exploring the conditions and resistance of subalterns’ (2005, 8). The ‘mediation and negotiations around culture and everyday life’ (Schaffer and Kerr 1999, 301) – while often the focus of postcolonial politics, or the ‘content’ of postcolonial literatures, for example – seem to have contributed less to the academic discipline’s constitution of its objects of study. Pleasingly, though, the conference call for papers drew significant interest from scholars in a variety of disciplines and from a variety of countries, each contributing to the increasing redress of an imbalance between elite and popular cultural forms in postcolonial critical scholarship. In the words of Stuart Hall, in his renowned essay ‘Notes on deconstructing the “popular”’ (1981), ‘popular culture matters’ (Hall 1998, 453). Thus the degree and significance of neglect might be debatable, but we regarded this very debate as both worthwhile and timely. However, the call for papers added a rejoinder to the proposition that popular culture matters to postcolonial studies: postcolonial studies also matters to the study of popular culture. The papers presented here are selected from those offered at the conference, while two further papers (Anjali Roy and Radhika Mohanram) have been contributed especially for this issue of Continuum. Collectively, they engage with – and contest – postcolonial studies with reference to popular culture, and they engage with popular culture (studies) from a postcolonial (studies) perspective. They reveal both the importance of each to the other, and the ambivalence that characterizes their relation.

A contaminated critique

art from the USA, the first art from outside Europe that was accepted as part of the European tradition. What has been accepted as modern is not the history of art in the USA, but post-war US art which, in Europe, is exhibited and explained in terms of previous Eurocentric practices. Despite the abundance of post-war US paintings purchased by European galleries and incorporated into a history of Eurocentric modernism, there are virtually no paintings by 18, 19 or early-20 century US artists in European collections. European galleries have the most parochial and xenophobic collections in the world. Their cultural arrogance is unmatched. All national art galleries I have visited throughout the world provide a more global and more generous view of modern art history (whether we take this to be the post-Renaissance or post-19th century periods) than their equivalent European galleries. Despite their often relative poverty to European art galleries, non-European art galleries contain more examples of European art than European art galleries contain of non-European art. For this reason, the most skewed histories of modern art are found in European art galleries. If European art curators can not recognise the full contribution of US art to modern art, what hope does the rest of the world have of gaining any recognition in Europe. It is the poverty of art historiography in Europe today, be it about contemporary or more traditional practices, that is the main reason for Third Text to exist.