Journal articles on the topic 'Cross-cultural/racial relations'

Psychological research and theory have traditionally focused on bias and conflict between separate groups. Our central thesis is that the processes that shape hierarchical group relations within a society are distinctive and typically operate in ways that are frequently subtle rather than blatant. The challenges of detecting new subtle forms of bias are receiving considerable attention in the field of social psychology, internationally. Although explicit hostility toward minority groups seems to have faded in modern societies, cross-cultural data show that the status, resources, and the power of women and ethnic/racial minorities remain unequal. The present literature review integrates the findings of cross-cultural research showing the role of paternalistic legitimizing ideas and behavior for establishing, maintaining, and reinforcing group hierarchy and the disadvantage of members of traditionally underrepresented groups. Specifically, we explain how intergroup helping relations can be used as a mechanism to maintain social advantage in racial and gender relations. These theoretical and experimental insights help illuminate the dynamics of relations between socially linked groups and the nature of contemporary bias. We also highlight how this perspective suggests novel and productive directions for future research.

This paper investigates the literary representation of London as a site of cross-cultural romance by analyzing the effects of romantic relations between Arab women and white men on their identities in the works of Selma Dabbagh’s Out of It (2011) and Nada Awar Jarrar’s Dreams of Water (2006). It aims at examining the city of London as a convenient testing ground for whether Arab women characters could mingle and cohabit with white men as a coping strategy in the Metropolis. As this paper shows, the Metropolis helps Arab women to navigate a sense of identity in these cross-cultural romances. It is within the multi-ethnic and multicultural spaces of Metropolitan London that new intimate possibilities between Arab women and white men begin to emerge, revising and interrogating long-established racial and cultural barriers and boundaries. In other words, this is an attempt to examine how these cross-cultural romances serve to tighten the rift between the two cultures and decode the city’s different spaces. Therefore, the article argues that London’s multiple spaces appear to be a prominent factor in the construction of a social space in which cultural identity can be reconstructed and redefined.

Abstract At the beginning of the 1970s, relations between the historic British churches and the new black-led churches were usually non-existent or marked by prejudices or ambivalences. This article examines the emergence, development, and significance of a cross-cultural ecumenical dialogue sponsored by the British Council of Churches. It places this in a context of both growing white liberal interest in the ‘multi-racial’ society and the increasing public assertiveness of collective black Christian consciousness. In doing so, it contributes to our understandings of religious change in the twentieth century: both in terms of perceptions of ‘secularization’ and the complex relationship between Christianity and race relations in the decades after Windrush.

Abstract This article explores the literary representations of the ‘unsaid’ and intangible connections of humanity across cultures as represented in Undisciplined Heart (2010), the memoir of the Namibian writer Jane Katjavivi. The central concerns are to examine how the author, through the act of writing, ascertains a new female identity within a culturally transforming Africa; how the fictionalization of her life is a revolutionary way of abdicating the role of silent white-female spectator in Africa; and how her story is a voice that matters in as much as it demonstrates the salient cultural relatedness and connectedness in Africa. The issues and concerns around transnational families, transculturalism, female subjectivity, agency, transnationality and multiculturalism are therefore central in this article. The guiding principles of this essay are Ubuntu (ubuntuism) and Afro-transnationalism in order to explore the sense of ‘rainbowism’ as articulated within a transnational, multiracial and multicultural literary text, Undisciplined Heart. The article brings to the fore the often overlooked presence of ‘white’ writing in postcolonial and post-independence Africa and provides some nuanced insights into the racial and cultural patterns of connectedness – the harmonious cross-cultural sense of being in an Africa that is both culturally and spatially diverse. The article also interrogates as well as problematizes the elusive and constantly changing issues of identity and belonging.

Many organizations attempt to increase cultural competence as one way to foster organizational change to enhance equity and inclusion. But the literature on cultural competence is largely silent on the role of emotion, despite the strong feelings that inevitably accompany work in cross-racial dyads, groups, and institutions. We offer group relations theory as an approach rooted in the importance of emotions, especially anxiety, and offering a rich awareness of how unconscious processes, including defense mechanisms like splitting and projection, drive that anxiety. We show how this approach helps us both diagnose and address difficult dynamics, including by recognizing entrenched power inequities. We draw on examples from others’ research as well as our own research, teaching, and consulting to illustrate key concepts. Ultimately, we argue that buried emotions can create distance and inhibit change. Surfacing and addressing them can foster connection and provide a way for organizations to move forward.

Higher education institutions are among the few places where people of different racial, cultural, and socioeconomic backgrounds can engage with each other in more than just a superficial way, providing students a unique opportunity to develop the skills needed to function effectively in a diverse, increasingly global world. Whether students develop this capacity will depend in large part on whether the institution they attend has provided structures for those critical learning experiences to take place. But what form should such learning experiences take? This essay argues that positive cross-racial engagement may require both structured intergroup dialogue and intragroup dialogue opportunities to support the learning needs of both White students and students of color in the context of predominantly White institutions.

Katherine Magyarody, “‘Sacred Ties of Brotherhood’: The Social Mediation of Imperial Ideology in The Last of the Mohicans and Canadian Crusoes” (pp. 315–342) This essay analyzes narrative patterns of colonist-indigenous relations within Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) and two Robinsonade texts, James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans (1826) and Catharine Parr Traill’s Canadian Crusoes (1852). Within the latter texts, the multiplication of Crusoe into “castaway” groups allows for an investigation of the social collateral of reaffirming racial hierarchies via settlers’ allegiance to indigenous individuals while destroying larger indigenous communities. In The Last of the Mohicans, the hybrid Cora Munroe and the Mohican Uncas’s love for her threatens the established pattern of homosocial interracial friendship; their deaths reaffirm racial boundaries. Conversely, by depicting a “coterie” of Scotch, French-Canadian, hybrid, and Mohawk members, Canadian Crusoes self-consciously rewrites the tragedy of Cooper’s novel so that sororal love enables cross-cultural marriage. Nevertheless, Traill’s proleptic descriptions of Canadian settlement mark her narrative as an alternate history that diverges from the progressive alienation of Native communities.

We present the dossier “Studies of Childhood: movements, limits and frontiers”, a theme discussed in the III Brazilian Congress Childhood Studies (CEI). The Congress was organized by members of the Department of Childhood Studies (DEDI) and the Graduate Program in Education (ProPEd) of the State University of Rio de Janeiro. The articles that compose the dossier review the debates that took place during the event in the fields of education, international relations, and ethno-racial issues. In this presentation, inspired by Mario Benedetti's poem “The Bridge”, we explore the power of three words to think about childhood and the relationship we establish with children: borders, strangeness and movements. How many borders do childhood and children cross into the political, cultural, social, and biological order of life? Which movements or changes do they produce, reproduce, and spread? How to destrange childhood, in the sense of challenging the actions and discursive productions that promote exclusions of various forms? Which movements – in the field of research and in society in general – are instituted to encourage the agency of childhood? Starting from the idea that both our culture and our subjectivity are constituted in the relationship between an interior and an exterior that are placed in tension, we draw on philosophy, literature, psychoanalysis, and cultural studies to explore these questions. In this dossier, the texts compose a set that dialogues with the philosophy of childhood and goes beyond conceptual and methodological limits, in the sense of making moves to understand children and childhood through their perspectives, actions, languages and positions, in an objective and subjective form.

ObjectiveTo gain exploratory insights into the multifaceted, lived experience impact of COVID-19 on a small sample of ethnic minority healthcare staff to cocreate a module of questions for follow-up online surveys on the well-being of healthcare staff during the pandemic.DesignA cross-sectional design using two online focus groups among ethnic minority healthcare workers who worked in care or supportive roles in a hospital, community health or primary care setting for at least 12 months.ParticipantsThirteen healthcare workers (11 female) aged 26–62 years from diverse ethnic minority backgrounds, 11 working in clinical roles.ResultsFive primary thematic domains emerged: (1) viral vulnerability, centring around perceived individual risk and vulnerability perceptions; (2) risk assessment, comprising pressures to comply, perception of a tick-box exercise and issues with risk and resource stratification; (3) interpersonal relations in the workplace, highlighting deficient consultation of ethnic minority staff, cultural insensitivity, need for support and collegiate judgement; (4) lived experience of racial inequality, consisting of job insecurity and the exacerbation of systemic racism and its emotional burden; (5) community attitudes, including public prejudice and judgement, and patient appreciation.ConclusionsOur novel study has shown ethnic minority National Health Service (NHS) staff have experienced COVID-19 in a complex, multidimensional manner. Future research with a larger sample should further examine the complexity of these experiences and should enumerate the extent to which these varied thematic experiences are shared among ethnic minority NHS workers so that more empathetic and supportive management and related occupational practices can be instituted.

The purpose of this phronetic/pragmatic, mixed-methods study was to integrate quantitative data with qualitative data in examining the complex relations among depression, exercise, screen-viewing time, and life plans among 14 socioeconomically disadvantaged African American young adults. Based on the thematic analysis, the two emerging themes were as follows: life priorities (passing the General Educational Development [GED] test, pursuing profession/career, and being dedicated to church/ministry) and challenges in passing GED examination (e.g., difficulties with the GED test, high stress and low confidence, low interest in studying, health issues, and feelings of rejection/isolation). Based on cross tabulation, depression was highly associated with aerobic exercise and screen-viewing time (Cramer’s V = .44 and .42, respectively). Participants’ life challenges diminished the antidepressant effect of exercise and were linked to depression and excessive screen use. Two active men and a somewhat active woman experienced educational or health-related struggles, heavy screen watching, and severe depression. All three active men experienced educational challenges and severe depression. Two inactive participants reported limited screen use and limited depression, possibly because of their valued life goals (e.g., writing poetry and spiritually helping others). Contrary to the dominant cultural stereotype about African Americans being lazy, the study results show that the participants had highly similar career goals to the majority population yet faced many, significant structural barriers that interfered with their progress and thus sapped their motivation in achieving their life plans. Policy change is needed to reduce social structural barriers and racial systems of oppression in order to decrease poverty and depression.

AbstractIn the mid-twentieth century, in the aftermath of WWII and the Nazi atrocities and in the midst of decolonisation, a new discipline of transcultural psychiatry was being established and institutionalised. This was part and parcel of a global political project in the course of which Western psychiatry attempted to leave behind its colonial legacies and entanglements, and lay the foundation for a more inclusive, egalitarian communication between Western and non-Western concepts of mental illness and healing. In this period, the infrastructure of post-colonial global and transcultural psychiatry was set up, and leading psychiatric figures across the world embarked on identifying, debating and sometimes critiquing the universal psychological characteristics and psychopathological mechanisms supposedly shared among all cultures and civilisations. The article will explore how this psychiatric, social and cultural search for a new definition of ‘common humanity’ was influenced and shaped by the concurrent global rise of social psychiatry. In the early phases of transcultural psychiatry, a large number of psychiatrists were very keen to determine how cultural and social environments shaped the basic traits of human psychology, and ‘psy’ practitioners and anthropologist from all over the world sought to re-define the relationship between culture, race and individual psyche. Most of them worked within the universalist framework, which posited that cultural differences merely formed a veneer of symptoms and expressions while the universal core of mental illness remained the same across all cultures. The article will argue that, even in this context, which explicitly challenged the hierarchical and racist paradigms of colonial psychiatry, the founding generations of transcultural psychiatrists from Western Europe and North America tended to conceive of broader environmental determinants of mental health and pathology in the decolonising world in fairly reductionist terms—focusing almost exclusively on ‘cultural difference’ and cultural, racial and ethnic ‘traditions’, essentialising and reifying them in the process, and failing to establish some common sociological or economic categories of analysis of Western and non-Western ‘mentalities’. On the other hand, it was African and Asian psychiatrists as well as Marxist psychiatrists from Eastern Europe who insisted on applying those broader social psychiatry concepts—such as social class, occupation, socio-economic change, political and group pressures and relations etc.—which were quickly becoming central to mental health research in the West but were largely missing from Western psychiatrists’ engagement with the decolonising world. In this way, some of the leading non-Western psychiatrists relied on social psychiatry to establish the limits of psychiatric universalism, and challenge some of its Eurocentric and essentialising tendencies. Even though they still subscribed to the predominant universalist framework, these practitioners invoked social psychiatry to draw attention to universalism’s internal incoherence, and sought to revise the lingering evolutionary thinking in transcultural psychiatry. They also contributed to re-imagining cross-cultural encounters and exchanges as potentially creative and progressive (whereas early Western transcultural psychiatry primarily viewed the cross-cultural through the prism of pathogenic and traumatic ‘cultural clash’). Therefore, the article will explore the complex politics of the shifting and overlapping definitions of ‘social’ and ‘cultural’ factors in mid-twentieth century transcultural psychiatry, and aims to recover the revolutionary voices of non-Western psychiatrists and their contributions to the global re-drawing of the boundaries of humanity in the second half of the twentieth century.

AbstractIt is imperative that Social Sciences examine in depth the underlying issues in human relations that have contributed to divisions among persons, within families, institutions, between nations and religions. If we accept that dialogue is the main currency of statecraft, diplomacy, negotiation, mediation and peacebuilding (Rieker and Turn 2015), then we need to ask ourselves, what are the characteristics of a person capable of engaging in dialogue? Are they characteristics that can be taught? Are they characteristics that make us human?In his book “Relational Being” Gergen (2009) warns of the dire consequences we face if we continue on the pathway of “rugged individualism”. He explains how our relationships have become instruments for our own satisfaction. From Freud to Skinner, psychology has described human relationships as being primarily about seeking the greatest pleasure from others. But, the so-called “freedom” that we achieve gives us a satisfaction that is transitory at best. “Freedom contains an emptiness that only relationship can fill” (Gergen, 2009, p. 20). It is essential that we find the path to discovering the true meaning of relationship and more importantly cross-racial/ethnic relationships.Jean Baker Miller described what she termed “growth-fostering relationships” (Miller, 1986), and Chodorow (2001) has developed a theory regarding development suggesting that women develop along a relational pathway whereas men follow the developmental phases that move them toward autonomy. These theorists, and others, view the relational trait to be particularly characteristic of women. A more comprehensive understanding of the nature of the human person can be attained only by taking into consideration both autonomy and relational ability as equally important.Capacity for dialogue, therefore, is an important contribution that women bring to the world stage. Women from traditionally marginalized groups offer an essential and unique perspective to this topic due to their understanding of the role of power in the dynamics of relationships. To foster cross-cultural dialogue it is important to examine the power dynamics of what it means to be honest, empathetic and collaborative across cultures.In this discussion, the authors draw upon the fields of technology, child development, feminism, and the social justice literature in an attempt to articulate the benefits of dialogue. It is far from exhaustive and provides a cursory purview of this challenging topic. It is an example of how integration among different theories can help move our literature forward in understanding a challenging topic as dialogue. It also offers a perspective on how men and women can grow in their relationship building ability, and therefore ability to dialogue, by embracing characteristics like being vulnerable, cooperative, selfless, and nurturing, relating this to the teachings of Chiara Lubich.

AbstractAs people who cross racial boundaries in the family formation process, the experiences of interracial couples can actually reveal the nature of racial boundaries within and across societies. I draw on in-depth qualitative interviews with eighty-seven respondents in interracial Black and White couples in Los Angeles and Rio de Janeiro to compare perceptions of public stigmatization by outsiders, a term I call “boundary-policing.” I find that couples in Los Angeles perceive gendered, Black individuals as perpetrators of this boundary-policing. In Rio de Janeiro, couples perceive regionalized and classed, White perpetrators. These findings suggest that in the United States and Brazil, racial boundaries are intertwined with class and gender boundaries to shape negotiation of boundary-policing in the two contexts. This analysis builds on previous studies of ethnoracial boundaries by showing how individuals reinforce and negotiate them through interpersonal relations. It demonstrates the similarities and differences in the negotiation and reinforcement of racial boundaries in the two sites.

The poetry of Naomi Shihab Nye exemplifies the complexities of identity issues operating in a culture that is fraught with racial and political intensity. Although the poet has repeatedly mentioned the impact of her experience in Palestine on the formation of her poetic vision and consciousness, she does not resist -or separate herself from- the influence of American literary tradition and culture. Her multicultural identity embraces the two cultures by presenting the amalgamation of both Arab heritage and American experience. Thus, Nye's poetry shows how this Arab-American identity develops to be cosmopolitan as she sees herself as a "citizen of the world". This cosmopolitanism plays an important role in cross-cultural conversation which is based on acceptance and respect of difference. Her poetry is a message to all people and other hyphenated literary writers to celebrate their difference and use it to connect the various cultures in the world.

Almayer’s Folly (1896) by Joseph Conrad challenged the conventions of the fictional romance while confronting the need of native-born Malayans and other Asian individuals to find voice and identity in an imperial context. Along with the narrative voice in this text are the many other voices of those who have been colonized. Fidelity to one’s identity and openness to relationships across cultures lies at the crux of this study. Conrad’s critics of the 1950s and 1960s dismissed his first novel as a romance with a weak subplot. However, that subplot, about Almayer’s daughter Nina and her love affair, sets forth moral claims of loyalty and fidelity that must be taken into account. For her relation- ship with a Malay prince expresses a love that is binding and enduring, one that crosses boundaries and divisions and is an apt model for our culturally convergent world. Conrad creates a dialectic of intercultural subjectivities to make a point about identity, loyalty, and self-fashioning. Whereas Almayer is portrayed as foolish and inflexible, his daughter, Nina, faces significant issues of identity, as she has to choose between the traditional, indigenous heritage of her mother and her father’s modern European aspirations. With Almayer’s Folly, Joseph Conrad showed himself to be an international novelist who could develop a story with an inter-racial and intercultural cast of characters.

Abstract This essay explores the role that conversations about race and racism played in forming a partnership between an African American public relations firm and the Cuban National Tourist Institute (INIT) in 1960, just one year after Fidel Castro’s victory over Fulgencio Batista. The article highlights how Cuban revolutionary leaders, Afro-Cubans, and African Americans exploited temporary transnational relationships to fight local battles. Claiming that the Cuban Revolution had eliminated racial discrimination, INIT invited world champion boxer Joe Louis and 50 other African Americans to the island in January 1960 to experience “first class treatment — as first class citizens.” This move benefited Cuban revolutionary leaders by encouraging new tourism as the number of mainstream white American travelers to the island declined. The business venture also allowed African Americans to compare racial violence in the US South to the supposed integrated racial paradise in Cuba and foreshadowed future visits by black radicals, including NAACP leader Robert F. Williams. The politics expressed by Cuban newspapers and travel brochures, however, did not always fit with the lived experiences of Afro-Cubans. This essay uncovers how Afro-Cubans threatened national discourses by invoking revolutionary promises to denounce continued racial segregation in the very facilities promoted to African American tourists. Ultimately, ideas about race did not just cross borders between Cuba and the United States in 1960. Rather, they constituted and constructed those borders as Afro-Cubans used government claims to reposition themselves within the new revolutionary state.

AbstractChinese international students are vital to internationalization development in Canadian higher education, providing immediate and significant social and economic benefits to Canadian society. The existing scholarly studies have primarily adopted a cultural approach, with a focus on intercultural adaptation or related cross-cultural perspectives. This study goes beyond the cultural approach and examines how race, gender, and class intersect in producing social inequality among Chinese international students in Canada. Through the narratives of five students attending higher education institutions in British Columbia, the study reveals that Chinese international students have experienced discrimination in relation to developing friendship, integrating to the learning environment, and accessing supports and resources on campus based on the color of skin, their gender, and misperception of their class. The color line divides them into the “dominant white” and “people of color.” Color blindness negates their racial identities and ignores the ways in which these affect their learning experiences. The findings of this research call for an intersectional approach to examine international students and their lived experiences by addressing students’ multiple identities and differences to enrich their lived experience in Canada.

Research on bisexual histories and identities in later life is limited and reflects only single-nation studies. This article compares findings from two independently conducted studies of bisexual aging, in the United Kingdom and the United States, using a discourse analytic and life course perspective. The goals were to compare how participants narrated and made sense of their bisexual experiences in later life and to examine ways in which historical and cultural contexts shaped their accounts. Findings indicate that similar histories around lesbian separatism and the HIV/AIDS epidemic enabled shared discursive resources, while differing ethnic and racial relations enabled distinctive discursive possibilities. In both studies intersectional experiences, particularly including being a person of color and having a transgender history, profoundly affected individual narratives. Future research will benefit from creative conceptualizations of bisexuality, applying the life course perspective in research and practice, and supporting the diverse and resilient ways bisexual older adults use language.

Background: Social prescribing (such as green social prescribing), aims to address health disparities cross-culturally to improve well-being. However, evidence highlights racial disparities in relation to access to quality green space (including local/national parks and recreational spaces). This review aimed to identify the psycho-socioeconomic barriers to green space access for racialised individuals/families and Black Indigenous People of Colour (BIPOC), to understand what cultural adaptations might be made to help support them to access green social prescribing within the UK. Method: A narrative systematic review was conducted to identify barriers to green space access for racialised individuals/families and BIPOC. Searches of publication databases (APA PsycInfo, Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews [CDSR], Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials [CENTRAL], Cumulated Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature [CINAHL], and SCOPUS Preview) were undertaken from January to February 2022, to identify quantitative peer reviewed studies. Of the 4493 abstracts identified, ten studies met the inclusion criteria and were included for final review. Results: The results suggest that interpersonal, practical (such as transportation costs, entrance fees and lodging costs) and environmental factors can act as barriers to green space access for racialised individuals/families. Most frequently reported barriers were perceptions of safety and costs associated with travel and accessing green spaces, particularly for families. Conclusion: Factors such as diversity-friendly schemes (e.g., multiple languages on signs and additional prayer spaces in parks), funding and strategies to improve safety should be considered in the design and commissioning of green space and green social prescribing initiatives in primary care. By mitigating these barriers green space can become more accessible and improve inclusivity for racialised individuals/families. Future research could explore the inter-racial differences between racialised populations and which mechanisms reduce barriers to access and in what contexts.

Background: Numerous studies have documented multilevel racial inequalities in health care utilization, medical treatment, and quality of care in minority populations in the United States. Palliative care for people with serious illness and hospice services for people approaching the end of life are no exception. It is also well established that Hispanics and non-Hispanic Blacks are more likely than non-Hispanic Whites to have less knowledge about advance care planning and directives, hospice, and palliative care. Both qualitative and quantitative research has identified lack of awareness of palliative and hospice services as one of the major factors contributing to the underuse of these services by minority populations. However, an insufficient number of racial/ethnic comparative studies have been conducted to examine associations among various independent factors in relation to awareness of end-of-life, palliative care and advance care planning and directives. Aims: The main objective of this analysis was to examine correlates of awareness of palliative, hospice care and advance directives in a racially and ethnically diverse large sample of California adults. Methods: This cross-sectional study includes 2,328 adults: Hispanics (31%); non-Hispanic Blacks (30%); and non-Hispanic Whites (39%) from the Survey of California Adults on Serious Illness and End-of-Life 2019. Using multivariate analysis, we adjusted for demographic and socio-economic variables while estimating the potential independent impact of health status, lack of primary care providers, and recent experiences of participants with a family member with serious illnesses. Results: Hispanic and non-Hispanic Black participants are far less likely to report that they have heard about palliative and hospice care and advance directives than their non-Hispanic White counterparts. In this study, 75%, 74%, and 49% of Hispanics, non-Hispanic Blacks, and non-Hispanic White participants, respectively, claimed that they have never heard about palliative care. Multivariate analysis of data show gender, age, education, and income all significantly were associated with awareness. Furthermore, being engaged with decision making for a loved one with serious illnesses and having a primary care provider were associated with awareness of palliative care and advance directives. Discussion: Our findings reveal that lack of awareness of hospice and palliative care and advance directives among California adults is largely influenced by race and ethnicity. In addition, demographic and socio-economic variables, health status, access to primary care providers, and having informal care giving experience were all independently associated with awareness of advance directives and palliative and hospice care. These effects are complex, which may be attributed to various historical, social, and cultural mechanisms at the individual, community, and organizational levels. A large number of factors should be addressed in order to increase knowledge and awareness of end-of-life and palliative care as well as completion of advance directives and planning. The results of this study may guide the design of multi-level community and theoretically-based awareness and training models that enhance awareness of palliative care, hospice care, and advance directives among minority populations.

The objective of this study is to discuss affordances in foreign language (L2) teacher education in the digital age. With that aim, some pedagogical interventions were carried out in the course of “Supervised Internship” within the context of the Undergraduate Degree in English Language Teaching, at a federal university in the Southeast of Brazil in order to obtain empirical data concerning the perceptions of pre-service English teachers. The theoretical framework is based on the concept of affordance, in relation to the effects of globalization (and its Information and Communication Technologies - ICTs) on the education of language teachers in the digital age, considering aspects of interculturality, through hybrid approaches such as CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning), COIL (Collaborative Online International Learning) and the Intercomprehension approach. Data were obtained through participant observation and interviews with educators and pre-service teachers, and include: 1) discussion of texts about language teaching, interculturality and the use of technologies in education; 2) virtual meetings in COIL format with pre-service teachers enrolled in the course of “Supervised Internship” at a Brazilian university and at Alberto Hurtado University (AHU) in Chile; 3) discussion/reflection sessions; 4) interviews with participants. The analysis suggests that ICTs and approaches such as CLIL, COIL and Intercomprehension promote affordances for inclusive practices (for financially disadvantaged people, with the use of internet); multilingual practices (including other languages besides English); and intercultural practices, promoting contact and learning among different cultures and languages.ResumoO objetivo deste estudo é refletir sobre affordances na formação de professores de línguas adicionais (L2) na era digital. Com esse objetivo, algumas intervenções pedagógicas foram realizadas na disciplina de “Estágio Supervisionado” do curso de Licenciatura em Letras Inglês de uma universidade federal do Sudeste brasileiro, a fim de ilustrar e embasar essa reflexão por meio de dados empíricos das percepções de professores de inglês em formação. O arcabouço teórico se baseia na noção de affordance em relação aos efeitos da globalização com suas tecnologias de informação e comunicação (TICs) na formação de professores de L2 na era digital, com a ampliação da interculturalidade por meio de abordagens híbridas como a CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning), COIL (Collaborative Online International Learning) e Intercompreensão. Os dados foram gerados por meio de observação participante e entrevistas com os professores formadores e em formação, e incluem: 1) discussões de textos sobre ensino de idiomas, interculturalidade e uso de tecnologias na educação; 2) reuniões virtuais em formato COIL, com professores em formação, matriculados na disciplina de estágio supervisionado na universidade no Brasil e na Universidade Alberto Hurtado, no Chile; 3) sessões de reflexão; e 4) entrevistas com os participantes. A análise sugere que as TICs e abordagens como a CLIL, COIL e Intercompreensão propiciam affordances para uma prática mais inclusiva (alcançando pessoas desfavorecidas financeiramente por meio da internet); multilíngue (por meio da inclusão de outras línguas além do inglês); e intercultural, permitindo contato e aprendizado entre culturas e línguas diferentes.ResumenEl objetivo de este estudio es discutir las posibilidades en la educación de profesores de lenguas extranjeras (L2) en la era digital. Con ese objetivo, se llevaron a cabo algunas intervenciones pedagógicas en la asignatura de "Práctica Supervisada" de la carrera de Licenciatura en Inglés en una universidad federal en el sudeste de Brasil, con el fin de obtener datos empíricos sobre las percepciones de profesores de inglés en pre-servicio. El marco teórico se basa en el concepto de affordance, en relación con los efectos de la globalización (y sus Tecnologías de la Información y la Comunicación - TIC) en la educación de los profesores de idiomas en la era digital, considerando aspectos de la interculturalidad, a través de enfoques híbridos como CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning), COIL (Collaborative Online International Learning) e de Intercomprensión. Los datos se obtuvieron a través de la observación participante y entrevistas con educadores y profesores en pre-servicio e incluyen: 1) discusión de textos sobre enseñanza de idiomas, interculturalidad y el uso de tecnologías en educación; 2) reuniones virtuales en formato COIL con maestros de pre-servicio inscritos en la carrera de la universidad brasileña y en la Universidad Alberto Hurtado (AHU) en Chile; 3) sesiones de discusión / reflexión; 4) entrevistas con los participantes. El análisis sugiere que las TIC y los enfoques como CLIL, COIL e Intercomprensión promueven posibilidades de prácticas inclusivas (para las personas con desventajas financieras, con el uso de internet); prácticas multilingües (incluidos otros idiomas además del inglés); y prácticas interculturales, promoviendo el contacto y el aprendizaje entre diferentes culturas e idiomas.Palavras-chave: Educação intercultural, Tecnologia da informação e da comunicação, Línguas estrangeiras modernas, formação de professores.Keywords: Cross cultural training, Information technology, Second language instruction, Teacher education.Palabras clave: Educación intercultural, Tecnología de información y comunicación, Idiomas extranjeros, Formación de profesores de idiomas.ReferencesABRAHAMS, Mary Jane; RÍOS, Pablo Silva. What happens with English in Chile? Challenges in teacher preparation. In: KAMHI-STEIN, Lía D.; MAGGIOLI, Gabriel Díaz; OLIVEIRA, Luciana C. De (Eds.). 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Prevalence data is generally seen as objective and true; providing justified evidence to address crimes such as CSA. However, the many barriers to disclosure including cultural and racial factors for ethnic minorities mean that prevalence data needs to be regarded with caution. A program addressing this need was delivered across Australia in 2019 and evaluated over six months using mixed-methods (T1 n=112; T2 n=44). It found that practitioners (social workers, counsellors, psychologists) already have a ‘healthy distrust’ of the numbers, and the program seemed to increase this. Overall, caution in the clinical setting is important for mitigating racism, but the positivist research and policy landscape may need to question its trust of ‘objective’ numeric data, else it could further perpetuate risk of systemic harm. The child’s right to safety regardless of cultural background is seen to provide the impetus to address CSA, not the apparent size of the problem.

This article introduces the Government-Sponsored Mass Expulsion (GSME) dataset documenting cross-border mass expulsion episodes around the world from 1900 to 2020. This new dataset focuses on mass expulsion policies in which governments systematically remove ethnic, racial, religious or national groups, en masse. The GSME dataset disaggregates mass expulsion from other exclusionary politics concepts to isolate policies of intentional group-based population removal. This allows for a systematic examination of governmental expulsion policies, distinct from policies aimed at annihilation (genocide), control (massacre) or cultural elimination (coercive assimilation). The GSME dataset documents 139 expulsion episodes since 1900, affecting over 30 million citizens and non-citizens across all world regions. The data are drawn from archival research conducted at the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and the International Committee of the Red Cross, as well as secondary sources and extant datasets. This article presents an empirical overview of the data including information on the expelling country, onset, duration, region, scale, category of persons expelled, and frequency. Although mass expulsion is a rare event, it is a reoccurring rare event. Its consistent use – with over two million people expelled in the last five years alone – demands additional empirical and theoretical investigation. The GSME dataset contributes to the study of exclusionary politics as a dependent variable, but it also offers promise as an explanatory variable for those studying phenomena affected by mass expulsion.

Indigenous cross-cultural training has been around since the 1980s. It is often seen as a way to increase the skills and competency of staff engaged in providing service to Indigenous clients and customers, teaching Indigenous students within universities and schools, or working with Indigenous communities (Fredericks and Bargallie, “Indigenous”; “Which Way”). In this article we demonstrate how such training often exposes power, whiteness, and concepts of an Indigenous “other”. We highlight how cross-cultural training programs can potentially provide a setting in which non-Indigenous participants can develop a deeper realisation of how their understandings of the “other” are formed and enacted within a “white” social setting. Revealing whiteness as a racial construct enables people to see race, and “know what racism is, what it is not and what it does” (Bargallie, 262). Training participants can use such revelations to develop their racial literacy and anti-racist praxis (Bargallie), which when implemented have the capacity to transform inequitable power differentials in their work with Indigenous peoples and organisations.What Does the Literature Say about Cross-Cultural Training? An array of names are used for Indigenous cross-cultural training, including cultural awareness, cultural competency, cultural responsiveness, cultural safety, cultural sensitivity, cultural humility, and cultural capability. Each model takes on a different approach and goal depending on the discipline or profession to which the training is applied (Hollinsworth). Throughout this article we refer to Indigenous cross-cultural training as “cultural competence” or “cultural awareness” and discuss these in relation to their application within higher education institutions. While literature on health and human services programs in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and other nation states provide clear definitions of terms such as “cultural safety”, cultural competence or cultural awareness is often lacking a concise and consistent definition.Often delivered as a half day or a one to two-day training course, it is unrealistic to think that Indigenous cultural competence can be achieved through one’s mere attendance and participation. Moreover, when courses centre on “cultural differences” and enable revelations about those differences they are in danger of presenting idealised notions of Indigeneity. Cultural competence becomes a process through which an Indigenous “other” is objectified, while very little is offered by way of translating knowledge and skills into practice when working with Indigenous peoples.What this type of learning has the capacity to do is oversimplify and reinforce racism and racist stereotypes of Indigenous peoples and Indigenous cultures. What is generally believed is that if non-Indigenous peoples know more about Indigenous peoples and cultures, relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples will somehow improve. The work of Goenpul scholar Aileen Moreton-Robinson is vital to draw on here, when she asks, has the intellectual investment in defining our cultural differences resulted in the valuing of our knowledges? Has the academy become a more enlightened place in which to work, and, more important, in what ways have our communities benefited? (xvii)What is revealed in a range of studies – whether centring on racism and discrimination or the ongoing disparities across health, education, incarceration, employment, and more – is that despite forty plus years of training focused on understanding cultural differences, very little has changed. Indigenous knowledges continue to be devalued and overlooked. Everyday and structural racisms shape everyday experiences for Indigenous employees in Australian workplaces such as the Australian Public Service (Bargallie) and the Australian higher education sector (Fredericks and White).As the literature demonstrates, the racial division of labour in such institutions often leaves Indigenous employees languishing on the lower rungs of the employment ladder (Bargallie). The findings of an Australian university case study, discussed below, highlights how power, whiteness, and concepts of “otherness” are exposed and play out in cultural competency training. Through their exposure, we argue that better understandings about Indigenous Australians, which are not based on culture difference but personal reflexivity, may be gained. Revealing What Was Needed in the Course’s Foundation and ImplementationThis case study is centred within a regional Australian university across numerous campuses. In 2012, the university council approved an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander strategy, which included a range of initiatives, including the provision of cross-cultural training for staff. In developing the training, a team explored the evidence as it related to university settings (Anning; Asmar; Butler and Young; Fredericks; Fredericks and Thompson; Kinnane, Wilks, Wilson, Hughes and Thomas; McLaughlin and Whatman). This investigation included what had been undertaken in other Australian universities (Anderson; University of Sydney) and drew on the recommendations from earlier research (Behrendt, Larkin, Griew and Kelly; Bradley, Noonan, Nugent and Scales; Universities Australia). Additional consultation took place with a broad range of internal and external stakeholders.While some literature on cross-cultural training centred on the need to understand cultural differences, others exposed the problems of focusing entirely on difference (Brach and Fraser; Campinha-Bacote; Fredericks; Spencer and Archer; Young). The courses that challenged the centrality of cultural difference explained why race needed to be at the core of its training, highlighting its role in enabling discussions of racism, bias, discrimination and how these may be used as means to facilitate potential individual and organisational change. This approach also addressed stereotypes and Eurocentric understandings of what and who is an Indigenous Australian (Carlson; Gorringe, Ross and Forde; Hollinsworth; Moreton-Robinson). It is from this basis that we worked and grew our own training program. Working on this foundational premise, we began to separate content that showcased the fluidity and diversity of Indigenous peoples and refrained from situating us within romantic notions of culture or presenting us as an exotic “other”. In other words, we embraced work that responded to non-Indigenous people’s objectified understandings and expectations of us. For example, the expectation that Indigenous peoples will offer a Welcome to Country, performance, share a story, sing, dance, or disseminate Indigenous knowledges. While we recognise that some of these cultural elements may offer enjoyment and insight to non-Indigenous people, they do not challenge behaviours or the nature of the relationships that non-Indigenous people have with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples (Bargallie; Fredericks; Hollinsworth; Westwood and Westwood; Young).The other content which needed separating were the methods that enabled participants to understand and own their standpoints. This included the use of critical Indigenous studies as a form of analysis (Moreton-Robinson). Critical race theory (Delgado and Stefancic) was also used as a means for participants to interrogate their own cultural positionings and understand the pervasive nature of race and racism in Australian society and institutions (McLaughlin and Whatman). This offered all participants, both non-Indigenous and Indigenous, the opportunity to learn how institutional racism operates, and maintains discrimination, neglect, abuse, denial, and violence, inclusive of the continued subjugation that exists within higher education settings and broader society.We knew that the course needed to be available online as well as face-to-face. This would increase accessibility to staff across the university community. We sought to embed critical thinking as we began to map out the course, including the theory in the sections that covered colonisation and the history of Indigenous dispossession, trauma and pain, along with the ongoing effects of federal and state policies and legislations that locates racism at the core of Australian politics. In addition to documenting the ongoing effects of racism, we sought to ensure that Indigenous resistance, agency, and activism was highlighted, showing how this continues, thus linking the past to the contemporary experiences of Indigenous peoples.Drawing on the work of Bargallie we wanted to demonstrate how Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples experience racism through systems and structures in their everyday work with colleagues in large organisations, such as universities. Participants were asked to self-reflect on how race impacts their day-to-day lives (McIntosh). The final session of the training focused on the university’s commitment to “Closing the Gap” and its Reconciliation Action Plan (RAP). The associated activity involved participants working individually and in small groups to discuss and consider what they could contribute to the RAP activities and enact within their work environments. Throughout the training, participants were asked to reflect on their personal positioning, and in the final session they were asked to draw from these reflections and discuss how they would discuss race, racism and reconciliation activities with the governance of their university (Westwood and Westwood; Young).Revelations in the Facilitators, Observers, and Participants’ Discussions? This section draws on data collected from the first course offered within the university’s pilot program. During the delivery of the in-person training sessions, two observers wrote notes while the facilitators also noted their feelings and thoughts. After the training, the facilitators and observers debriefed and discussed the delivery of the course along with the feedback received during the sessions.What was noticed by the team was the defensive body language of participants and the types of questions they asked. Team members observed how there were clear differences between the interest non-Indigenous participants displayed when talking about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and a clear discomfort when they were asked to reflect on their own position in relation to Indigenous people. We noted that during these occasions some participants crossed their arms, two wrote notes to each other across the table, and many participants showed discomfort. When the lead facilitator raised this to participants during the sessions, some expressed their dislike and discomfort at having to talk about themselves. A couple were clearly unhappy and upset. We found this interesting as we were asking participants to reflect and talk about how they interpret and understand themselves in relation to Indigenous people and race, privilege, and power.This supports the work of DiAngelo who explains that facilitators can spend a lot of time trying to manage the behaviour of participants. Similarly, Castagno identifies that sometimes facilitators of training might overly focus on keeping participants happy, and in doing so, derail the hard conversations needed. We did not do either. Instead, we worked to manage the behaviours expressed and draw out what was happening to break the attempts to silence racial discussions. We reiterated and worked hard to reassure participants that we were in a “safe space” and that while such discussions may be difficult, they were worth working through on an individual and collective level.During the workshop, numerous emotions surfaced, people laughed at Indigenous humour and cried at what they witnessed as losses. They also expressed anger, defensiveness, and denial. Some participants revelled in hearing answers to questions that they had long wondered about; some openly discussed how they thought they had discovered a distant Aboriginal relative. Many questions surfaced, such as why hadn’t they ever been told this version of Australian history? Why were we focusing on them and not Aboriginal people? How could they be racist when they had an Aboriginal friend or an Aboriginal relative?Some said they felt “guilty” about what had happened in the past. Others said they were not personally responsible or responsible for the actions of their ancestors, questioning why they needed to go over such history in the first place? Inter-woven within participants’ revelations were issues of racism, power, whiteness, and white privilege. Many participants took a defensive stance to protect their white privilege (DiAngelo). As we worked through these issues, several participants started to see their own positionality and shared this with the group. Clearly, the revelation of whiteness as a racial construct was a turning point for some. The language in the group also changed for some participants as revelations emerged through the interrogation and unpacking of stories of racism. Bargallie’s work exploring racism in the workplace, explains that “racism”, as both a word and theme, is primarily absent in conversations amongst non-Indigenous colleagues. Despite its entrenchment in the dialogue, it is rarely, if ever addressed. In fact, for many non-Indigenous people, the fear of being accused of racism is worse than the act of racism itself (Ahmed; Bargallie). We have seen this play out within the media, sport, news bulletins, and more. Lentin describes the act of denying racism despite its existence in full sight as “not racism”, arguing that its very denial is “a form of racist violence” (406).Through enhancing racial literacy, Bargallie asserts that people gain a better understanding of “what racism is, what racism is not and how race works” (258). Such revelations can work towards dismantling racism in workplaces. Individual and structural racism go hand-in-glove and must be examined and addressed together. This is what we wanted to work towards within the cultural competency course. Through the use of critical Indigenous studies and critical race theory we situated race, and not cultural difference, as central, providing participants with a racial literacy that could be used as a tool to challenge and dismantle racism in the workplace.Revelations in the Participant Evaluations?The evaluations revealed that our intention to disrupt the status quo in cultural competency training was achieved. Some of the discussions were difficult and this was reflected in the feedback. It was valuable to learn that numerous participants wanted to do more through group work, conversations, and problem resolution, along with having extra reading materials. This prompted our decision to include extra links to resource learning materials through the course’s online site. We also opted to provide all participants with a copy of the book Indigenous Australia for Dummies (Behrendt). The cost of the book was built into the course and future participants were thankful for this combination of resources.One unexpected concern raised by participants was that the course should not be “that hard”, and that we should “dumb down” the course. We were astounded considering that many participants were academics and we were confident that facilitators of other mandatory workplace training, for example, staff Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO), Fire Safety, Risk Management, Occupational Health and Safety, Discrimination and more, weren’t asked to “dumb down” their content. We explained to the participants what content we had been asked to deliver and knew their responses demonstrated white fragility. We were not prepared to adjust the course and dumb it down for white understandings and comfortabilities (Leonardo and Porter).Comments that were expected included that the facilitators were “passionate”, “articulate”, demonstrated “knowledge” and effectively “dealt with issues”. A couple of the participants wrote that the facilitators were “aggressive” or “angry”. This however is not new for us, or new to other Aboriginal women. We know Aboriginal women are often seen as “aggressive” and “angry”, when non-Indigenous women might be described as “passionate” or “assertive” for saying exactly the same thing. The work of Aileen Moreton-Robinson in Australia, and the works of numerous other Aboriginal women provide evidence of this form of racism (Fredericks and White; Bargallie; Bond). Internationally, other Indigenous women and women of colour document the same experiences (Lorde). Participants’ assessment of the facilitators is consistent with the racism expressed through racial microaggression outside of the university, and in other organisations. This is despite working in the higher education sector, which is normally perceived as a more knowledgeable and informed environment. Needless to say, we did not take on these comments.The evaluations did offer us the opportunity to adjust the course and make it stronger before it was offered across the university where we received further evaluation of its success. Despite this, the university decided to withdraw and reallocate the money to the development of a diversity training course that would cover all equity groups. This meant that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples would be covered along with sexual diversity, gender, disability, and people from non-English speaking backgrounds. The content focused on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples was reduced to one hour of the total course. Including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in this way is not based on evidence and works to minimise Indigenous Australians and their inherent rights and sovereignty to just another “equity group”. Conclusion We set out to develop and deliver a cross-cultural course that was based on evidence and a foundation of 40 plus years’ experience in delivering such training. In addition, we sought a program that would align with the university’s Reconciliation Action Plan and the directions being undertaken in the sector and by Universities Australia. Through engaging participants in a process of critical thinking centring on race, we developed a training program that successfully fostered self-reflection and brought about revelations of whiteness.Focusing on cultural differences has proven ineffective to the work needed to improve the lives of Indigenous Australian peoples. 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The current cross-sectional study examined how adolescents’ appraisal of how positively others viewed their ethnic-racial group (i.e., public regard) and how integral their ethnic-racial background was to their self-concept (i.e., centrality) related to their intergroup contact approach and avoidance attitudes. Participants were Black, Latinx, and White high school students ( N = 2,609; Mage = 16.39, SD = 1.16; 52% female) from the U.S. Southwest and Midwest. Utilizing multigroup structural equation modeling, results indicated that across all ethnic-racial backgrounds, and regardless of geographical context, public regard was positively associated with approach attitudes. Conversely, findings for avoidance attitudes varied by ethnic-racial background. Specifically, public regard was negatively associated with avoidance attitudes for White adolescents, whereas this relation was null for Black and Latinx adolescents. Additionally, although centrality was positively associated with avoidance attitudes among all adolescents, the relation was stronger among White adolescents than among Black and Latinx adolescents.

Anecdotal reports suggested an uptick in anti-Asian prejudice corresponding with the initial outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Examining responses from White U.S. citizens ( N = 589) during the first months of the pandemic, this study tested: (a) whether actual intensity (official number of cases or deaths reported) or perceived intensity (participants’ estimates of the same) of the COVID-19 outbreak predicted indicators of racial outgroup prejudice, particularly those associated with cross-group interaction, (b) whether outgroup prejudice was oriented toward Asian people specifically, or toward racial outgroups more broadly (e.g., toward both Asian people and Black people), and (c) whether contact with racial outgroups moderated relations between COVID-19 intensity and racial prejudice. Results showed that perceived COVID-19 intensity was associated with prejudice indicators representing the desire for social distance from Asian people, as well as from Black people, yet it was unrelated to reports of negative affect toward either racial outgroup. These patterns support the idea that prejudice during periods of disease outbreak might functionally serve to reduce willingness for interaction with, and likelihood of infection from, racial outgroups. Contact moderated the relation between official reports of COVID-19 intensity and support for anti-China travel policies, such that greater contact with Asian people was associated with less support for exclusionary, anti-China travel policies when actual COVID-19 intensity was high. Overall, these results suggest that intensity of disease threat can exacerbate racial outgroup prejudice and reduce willingness for cross-group interaction, but that intergroup contact may sometimes provide a prejudice-attenuating effect.

This paper explores South African hip-hop activist Emile YX?'s work to suggest that he presents an alternative take on mainstream US and South African hip-hop. While it is arguable that a great deal of mainstream hip-hop is commercially co-opted, it is clear that a significant amount of US hip-hop (by Angel Haze or Talib Kweli, for example) and hip-hop beyond the US (by Positive Black Soul, Godessa, Black Noise or Prophets of da City, for example) present alternatives to its co-option. Emile YX? pushes for an alternative to mainstream hip-hop's aesthetics and politics. Foregoing what Prophets of da City call “mindless topics” (Prophets of da City “Cape Crusader”), he employs hip-hop to engage audiences critically about social and political issues, including language and racial identity politics. Significantly, he embraces AfriKaaps, which is a challenge to the hegemonic speech variety of Afrikaans. From Emile's perspective, AfriKaaps preceded Afrikaans because it was spoken by slaves during the Cape colonial era and was later culturally appropriated by Afrikaner Nationalists in the apartheid era to construct white, Afrikaner identity as pure and bounded. AfriKaaps in hip-hop therefore presents an alternative to mainstream US-centric hip-hop in South Africa (via AKA or Cassper Nyovest, for example) as well as Afrikaner Nationalist representations of Afrikaans and race by promoting multilingual hip-hop aesthetics, which was initially advanced by Prophets of da City in the early '90s.Pursuing Alternative TrajectoriesEmile YX?, a former school teacher, started out with the Black Consciousness-aligned hip-hop crew, Black Noise, as a b-boy in the late 1980s before becoming an MC. Black Noise went through a number of iterations, eventually being led by YX? (aka Emile Jansen) after he persuaded the crew not to pursue a mainstream record deal in favour of plotting a career path as independent artists. The crew’s strategy has been to fund the production and distribution of their albums independently and to combine their work as recording and performing artists with their activism. They therefore arranged community workshops at schools and, initially, their local library in the township, Grassy Park, before touring nationally and internationally. By the late 1990s, Jansen established an NGO, Heal the Hood, in order to facilitate collaborative projects with European and South African partners. These partnerships, not only allowed Black Noise crew members to continue working as hip-hip activists, but also created a network through which they could distribute their music and secure further bookings for performances locally and internationally.Jansen’s solo work continued along this trajectory and he has gone on to work on collaborative projects, such as the hip-hop theatre show Afrikaaps, which looks critically at the history of Afrikaans and identity politics, and Mixed Mense, a b-boy show that celebrates African dance traditions and performed at One Mic Festival at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC in 2014 (48 Hours). This artist’s decision not to pursue a mainstream record deal in the early 1990s probably saved Black Noise from being a short-lived pop sensation in favour of pursuing a route that ensured that Cape hip-hop retained its alternative, Black Consciousness-inspired subcultural edge.The activism of Black Noise and Heal the Hood is an example of activists’ efforts to employ hip-hop as a means of engaging youth critically about social and political issues (Haupt, Stealing Empire 158-165). Hence, despite arguments that the seeds for subcultures’ commercial co-option lie in the fact that they speak through commodities (Hebdige 95; Haupt, Stealing Empire 144–45), there is evidence of agency despite the global reach of US cultural imperialism. H. Samy Alim’s concept of translocal style communities is useful in this regard. The concept focuses on the “transportability of mobile matrices – sets of styles, aesthetics, knowledges, and ideologies that travel across localities and cross-cut modalities” (Alim 104-105). Alim makes the case for agency when he contends, “Although global style communities may indeed grow out of particular sociohistoric originating moments, or moments in which cultural agents take on the project of creating ‘an origin’ (in this case, Afrodiasporic youth in the United States in the 1970s), it is important to note that a global style community is far from a threatening, homogenizing force” (Alim 107).Drawing on Arjun Appadurai’s concepts of ethnoscapes, financescapes, ideoscapes and mediascapes, Alim argues that the “persistent dialectical interplay between the local and the global gives rise to the creative linguistic styles that are central to the formation of translocal style communities, and leads into theorizing about glocal stylizations and style as glocal distinctiveness” (Appadurai; Alim 107). His view of globalisation thus accommodates considerations of the extent to which subjects on both the local and global levels are able to exercise agency to produce new or alternative meanings and stylistic practices.Hip-Hop's Translanguaging Challenge to HegemonyJansen’s “Mix en Meng It Op” [“Mix and Blend It / Mix It Up”] offers an example of translocal style by employing translanguaging, code mixing and codeswitching practices. The song’s first verse speaks to the politics of race and language by challenging apartheid-era thinking about purity and mixing:In South Africa is ek coloured and African means black raceFace it, all mense kom van Africa in the first placeErase all trace of race and our tribal divisionEk’s siek en sat van all our land’s racist decisionsMy mission’s om te expose onse behoort aan een rasHou vas, ras is las, watch hoe ons die bubble barsPlus the mixture that mixed here is not fixed, sirStir daai potjie want ons wietie wattie mixtures wereThis illusion of race and tribe is rotten to the coreWhat’s more the lie of purity shouldn’t exist anymoreLook at Shaka Zulu, who mixed all those tribes togetherMixed conquered tribes now Amazulu foreverHave you ever considered all this mixture before?Xhosa comes from Khoe khoe, do you wanna know more?Xhosa means angry looking man in Khoe KhoeSoe hulle moet gemix het om daai clicks to employ(Emile YX? “Mix en Meng It Op”; my emphasis)[In South Africa I am coloured and African means black raceFace it, all people come from Africa in the first placeErase all trace of race and our tribal divisionI’m sick and tired of all our land’s racist decisionsMy mission’s to expose the fact that we belong top one raceHold on, race is a burden, watch as we burst the bubble Plus the mixture that mixed here is not fixed, sirStir that pot because we don’t know what the mixtures wereThis illusion of race and tribe is rotten to the coreWhat’s more the lie of purity shouldn’t exist anymoreLook at Shaka Zulu, who mixed all those tribes togetherMixed conquered tribes now Amazulu foreverHave you ever considered all this mixture before?Xhosa comes from Khoe khoe, do you wanna know more?Xhosa means angry looking man in Khoe KhoeSo they must have mixed to employ those clicks]The MC does more than codeswitch or code mix in this verse. The syntax switches from that of English to Afrikaans interchangeably and he is doing more than merely borrowing words and phrases from one language and incorporating it into the other language. In certain instances, he opts to pronounce certain English words and phrases as if they were Afrikaans (for example, “My” and “land’s”). Suresh Canagarajah explains that codeswitching was traditionally “distinguished from code mixing” because it was assumed that codeswitching required “bilingual competence” in order to “switch between [the languages] in fairly contextually appropriate ways with rhetorical and social significance”, while code mixing merely involved “borrowings which are appropriated into one’s language so that using them doesn't require bilingual competence” (Canagarajah, Translingual Practice 10). However, he argues that both of these translingual practices do not require “full or perfect competence” in the languages being mixed and that “these models of hybridity can be socially and rhetorically significant” (Canagarajah, Translingual Practice 10). However, the artist is clearly competent in both English and Afrikaans; in fact, he is also departing from the hegemonic speech varieties of English and Afrikaans in attempts to affirm black modes of speech, which have been negated during apartheid (cf. Haupt “Black Thing”).What the artist seems to be doing is closer to translanguaging, which Canagarajah defines as “the ability of multilingual speakers to shuttle between languages, treating the diverse languages that form their repertoire as an integrated system” (Canagarajah, “Codemeshing in Academic Writing” 401). The mix or blend of English and Afrikaans syntax become integrated, thereby performing the very point that Jansen makes about what he calls “the lie of purity” by asserting that the “mixture that mixed here is not fixed, sir” (Emile XY? “Mix en Meng It Op”). This approach is significant because Canagarajah points out that while research shows that translanguaging is “a naturally occurring phenomenon”, it “occurs surreptitiously behind the backs of the teachers in classes that proscribe language mixing” (Canagarajah, “Codemeshing in Academic Writing” 401). Jansen’s performance of translanguaging and challenge to notions of linguistic and racial purity should be read in relation to South Africa’s history of racial segregation during apartheid. Remixing Race/ism and Notions of PurityLegislated apartheid relied on biologically essentialist understandings of race as bounded and fixed and, hence, the categories black and white were treated as polar opposites with those classified as coloured being seen as racially mixed and, therefore, defiled – marked with the shame of miscegenation (Erasmus 16; Haupt, “Black Thing” 176-178). Apart from the negative political and economic consequences of being classified as either black or coloured by the apartheid state (Salo 363; McDonald 11), the internalisation of processes of racial interpellation was arguably damaging to the psyche of black subjects (in the broad inclusive sense) (cf. Fanon; Du Bois). The work of early hip-hop artists like Black Noise and Prophets of da City (POC) was therefore crucial to pointing to alternative modes of speech and self-conception for young people of colour – regardless of whether they self-identified as black or coloured. In the early 1990s, POC lead the way by embracing black modes of speech that employed codeswitching, code mixing and translanguaging as a precursor to the emergence of music genres, such as kwaito, which mixed urban black speech varieties with elements of house music and hip-hop. POC called their performances of Cape Flats speech varieties of English and Afrikaans gamtaal [gam language], which is an appropriation of the term gam, a reference to the curse of Ham and justifications for slavery (Adhikari 95; Haupt Stealing Empire 237). POC’s appropriation of the term gam in celebration of Cape Flats speech varieties challenge the shame attached to coloured identity and the linguistic practices of subjects classified as coloured. On a track called “Gamtaal” off Phunk Phlow, the crew samples an assortment of recordings from Cape Flats speech communities and capture ordinary people speaking in public and domestic spaces (Prophets of da City “Gamtaal”). In one audio snippet we hear an older woman saying apologetically, “Onse praatie suiwer Afrikaan nie. Onse praat kombius Afrikaans” (Prophets of da City “Gamtaal”).It is this shame for black modes of speech that POC challenges on this celebratory track and Jansen takes this further by both making an argument against notions of racial and linguistic purity and performing an example of translanguaging. This is important in light of research that suggests that dominant research on the creole history of Afrikaans – specifically, the Cape Muslim contribution to Afrikaans – has been overlooked (Davids 15). This oversight effectively amounted to cultural appropriation as the construction of Afrikaans as a ‘pure’ language with Dutch origins served the Afrikaner Nationalist project when the National Party came into power in 1948 and began to justify its plans to implement legislated apartheid. POC’s act of appropriating the denigrated term gamtaal in service of a Black Consciousness-inspired affirmation of colouredness, which they position as part of the black experience, thus points to alternative ways in which people of colour cand both express and define themselves in defiance of apartheid.Jansen’s work with the hip-hop theater project Afrikaaps reconceptualised gamtaal as Afrikaaps, a combination of the term Afrikaans and Kaaps. Kaaps means from the Cape – as in Cape Town (the city) or the Cape Flats, which is where many people classified as coloured were forcibly relocated under the Group Areas Act under apartheid (cf. McDonald; Salo; Alim and Haupt). Taking its cue from POC and Brasse vannie Kaap’s Mr FAT, who asserted that “gamtaal is legal” (Haupt, “Black Thing” 176), the Afrikaaps cast sang, “Afrikaaps is legal” (Afrikaaps). Conclusion: Agency and the Transportability of Mobile MatricesJansen pursues this line of thought by contending that the construction of Shaka Zulu’s kingdom involved mixing many tribes (Emile YX? “Mix en Meng It Op”), thereby alluding to arguments that narratives about Shaka Zulu were developed in service of Zulu nationalism to construct Zulu identity as bounded and fixed (Harries 105). Such constructions were essential to the apartheid state's justifications for establishing Bantustans, separate homelands established along the lines of clearly defined and differentiated ethnic identities (Harries 105). Writing about the use of myths and symbols during apartheid, Patrick Harries argues that in Kwazulu, “the governing Inkatha Freedom Party ... created a vivid and sophisticated vision of the Zulu past” (Harries 105). Likewise, Emile YX? contends that isiXhosa’s clicks come from the Khoi (Emile YX? “Mix en Meng It Op”; Afrikaaps). Hence, the idea of the Khoi San’s lineage and history as being separate from that of other African communities in Southern Africa is challenged. He thus challenges the idea of pure Zulu or Xhosa identities and drives the point home by sampling traditional Zulu music, as opposed to conventional hip-hop beats.Effectively, colonial strategies of tribalisation as a divide and rule strategy through the reification of linguistic and cultural practices are challenged, thereby reminding us of the “transportability of mobile matrices” and “fluidity of identities” (Alim 104, 105). In short, identities as well as cultural and linguistic practices were never bounded and static, but always-already hybrid, being constantly made and remade in a series of negotiations. This perspective is in line with research that demonstrates that race is socially and politically constructed and discredits biologically essentialist understandings of race (Yudell 13-14; Tattersall and De Salle 3). This is not to ignore the asymmetrical relations of power that enable cultural appropriation and racism (Hart 138), be it in the context of legislated apartheid, colonialism or in the age of corporate globalisation or Empire (cf. Haupt, Static; Hardt & Negri). But, even here, as Alim suggests, one should not underestimate the agency of subjects on the local level to produce alternative forms of expression and self-representation.ReferencesAdhikari, Mohamed. "The Sons of Ham: Slavery and the Making of Coloured Identity." South African Historical Journal 27.1 (1992): 95-112.Alim, H. Samy “Translocal Style Communities: Hip Hop Youth as Cultural Theorists of Style, Language and Globalization”. Pragmatics 19.1 (2009):103-127. Alim, H. Samy, and Adam Haupt. “Reviving Soul(s): Hip Hop as Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy in the U.S. & South Africa”. Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies: Teaching and Learning for Educational Justice. Ed. Django Paris and H. Samy Alim. New York: Teachers College Press, Columbia University, 2017 (forthcoming). Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Modernity. London: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.Canagarajah, Suresh. Translingual Practice: Global Englishes and Cosmopolitan Relations. London & New York: Routledge, 2013.Canagarajah, Suresh. “Codemeshing in Academic Writing: Identifying Teachable Strategies of Translanguaging”. The Modern Language Journal 95.3 (2011): 401-417.Creese, Angela, and Adrian Blackledge. “Translanguaging in the Bilingual Classroom: A Pedagogy for Learning and Teaching?” The Modern Language Journal 94.1 (2010): 103-115. Davids, Achmat. The Afrikaans of the Cape Muslims. Pretoria: Protea Book House, 2011.Du Bois, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folk. Journal of Pan African Studies, 1963, 2009 (eBook).Erasmus, Zimitri. “Introduction.” Coloured by History, Shaped by Place. Ed. Zimitri Erasmus. 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B. Ziff and P.V. Roa. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1997.Harries, Patrick. “Imagery, Symbolism and Tradition in a South African Bantustan: Mangosuthu Buthelezi, Inkatha, and Zulu History”. History and Theory 32.4, Beiheft 32: History Making in Africa (1993): 105-125. Hebdige, Dick. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Routledge, 1979.MacDonald, Michael. Why Race Matters in South Africa. University of Kwazulu-Natal Press: Scottsville, 2006.Salo, Elaine. “Negotiating Gender and Personhood in the New South Africa: Adolescent Women and Gangsters in Manenberg Township on the Cape Flats.” Journal of European Cultural Studies 6.3 (2003): 345–65.Tattersall, Ian, and Rob De Salle. Race? Debunking a Scientific Myth. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2011.TheatreAfrikaaps. Afrikaaps. The Glasshouse, 2011.FilmsValley, Dylan, dir. Afrikaaps. Plexus Films, 2010. MusicProphets of da City. “Gamtaal.” Phunk Phlow. 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The study of Latinx children’s race- and ethnicity-related identity, beliefs, and preferences has the potential to contribute to theoretical models and policy recommendations concerning intergroup attitudes and relations. We examined a host of such constructs among Latinx children ( N = 61; 72% girls) living in the Southwest US, ranging from 6 to 11 years ( M = 8.45, SD = 1.39). With the goal of assessing individual, group, and age-related variation within—and relations across—measures, we assessed racial/ethnic: (a) identity (i.e., self-categorization, centrality), (b) beliefs (stereotypes, perceived parental social distance), and (c) preferences (friendship choices, social distance). Results indicated that children held more positive attitudes toward Latinx and White children than toward Black children. Children who felt more comfortable around Latinx individuals had more Latinx best friends, and those children who felt that race/ethnicity was an important part of their identity were more likely to report having no Black best friends, suggesting that parents and teachers should discuss race/ethnicity in ways that dispel potential anti-Black prejudice and encourage cross-race/ethnicity friendship.

As a specialist in culture and communication studies, teaching in a school of business, I realised that the notion of interdisciplinarity is usually explored in the comfort of one's own discipline. Meanwhile, the practice of interdisciplinarity is something else. The very notion of disciplinarity implies a regime of discursive practices, but in the zone between disciplines, there is often no adequate language. This piece of writing is a brief analysis of an example of the language of business studies when business studies thinks about culture. It looks at how business studies approaches cultural difference in context of intercultural contact. Geert Hofstede's Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind (1991) This article is a brief and very selective critique of Geert Hofstede's notion of culture in Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind. Hofstede has been publishing his work on cross-cultural management since the 1960s. His work is routinely used in reference to cross/multi/intercultural issues in business studies (a term I use to include commerce, finance, management, and marketing). Before I begin, I must insist that Hofstede's Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind is a very useful text for business studies students, as it introduces them to useful concepts in relation to culture, like culture shock, acculturation (not enculturation -- I suppose managers are repatriated before that happens), and training for successful cross-cultural communication. It is worth including here a brief note on the subtitle of Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind. This "software of the mind" is clearly analogous to computer programming. However, Hofstede disavows the analogy, which is central to his thesis, saying that people are not programmed the way computers are. So they are, but not really. Hofstede claims that in order to learn something different, one "must unlearn ... (the) ... patterns of thinking, feeling, and potential acting which were learned throughout (one's) lifetime". And it is this thinking/feeling/acting function he calls the "software of the mind" (4). So, is the body the hardware? Thinking and feeling are abstract and could, with a flight of fancy, be seen as "software". However, acting is visible, tangible, and often visceral. I am suggesting that "acting" either represents or is just about all we have as culture. Acting (in the fullest sense, including speech, gesture, manners, textual production, etc.) is not evidence of culture, it is culture. Also, computer technology, like every other technology, is part of culture, as evident in this journal. Culture I share Clifford Geertz's concept of culture as a semiotic one, where interpretation is a search for meaning, and where meaning lies in social relations. Geertz writes that to claim that culture consists in brute patterns of behaviour in some identifiable community is to reduce it (the community and the notion of culture). Human behaviour is symbolic action. Culture is not just patterned conduct, a frame of mind which points to some sort of ontological status. Culture is public, social, relational, and contextual. To quote Geertz: "culture is not a power, something to which social events, behaviours, institutions, or processes can be causally attributed; it is a context" (14). Culture is not an ontological essence or set of behaviours. Culture is made up of webs of relationships. That Hofstede locates culture in the mind is probably the most problematic aspect of his writing. Culture is difficult for any discipline to describe because different disciplines have their own view of social reality. They operate in their own paradigms. Hofstede uses a behaviourist psychological approach to culture, which looks at what he calls national character and typical behaviours. Even though Hofstede is aware of being, as an observer of human behaviour, an integral part of his object of analysis (other cultures), he nevertheless continuously equates the observed behaviour to particular kinds of national thinking and feeling where national is often collapsed into cultural. Hofstede uses an empirical behaviourist paradigm which measures certain behaviours, as if the observer is outside the cultural significance attributed to behaviours, and attributes them to culture. Hofstede's Notion of Culture Hofstede's work is based on quantitative data gathered from questionnaires administered to IBM corporation employees in various countries. He looked at 72 national subsidiaries, 38 occupations, 20 languages, and at two points in time (1968 and 1972), and continued his commentary on that data into the 1990s. He claims that because the entire sample has a common corporate culture, the only thing that can account for systematic and consistent differences between national groups within a homogeneous multinational organisation is nationality itself. It is as if corporate culture is outside, has nothing to do with, national culture (itself a complex and dynamic concept). Hofstede's work does not account for the fact that IBM is an American multinational corporation and, as such, whatever attributes are used to measure cultural difference, those found in American corporate culture will set the benchmark for whatever other cultures are measured. This view is supported in business studies in general where American management practices are seen as universal and normal, even when they are described as 'Western'. The areas Hofstede's IBM survey looked at are: 1. Social inequality, including the relationship with authority (also described as power distance); 2. The relationship between the individual and the group (also described as individualism versus collectivism); 3. Concepts of masculinity and femininity: the social implications of having been born as a boy or a girl (also described as masculinity versus femininity); 4. Ways of dealing with uncertainty, relating to the control of aggression and the expression of emotions (also described as uncertainty avoidance). These concepts are in themselves culturally specific and have become structurally embedded in organisational theory. Hofstede writes that these four dimensions of culture are aspects of culture that can be measured relative to other cultures. What these four dimensions actually do is not to combine to give us a four-dimensional (complex?) appreciation of culture. Rather, they map onto each other and reinforce a politically conservative, Eurocentric view of culture. Hofstede does admit to having had "a 'Western' way of thinking", but he inevitably goes back to "the mind" as a place or goal. He refers to a questionnaire composted by "Eastern', in this case Chinese minds ... [which] ... are programmed according to their own particular cultural framework" (171). So there is this constant reference to culturally programmed minds that determine certain behaviours. In his justification of using typologies to categorise people and their behaviour (minds?) Hofstede also admits that most people / cultures are hybrids. And he admits that rules are made arbitrarily in order to classify people / cultures (minds?). However, he insists that the statistical clusters he ends up with are an empirical typology. Such a reduction of "culture" to this kind of radical realism is absolutely anatomical and enumerative. And, the more Hofstede is quoted as an authority on doing business across cultures, the more truth value his work accrues. The sort of language Hofstede uses to describe culture attributes intrinsic meanings and, as a result, points to difference rather than diversity. Languages of difference are based on binaristic notions of masculine/feminine, East/West, active/passive, collective/individual, and so on. In this opposition of activity and passivity, the East (feminine, collectivist) is the weaker partner of the West (masculine, individualist). There is a nexus of knowledge and power that constructs cultural difference along such binaristic lines. While a language of diversity take multiplicity as a starting point, or the norm, Hofstede's hegemonic and instrumentalist language of difference sees multiplicity as problematic. This problem is flagged at the very start of Cultures and Organizations. 12 Angry Men: Hofstede Interprets Culture and Ignores Gender In the opening page of Cultures and Organizations there is a brief passage from Reginald Rose's play 12 Angry Men (1955). (For a good review of the film see http://www.film.u- net.com/Movies/Reviews/Twelve_Angry.html. The film was recently remade.) Hofstede uses it as an example of how twelve different people with different cultural backgrounds "think, feel and act differently". The passage describes a confrontation between what Hofstede refers as "a garage owner" and "a European-born, probably Austrian, watchmaker". Such a comparison flags, right from the start, a particular way of categorising and distinguishing between two people, in terms of visible and audible signs and symbols. Both parties are described in terms of their occupation. But then the added qualification of one of the parties as being "European-born, probably Austrian" clearly indicates that the unqualified party places him in the broad category "American". In other words, the garage owner's apparently neutral ethnicity implies a normative "American", against which all markers of cultural difference are measured. Hofstede is aware of this problem. He writes that "cultural relativism does not imply normlessness for oneself, nor for one's society" (7). However, he still uses the syntax of binaristic classification which repeats and perpetuates the very problems he is apparently addressing. One of the main factors that makes 12 Angry Men such a powerful drama is that each man carries / inscribes different aspects of American culture. And American culture is idealised in the justice system, where rationality and consensus overcomes prejudice and social pressure. Each man has a unique make-up, which includes class, occupation, ethnicity, personality, intelligence, style and experience. But 12 Angry Men is also an interesting exploration of masculinity. Because Hofstede has included a category of "masculine/feminine" in his study of national culture, it is an interesting oversight that he does not comment on this powerful element of the drama. People identify along various lines, in terms of ethnicities, languages, histories, sexuality, politics and nationalism. Most people do have multiple and varied aspects to their identity. However, Hofstede sees multiple lines of identification as causing "conflicting mental programs". Hofstede claims that identification on the gender level of his hierarchy is determined "according to whether a person was born as a girl or as a boy" (10). Hofstede misses the crucial point that whilst whether one is born female or male determines one's sex, whether one is enculturated as and identifies as feminine or masculine indicates one's gender. Sex and gender are not the same thing. Sex is biological (natural) and gender is ideological (socially constructed and naturalised). This sort of blindness to the ideological component of identity is a fundamental flaw in Hofstede's thesis. Hofstede takes ideological constructions as given, as natural. For example, in endnote 1 of Chapter 4, "He, she, and (s)he", he writes "My choice of the terms (soft feminine and hard masculine) is based on what is in virtually all societies, not on what anybody thinks should be (107, his italics). He reinforces the notion of gendered essences, or essences which constitute national identity. Indeed, the world is not made up of entities or essences that are masculine or feminine, Western or Eastern, active or passive. And the question is not so much about empirical accuracy along such lines, but rather what are the effects of always reinscribing cultures as Western or Eastern, masculine or feminine, collectivist or individualist. In an era of globalism and mass, interconnected communication, identities are multiple, and terms like East and West, masculine and feminine, active and passive, should be used as undecidable codes that, at the most, flag fragments of histories and ideologies. Identity East and West are concepts that did not come out of a political or cultural vacuum. They are categories, or concepts, that originated and flourished with European expansionism from the 17th century. They underwrote imperialism and colonisation. They are not inert labels that merely point to something "out there". East and West, like masculine and feminine or any other binary pair, indicate an imaginary relationship that prioritises one of the pair over the other. People and cultures cannot be separated into static Western and Eastern essences. Culture itself is always diverse and dynamic. It is marked by migration, diaspora, and exile, not to mention historical change. There are no "original" cultures. The sort of discourse Hofstede uses to describe cultures is based on an ontological and epistemological distinction made between East and West. Culture is not something invisible or intangible. Culture is not something obscure that is in the mind (whatever or wherever that is) which manifests itself in peculiar behaviours. Culture is what and how we communicate, whether that takes the form of speech, gestures, novels, plays, architecture, style, or art. And, as such, communication includes the objects we produce and exchange and the symbols to which we give meaning. So, when Hofstede writes that the Austrian watchmaker acts the way he does because he cannot behave otherwise. After many years in his new home country, he still behaves the way he was raised. He carries within himself an indelible pattern of behaviour he is attributing a whole range of qualities which are frequently given by dominant cultures to their cultural "others" (1). Hofstede attributes politeness, tradition, and, above all, stasis, to the European-Austrian watchmaker. The phrase "after many years in his new home country" is contradictory. If so many years have passed, why is "home" still "new"? And, indeed, the watchmaker might still behave the way he was raised, but it would be safe to assume that the garage owner also behaves the way he was raised. One of the main points made in 12 Angry Men is that twelve American men are all very different to each other in terms of values and behaviour. All this is represented in the dialogue and behaviour of twelve men in a closed room. If we are concerned with different kinds of social behaviour, and we are not concerned with pathological behaviour, then how can we know what anyone carries within themselves? Why do we want to know what anyone carries within themselves? From a cultural studies perspective, the last question is political. However, from a business studies perspective, that question is naïve. The radical economic rationalist would want to know as much as possible about cultural differences so that we can better target consumer groups and be more successful in cross-cultural negotiations. In colonial days, foreigners often wielded absolute power in other societies and they could impose their rules on it [sic]. In these postcolonial days, foreigners who want to change something in another society will have to negotiate their interventions. (7) Those who wielded absolute power in the colonies were the non-indigenous colonisers. It was precisely the self-legitimating step of making a place a colony that ensured an ongoing presence of the colonising power. The impetus behind learning about the Other in the colonial times was a combination of spiritual salvation (as in the "mission civilisatrice") and economic exploitation (colonies were seen as resources for the benefit of the European and later American centres). And now, the impetus behind learning about cultural difference is that "negotiation is more likely to succeed when the parties concerned understand the reasons for the differences in viewpoints" (7). Culture as Commerce What, in fact, happens, is that business studies simultaneously wants to "do" components of cross-cultural studies, as it is clearly profitable, while shunning the theoretical discipline of cultural studies. A fundamental flaw in a business studies perspective, which is based on Hofstede's work, is a blindness to the ideological and historical component of identity. Business studies has picked up just enough orientalism, feminism, marxism, deconstruction and postcolonialism to thinly disavow any complicity with dominant (and dominating) discourses, while getting on with business-as-usual. Multiculturalism and gender are seen as modern categories to which one must pay lip service, only to be able to get on with business-as-usual. Negotiation, compromise and consensus are desired not for the sake of success in civil processes, but for the material value of global market presence, acceptance and share. However, civil process and commercial interests are not easily separable. To refer to a cultural economy is not just to use a metaphor. The materiality of business, in the various forms of commercial transactions, is itself part of one's culture. That is, culture is the production, consumption and circulation of objects (including less easily definable objects, like performance, language, style and manners). Also, culture is produced and consumed socially (in the realm of the civil) and circulates through official and unofficial social and commercial mechanisms. Culture is a material and social phenomenon. It's not something hidden from view that only reveals itself in behaviours. Hofstede rightly asserts that culture is learned and not inherited. Human nature is inherited. However, it is very difficult to determine exactly what human nature is. Most of what we consider to be human nature turns out to be, upon close inspection, ideological, naturalised. Hofstede writes that what one does with one's human nature is "modified by culture" (5). I would argue that whatever one does is cultural. And this includes taking part in commercial transactions. Even though commercial transactions (including the buying and selling of services) are material, they are also highly ritualistic and highly symbolic, involving complex forms of communication (verbal and nonverbal language). Culture as Mental Programming Hofstede's insistent ontological reference to 'the sources of one's mental programs' is problematic for many reasons. There is the constant ontological as well as epistemological distinction being made between cultures, as if there is a static core to each culture and that we can identify it, know what it is, and deal with it. It is as if culture itself is a knowable essence. Even though Hofstede pays lip service to culture as a social phenomenon, saying that "the sources of one's mental programs lie within the social environments in which one grew up and collected one's life experiences" (4), and that past theories of race have been largely responsible for massive genocides, he nevertheless implies a kind of biologism simply by turning the mind (a radical abstraction) into something as crude as computer software, where data can be stored, erased or reconfigured. In explaining how culture is socially constructed and not biologically determined, Hofstede says that one's mental programming starts with the family and goes on through the neighbourhood, school, social groups, the work place, and the community. He says that "mental programs vary as much as the social environments in which they were acquired", which is nothing whatsoever like computer software (4-5). But he carries on to claim that "a customary term for such mental software is culture" (4, my italics). Before the large-scale changes which took place in the second half of the twentieth century in disciplines like anthropology, history, linguistics, and psychology, culture was seen to be a recognisable, determined, contained, consistent way of living which had deep psychic roots. Today, any link between mental processes and culture (formerly referred to as "race") cannot be sustained. We must be cautious against presuming to understand the relationship between mental process and social life and also against concluding that the content of the mind in each racial (or, if you like, ethnic or cultural) group is of a peculiar kind, because it is this kind of reductionism that feeds stereotypes. And it is the accumulation of knowledge about cultural types that implies power over the very types that are thus created. Conclusion A genuinely interdisciplinary approach to communication, commerce and culture would make business studies more theoretical and more challenging. And it would make cultural studies take commerce more seriously, beyond a mere celebration of shopping. This article has attempted to reveal some of the cracks in how business studies accounts for cultural diversity in an age of global commercial ambitions. It has also looked at how Hofstede's writings, as exemplary of the business studies perspective, papers over those cracks with a very thin layer of pluralist cultural relativism. This article is an invitation to open up a critical dialogue which dares to go beyond disciplinary traditionalisms in order to examine how meaning, communication, culture, language and commerce are embedded in each other. References Carothers, J.C. Mind of Man in Africa. London: Tom Stacey, 1972. Degabriele, Maria. Postorientalism: Orientalism since "Orientalism". Ph.D. Thesis. Perth: Murdoch University, 1997. Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York: Basic Books, 1973. Hofstede, Geert. Cultures and Organisations: Software of the Mind. Sydney: McGraw-Hill, 1991. Moore, Charles A., ed. The Japanese Mind: Essentials of Japanese Philosophy and Culture. Honolulu: East-West Centre, U of Hawaii, 1967. Patai, Raphael. The Arab Mind. New York: Scribner, 1983. Toffler, Alvin. Future Shock: A Study of Mass Bewildernment in the Face of Accelerating Change. Sydney: Bodley Head, 1970. 12 Angry Men. Dir. Sidney Lumet. Orion-Nova, USA. 1957. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Maria Degabriele. "Business as Usual: How Business Studies Thinks Culture." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.2 (2000). [your date of access] Chicago style: Maria Degabriele, "Business as Usual: How Business Studies Thinks Culture," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3, no. 2 (2000), ([your date of access]). APA style: Maria Degabriele. (2000) Business as usual: how business studies thinks culture. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3(2). ([your date of access]).

goes viral after the September 11 tragedy, this book adds another scholarly work on how Muslims fared in the twentieth century Europe. The buzz word indicating anti-Islam rhetoric has become contagious particularly after the Runnymede Trust Report (1997) which resulted in many Muslims fearing for their lives. Post September 11 popularises such rhetoric. For various reasons, religion and race have indeed been the targets in this challenging civilised world. The book is timely given the current scenario where one will encounter readings which tend to portray a rather bias perspective on Muslims; Muslims as the group to be avoided, or the group with extreme religious fundamentalism. The stigmatised Muslim—to borrow Goffman’s term—has become a narrative of today’s world, in particular, the social media where the public is frequently exposed to such (negative) debates about Muslims and on being Muslims. As the editors rightly point out, “[a]cross Western Europe, public discourse has been suffused by claims about Muslims and Islam. These claims are negative” (p. 1). Comprising eleven chapters, this book is a result of thorough research on how Muslims and non-Muslims in the European states embrace their daily lives in various institutions including schools, courts, hospitals, the military, electoral politics, and the labour market. Through a blend of practical schemas of others, the narrative unfolds stories of diverse people in their chosen realms. Readers are also exposed to comparative views of civic education courses in France and Germany. Multiculturalism in Europe and elsewhere is indeed challenging. The book content speaks volumes. The (in)tolerance of religious beliefs and practices might escalate into endless debates which either favour the state or the believers; for instance, in the case of wearing headscarves among female Muslims. The editors acknowledge this in the very first line of the preface that the book “...responds to the often loud debates about the place of Muslims in Western Europe” (p. i), and in the second paragraph on the 2004 ban wearing the veil in public schools in France. In so doing, the chapters skillfully embrace the discourse of practical schemas of those who are labelled as Muslims in a fast-changing Europe. The four book editors come from diverse backgrounds; for sure, two of the editors specialise in Islam and have done rather extensive research on Muslims. Bowen is Dunbar-Van Cleve Professor in Arts and Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis where he studies Islam and society in Indonesia and Europe. Bertossi is director of the Centre for Migration and Citizenship at the French Institute for International Relations in Paris. Of the other two editors, Duyvendak focuses on urban sociology and nativism, whilst Krook is Associate Professor of Political Science. She studies electoral gender quotas in cross-national perspective. Through their collaborative effort,and insights based on fieldwork and policy analysis, the discourse on perceptions and boundaries by the actors, Muslims and non-Muslims alike, are unfolded. The book is divided into two parts, with the first part exposing readers to the practical schemas in everyday institutional life. The second part discusses institutions and national political ideologies. In the first part, contributors presents practical schemas of people in various institutions including hospitals in France and Germany, as sites of cultural confrontation and integration that is illustrated in Chapter Two. The following chapter discusses how schools in France, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Germany fared and blended in with the Muslims, and poses the readers with a challenging question, “how the school should reflect society” (p. 59). Meanwhile, the Military in France is explored in Chapter Four; the title is rather throught-provoking given that it is framed as a question: French “Muslim” Soldiers? The military, being the military as argued by the contributor (Bertossi himself), “de-emphasizes any ethno-cultural, racial, or religious identities of civilians” when they become soldiers (p. 73). French schools, hospitals, and the relevant practical schemas are revisited in Chapter Five. In the second part, the courtroom scenario leads us to the juridical framings of Muslims and Islam in France and Germany (Chapter 6). Embedded elements include how judges enact their daily roles in decision making through the acts of marriage and adaptation to religious freedom. Chapter Seven exposes readers to the comparative analysis of the civic education course content in France and Germany whilst Chapter Eight examines minorities in electoral politics in Sweden, France and Britain. Chapter Nine deals with the Scandinavian headscarf debates in public and private institutions in Denmark, Norway and Sweden. The exclusion of Muslims in the Netherlands is explored in Chapter Ten. It is interesting to observe how the contributors guide us to the discourse of “neoculturalism”, which they argue, is “to identify a form of cultural protectionism, representing the world as divided into different, inimical cultures, and to distinguish this way of thinking from forms of cultural relativism” (p. 235). Here, we are exposed to the complicated scenario of “multiculturalism” in the country as I posited earlier. The binary perspective adopted by the Netherlands, between the “Dutch values” and the “Islamic values”, can escalate the tension caused by multiculturalism. One might have to further fine-tune the meaning of such a word in the current world where social media can help to propagate both good and bad intentions. I find this book an eye-opener to the discourse on perceptions and boundaries where Muslims in particular are involved, which are delicate and complicated to understand for any person who is not exposed to, or experience racism, and Islamophobia. Such acts of racism and Islamophobia are embedded in institutions as existing contexts of enactments and national ideologies as claimed by the editors in Chapter One and later reinforced in Chapter Five. They posit that in such non-homogeneous institutions, “actors develop practical schemas about Muslims and Islam”. The practical schemas, in turn, are constantly being reshaped and re-weighted by the events. In this sense, how we should embrace diversity in the name of multiculturalism, voiced often by many countries, for example, Malaysia, Singapore, and Britain; in particular, the United States, need further deliberation. It seems to me that in the deliberation, both parties, the authority and the people affected (Muslims), must partake in easing the tension and constraints. As the editors clearly articulate in the concluding chapter, institutions differ by token, by functions and by the contexts they are in. Obviously, there is no easy answer to comprehend the complex situations faced by the countries cited in the book; this is clearly made known by Bowen and associates. They have argued that “it is through the public institutions that citizens experience the state” (p. 266). Sensitivities weave in among the people (citizens) they spoke with, between duties to the states and to religion. This, in turn, brings us to the question of nation-building which seems to be an endless debate. In this regard, Mustafa Ishak’s book entitled, The Politics of Bangsa Malaysia: Nation-Building in a Multiethnic Society (2014) is worth reading for those who want to know more about Malaysian politics given the multicultural setting and Islam as the official religion. How do we tolerate diversity in the name of multiculturalism with people confessing different religious beliefs and ways of practising such beliefs while at the same time conform to the national ideologies and idea of being complete citizens? I find that in this context, the editors have managed to highlight the so-called tensions or tug-of-war between such competing needs. Arguably, it is fairly evident in the title with the use of “European States” and the possessive pronoun “their Muslim Citizens”, as it also suggests a sense of belonging for both sides though the book title is a bit wordy. The book contributors are rather courageous to discuss the issues given the depth of understanding and sensitivity required of the subject matter. Perhaps, more is needed in deliberating the idea which calls for a concerted effort from all parties involved. To be sure, those discussing the Muslims must have sufficient knowledge about Islam and its practices.

Briefs and Hot Brown Honey are two Brisbane based companies producing genre-bending work combining different mixes of circus, burlesque, hiphop, dance, boylesque, performance art, rap and drag. The two companies produce provocative performance that is entertaining and draws critical acclaim. However, what is particularly distinctive about these two companies is that they are both founded and directed by performers from Samoan cultural backgrounds who have leap-frogged over the normative whiteness of much contemporary Australian performance. Both companies have a radical political agenda. This essay argues that through the presentation of diverse alternative bodies, not only through the performing bodies presented on stage but also in the corporate bodies of the companies they have set up, they profoundly challenge the structure of the Australian performance industry and contribute a radical re-envisaging of the potential of circus to act as a vital political force.Briefs was co-founded by Creative Director, Samoan, Fez Fa’anana with his brother Natano Fa’anana in 2008. An experienced dancer and physical theatre performer, Fa’anana describes the company’s performances as the “dysfunctional marriage of theatre, circus, dance, drag and burlesque with the simplicity of a variety show format” (“On the Couch”). As Fa’anana’s alter ego, “the beautiful bearded Samoan ringmistress Shivannah says, describing The Second Coming, the Briefs show at the Sydney Festival 2017, the show is ‘A little bit butch with a f*** load of camp’” (Lavers). The show involves “extreme costume changes, extravagant birdbath boylesque, too close for comfort yo-yo tricks and more than one highly inappropriate banana” (“Briefs: The Second Coming”).Briefs is an all-male company with gender-bending forming an integral part of the ethos. In The Second Coming the accepted sinuous image of the female performer entwining herself around the aerial hoop or lyra is subverted with the act featuring instead a male contortionist performing the same seductive moves with silky smooth sensuousness. Another example of gender bending in the show is the Dita Von Teese number performed by a male performer in a birdbath filled with water with a trapeze suspended over the top of it. Perhaps the most sensational example of alternative bodies in the show is “the moment when performer Dallas Dellaforce, wearing a nude body stocking with a female body drawn onto it, and an enormously long, curly white-blond wig blown by a wind machine, stands like a high camp Botticelli Venus rising up out of the stage” (Lavers). The highly visible body of Fez Fa’anana as the gender-bending Samoan ringmistress challenges the pervasive whiteness in contemporary circus. Although there has been some discourse on the issue of whiteness within the context of Australian theatre, for example Lee Lewis arguing for an aggressive approach to cross-racial casting to combat the whiteness of Australian theatre and TV (Lewis), there has however been very little discussion of this issue within Australian contemporary circus. Mark St Leon’s discussion of historical attitudes to Aboriginal performers in Australian circus is a notable exception (St Leon).This issue remains widely unacknowledged, an aspect of whiteness that social geographers Audrey Kobashi and Linda Peake identify in their writing, whiteness is indicated less by its explicit racism than by the fact that it ignores, or even denies, racist indications. It occupies central ground by deracializing and normalizing common events and beliefs, giving them legitimacy as part of a moral system depicted as natural and universal. (Kobayashi and Peake 394)As film studies scholar, Richard Dyer writes,the invisibility of whiteness as a racial position in white (which is to say dominant) discourse is of a piece with its ubiquity … In fact for most of the time white people speak about nothing but white people, it’s just that we couch it in terms of ‘people’ in general. Research – into books, museums, the press, advertising, films, television, software – repeatedly shows that in Western representation whites are overwhelmingly and disproportionately predominant, have the central and elaborated roles, and above all, are placed as the norm, the ordinary, the standard. Whites are everywhere in representation … At the level of racial representation, in other words, whites are not of a certain race, they’re just the human race. (3)Dyer writes in conclusion that “white people need to learn to see themselves as white, to see their particularity. In other words whiteness needs to be made strange” (541). This applies in particular to contemporary circus. In a recent interview with the authors, ex-Circus Oz Artistic Director and CEO, Mike Finch, commented, “You could make an all-round entertaining family circus show with [racial] diversity represented and I believe that would be a deeply subversive act in a way in contemporary Australia” (Finch).Today in contemporary Australian circus very few racially diverse bodies can be seen and almost no Indigenous performers and this fact goes largely unremarked upon. In spite of there being Indigenous cultures within Australia that celebrate physical achievement, clowning and performance, there seem to be few pathways into professional circus for Indigenous athletes or artists. Although a considerable spread of social circus programs exists across Australia working with Indigenous youth at risk, there seem to be few structures in place to facilitate the transitioning between these social circus classes and entry into circus training programs or professional companies. Since 2012 Circus Oz has set up the program Blakflip to mentor and support young Indigenous performers to try and redress this problem. This has led to two graduates of the program moving on to perform with the company, namely Dale Woodbridge Brown and Ghenoa Gella, and also led to the mentorship and support of several students in gaining entry into the National Institute of Circus Arts in Melbourne. Circus Oz has also now appointed an Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islander Program Officer, Davey Thomson, who is working to develop networks between past and present participants in the Blakflip program and to strengthen links with Indigenous Communities. However, it could be argued that Fez Fa’anana with Briefs has in fact leapfrogged over these programs aimed at addressing the whiteness in contemporary circus. As a Samoan Australian performer he has not only co-founded his own contemporary performance company in which he takes the central performing role, but has now also established another company called Briefs Factory, which is a creative production house that develops, presents, produces and manages artists and productions, and now at any one time employs around 20 people. In terms of his performative physical presence on stage, in an interview in 2015, Fa’anana described his performance alter ego, Shivannah, as the “love child of the bearded lady and ring master.” In the same interview he also described himself tellingly as “a Samoan (who is not a security guard, football player nor a KFC cashier),” and as “an Australian … a legal immigrant” (“On the Couch”). The radical racial difference that the alternative body of Shivannah the ringmistress presents in performance is also constantly reinforced by Fa’anana’s repartee. At the beginning of the show he urges the audience “to put their feet flat on the floor and acknowledge the earth and how lucky we are to be in this beautiful country that for 200 years now has been called Australia” (Fa’anana). Comments about his Samoan ancestry are sprinkled throughout the show and are delivered with a light touch, constantly making the audience laugh. At one point in the show resplendent in a sequined costume, Fa’anana stands downstage in front of two performers on their knees cleaning up the mess left on the stage from the act before, and he says, “Finally, I’ve made it! I’ve got a couple of white boys cleaning up after me” (Fa’anana). In another part of the show, alluding to white stereotypes of Indigenous performers, Fa’anana thanks the drag artist who taught him how to put his drag make-up on, saying “I used to put my make-up on with a burnt stick before he showed me how to do it” (Fa’anana).In his book on critical pedagogy, political activist and scholar Peter McLaren writes on approaches to developing the means to resist and subvert pervasive whiteness, saying, “To resist whiteness means developing a politics of difference […] we need to re-think difference and identity outside a set of binary oppositions. We need to view identity as coalitional, as collective, as processual, as grounded in the struggle for social justice” (213). One example of how identity outside binary oppositions was explored in The Second Coming was in an act by drag artist Dallas Dellaforce, who dressedin a sumptuous fifties evening dress with pink balloon breasts rising out of the top of his low cut evening dress and wearing a Marilyn Monroe blonde wig, camped it up as a fifties coquette, flipping from sultry into a totally scary horror tantrum, before returning to coquette mode with the husky phrase, ‘I love you.’ When at the end of the song, stripped naked, sporting a shaved bald head and wearing only a suggestive long thin pink balloon, the full potential of camp to reveal different layers of artifice and constructed identity was revealed. (Lavers)Fez Fa’anana comments at the end of the show that The Second Coming was not aimed at any particular group of people, but instead aimed to “celebrate being human.” However, if this is the case, Fa’anana is demanding an extended definition of being human that through the inclusion of diverse alternative bodies pushes for a new understandings of what constitutes being human and how human identity can be construed. His work demands an understanding that is not oppositional nor grounded in binary opposition to normative whiteness but instead forms part of a re-thinking of human identity through alternative bodies that are presented as processual, and deeply grounded in the struggle for the social justice issue of acceptance of difference and alternatives.Hot Brown Honey is another Brisbane based company working with circus in conjunction with other forms such as burlesque, hip hop, and cabaret. The all-female company was recently awarded the UK 2016 Total Theatre Award for Innovation, Experimentation and Playing with Form. The company was co-founded by dancer and choreographer Lisa Fa’alafi, who is from the same Samoan family as Fez and Natano Fa’anana, with sound designer Kim “Busty Beatz” Bowers, a successful hip hop artist, poet and record producer. From the beginning Hot Brown Honey was envisaged as providing a performance space for women of colour. Lisa Fa’alafi says the company was formed to address the lack of performance opportunities available, “It’s plain knowledge that there are limited roles for people of colour, let alone women of colour” (quoted in Northover).Lyn Gardner, arts critic for The Guardian in the UK, describing Hot Brown Honey’s performance, writes that the company fights “gender and racial stereotypes with a raucous glee, while giving a feminist makeover to circus, hip-hop and burlesque” (Gardner). The company includes women mainly “of Indigenous, Pacific Islander and Indonesian heritage taking on colonialism, sexism, gender stereotypes and racism through often confronting performance and humour; their tagline is ‘fighting the power never tasted so sweet’” (Northover).In their show Hot Brown Honey present a straps act. Straps is a physically demanding aerial circus act that requires great upper body strength and is usually performed by male aerialists. However, in the Hot Brown Honey show gender expectations are subverted with the straps act performed by a female aerialist. Gardner writes of the performance of this straps act at the 2016 Edinburgh Festival Fringe as a “sequence that conjures the twisted moves of a woman trying to escape domestic violence,” and “One of the best circus sequences I’ve seen at this festival” (Gardner). Hula hoops, a traditionally female act, is also subverted and used to explore the stereotypes of the “exotic notion of Pacific culture” (Northover). Gardner writes of this act that the hoola hoops “are called into service to explore western tourists’ culture of entitlement”. Company co-founder Kim “Busty Beatz” Bowers, talks about the group’s approach to flipping perceptions of women of colour through investigating the power dynamics in gender relations, “We have a lot of flips around sexuality,” says Bowers. “Especially around the way people expect a black woman to be. We like to shift the exploitation and the power” (quoted in Northover).Another pressing issue that Hot Brown Honey address is a strange phenomenon apparent in much contemporary circus. In addition to the pervasive whiteness in contemporary circus, relatively few women are visible in many contemporary circus companies. Suzie Williams from Acrobatic Conundrum, the Seattle-based circus company, writes in her blog, “there are a lot of shows that feature many young, fit, exuberant guys and one flexible girl who performs a sensual/sentimental/romantic solo act” (Williams). Writing about Complètement Cirque, Montreal’s international circus festival which took place in July 2016, Williams says, “this year at the festival, my least favorite trend was … out of the 9 ticketed productions only one had more than one woman in it” (Williams, emphasis in original).Circus scholars have started to research this trend of lack of female representation both in contemporary circus schools and performance companies. “Gender in Circus Education: the institutionalization of stereotypes” was the title of a paper presented at the Circus and Its Others Conference in Montreal in July 2016 by Alisan Funk, a circus choreographer, teacher and director and an MA candidate at Concordia University in Montreal. Funk cited research from France showing that the educational programs and the industry are 70% male dominated. Although recreational programs in France have majority female populations, there appears to be a bottleneck at the level of entrance exams to superior schools. The few female students accepted to those schools are then frequently pushed towards solo aerial work (Funk). This push to solo aerial work means that the group floor work and acrobatics are often performed by men who create acrobatic groups that often then go on to form the basis for companies. (In this context the work of Circus Oz in this area needs to be acknowledged with the company having had a consistent policy over its 39 year existence of employing 50% female performers, however in the context of international contemporary circus this is increasingly rare).Williams writes in her blog about contemporary circus performance, “I want to see more women. I want to see women who look different from each other. I want to see so many women that no single women has to stand as a symbol of what all women can be” (Williams).Hot Brown Honey tackle the issue Williams raises head on, and they do it in the form of internationally award winning circus/cabaret that is all-female, where the bodies of the performers offer a radical alternative to the norms of contemporary circus and performance generally. The work shows women, a range of women performing circus-women of colour, with a wide range of bodies of varying shapes and sizes on stage. In Hot Brown Honey no single women in the show has to stand as a symbol of what all women can be. Briefs and Hot Brown Honey, through accessible yet political circus/cabaret, subvert the norms and institutionalized racial and gender-based biases inherent in contemporary circus both in Australia and internationally. By doing so these two companies have leap-frogged the normative presentation of performers in contemporary circus by speaking directly to a celebration of difference and diversity through the presentation of radical alternative bodies.ReferencesAlthusser, L. For Marx. Trans. Ben Brewster. London: Verso, 1965/2005.Beeby, J. “Briefs: The Second Coming – Jack Beeby Chats with Creative Director Fez Faanana.” Aussie Theatre 2015. <http://aussietheatre.com.au/features/briefs-the-second-coming-jack-beeby-chats-with-creative-director-fez-faanana>.“Briefs: The Second Coming.” Sydney Festival 2016. <http://www.sydneyfestival.org.au/2017/briefs>.Dyer, R. White: Essays on Race and Culture. New York: Routledge, 1997. Fa’anana, F. Repartee as Shivannah in The Second Coming by Briefs. Magic Mirrors Spiegeltent, Sydney Festival, 7 Jan. 2017. Performance.Finch, M. Personal communication. 13 Dec. 2016.Funk, A. “Gender in Circus Education: The Institutionalization of Stereotypes.” Paper presented at Circus and Its Others, July 2016.Gardner, L. “Shameless and Subversive: The Feminist Revolution Hits the Edinburgh Fringe.” The Guardian Theatre Blog 14 Aug. 2016. <https://www.theguardian.com/stage/theatreblog/2016/aug/14/feminist-revolution-edinburgh-stage-fringe-2016-burlesque>.Kyobashi A., and L. Peake. “Racism Out of Place: Thoughts on Whiteness and an Antiracist Geography in the New Millennium.” Annals of American Geographers 90.2 (2000): 392-403.Lavers, K. “Briefs: The Second Coming.” ArtsHub Reviews 2017. <http://performing.artshub.com.au/news-article/reviews/performing-arts/katie-lavers/briefs-the-second-coming-252936>.Lewis, L. Cross-Racial Casting: Changing the Face of Australian Theatre. Platform Papers No. 13. Strawberry Hills, NSW: Currency House, 2007. McLaren, P. Life in Schools: An Introduction to Critical Pedagogy in the Foundations of Education. 6th ed. New York: Routledge, 2016. McLaren, P., and R. Torres. “Racism and Multicultural Education: Rethinking ‘Race’ and ‘Whiteness’ in Late Capitalism.” Critical Multiculturalism: Rethinking Multicultural and Antiracist Education. Ed. S. May. Philadelphia, PA: Falmer Press, 1999. 42-76. Northover, K. “Melbourne International Comedy Festival: A Mix of Politically Infused Hip Hop and Cabaret.” Sydney Morning Herald 3 Apr. 2016. <http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/comedy/melbourne-international-comedy-festival-hot-brown-honey-a-mix-of-politicallyinfused-hiphop-and-cabaret-20160403-gnxazn.html>.“On the Couch with Fez Fa’anana.” Arts Review 2015. <http://artsreview.com.au/on-the-couch-with-fez-faanana/>.“Outrageous Boys’ Circus Briefs Is No Drag.” Daily Telegraph 2016. <http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/archive/specials/outrageous-boys-circus-briefs-is-no-drag/news-story/7d24aee1560666b4eca65af81ad19ff3>.St Leon, M. “Celebrated at First, Then Implied and Finally Denied.” The Routledge Circus Studies Reader. Eds. Katie Lavers and Peta Tait. London: Routledge, 2008/2016. 209-33. Williams, S. “Gender in Circus.” Acrobatic Conundrum 3 Aug. 2016. <http://www.acrobaticconundrum.com/blog/2016/8/3/gender-in-circus>.

All history of this area and the general talk and all of that is that 1973 was a turning point and the Aquarius Festival is credited with having turned this region around in so many ways, but I think that is a myth ... and I have to honour the truth; and the truth is that old Dicke Donelly came and did a Welcome to Country the night before the festival. (Joseph in Joseph and Hanley)In 1973 the Australian Union of Students (AUS) held the Aquarius Arts and Lifestyle Festival in a small, rural New South Wales town called Nimbin. The festival was seen as the peak expression of Australian counterculture and is attributed to creating the “Rainbow Region”, an area with a concentration of alternative life stylers in Northern NSW (Derrett 28). While the Aquarius Festival is recognised as a founding historical and countercultural event, the unique and important relationships established with Indigenous people at this time are generally less well known. This article investigates claims that the 1973 Aquarius Festival was “the first event in Australian history that sought permission for the use of the land from the Traditional Owners” (Joseph and Hanley). The diverse international, national and local conditions that coalesced at the Aquarius Festival suggest a fertile environment was created for reconciliatory bonds to develop. Often dismissed as a “tree hugging, soap dodging movement,” the counterculture was radically politicised having sprung from the 1960s social revolutions when the world witnessed mass demonstrations that confronted war, racism, sexism and capitalism. Primarily a youth movement, it was characterised by flamboyant dress, music, drugs and mass gatherings with universities forming the epicentre and white, middle class youth leading the charge. As their ideals of changing the world were frustrated by lack of systematic change, many decided to disengage and a migration to rural settings occurred (Jacob; Munro-Clarke; Newton). In the search for alternatives, the counterculture assimilated many spiritual practices, such as Eastern traditions and mysticism, which were previously obscure to the Western world. This practice of spiritual syncretism can be represented as a direct resistance to the hegemony of the dominant Western culture (Stell). As the new counterculture developed, its progression from urban to rural settings was driven by philosophies imbued with a desire to reconnect with and protect the natural world while simultaneously rejecting the dominant conservative order. A recurring feature of this countercultural ‘back to the land’ migration was not only an empathetic awareness of the injustices of colonial past, but also a genuine desire to learn from the Indigenous people of the land. Indigenous people were generally perceived as genuine opposers of Westernisation, inherently spiritual, ecological, tribal and communal, thus encompassing the primary values to which the counterculture was aspiring (Smith). Cultures converged. One, a youth culture rebelling from its parent culture; the other, ancient cultures reeling from the historical conquest by the youths’ own ancestors. Such cultural intersections are rich with complex scenarios and politics. As a result, often naïve, but well-intended relations were established with Native Americans, various South American Indigenous peoples, New Zealand Maori and, as this article demonstrates, the Original People of Australia (Smith; Newton; Barr-Melej; Zolov). The 1960s protest era fostered the formation of groups aiming to address a variety of issues, and at times many supported each other. Jennifer Clarke says it was the Civil Rights movement that provided the first models of dissent by formulating a “method, ideology and language of protest” as African Americans stood up and shouted prior to other movements (2). The issue of racial empowerment was not lost on Australia’s Indigenous population. Clarke writes that during the 1960s, encouraged by events overseas and buoyed by national organisation, Aborigines “slowly embarked on a political awakening, demanded freedom from the trappings of colonialism and responded to the effects of oppression at worst and neglect at best” (4). Activism of the 1960s had the “profoundly productive effect of providing Aborigines with the confidence to assert their racial identity” (159). Many Indigenous youth were compelled by the zeitgeist to address their people’s issues, fulfilling Charlie Perkins’s intentions of inspiring in Indigenous peoples a will to resist (Perkins). Enjoying new freedoms of movement out of missions, due to the 1967 Constitutional change and the practical implementation of the assimilation policy, up to 32,000 Indigenous youth moved to Redfern, Sydney between 1967 and 1972 (Foley, “An Evening With”). Gary Foley reports that a dynamic new Black Power Movement emerged but the important difference between this new younger group and the older Indigenous leaders of the day was the diverse range of contemporary influences. Taking its mantra from the Black Panther movement in America, though having more in common with the equivalent Native American Red Power movement, the Black Power Movement acknowledged many other international struggles for independence as equally inspiring (Foley, “An Evening”). People joined together for grassroots resistance, formed anti-hierarchical collectives and established solidarities between varied groups who previously would have had little to do with each other. The 1973 Aquarius Festival was directly aligned with “back to the land” philosophies. The intention was to provide a place and a reason for gathering to “facilitate exchanges on survival techniques” and to experience “living in harmony with the natural environment.” without being destructive to the land (Dunstan, “A Survival Festival”). Early documents in the archives, however, reveal no apparent interest in Australia’s Indigenous people, referring more to “silken Arabian tents, mediaeval banners, circus, jugglers and clowns, peace pipes, maypole and magic circles” (Dunstan, “A Survival Festival”). Obliterated from the social landscape and minimally referred to in the Australian education system, Indigenous people were “off the radar” to the majority mindset, and the Australian counterculture similarly was slow to appreciate Indigenous culture. Like mainstream Australia, the local counterculture movement largely perceived the “race” issue as something occurring in other countries, igniting the phrase “in your own backyard” which became a catchcry of Indigenous activists (Foley, “Whiteness and Blackness”) With no mention of any Indigenous interest, it seems likely that the decision to engage grew from the emerging climate of Indigenous activism in Australia. Frustrated by student protestors who seemed oblivious to local racial issues, focusing instead on popular international injustices, Indigenous activists accused them of hypocrisy. Aquarius Festival directors, found themselves open to similar accusations when public announcements elicited a range of responses. Once committed to the location of Nimbin, directors Graeme Dunstan and Johnny Allen began a tour of Australian universities to promote the upcoming event. While at the annual conference of AUS in January 1973 at Monash University, Dunstan met Indigenous activist Gary Foley: Gary witnessed the presentation of Johnny Allen and myself at the Aquarius Foundation session and our jubilation that we had agreement from the village residents to not only allow, but also to collaborate in the production of the Festival. After our presentation which won unanimous support, it was Gary who confronted me with the question “have you asked permission from local Aboriginal folk?” This threw me into confusion because we had seen no Aboriginals in Nimbin. (Dunstan, e-mail) Such a challenge came at a time when the historical climate was etched with political activism, not only within the student movement, but more importantly with Indigenous activists’ recent demonstrations, such as the installation in 1972 of the Tent Embassy in Canberra. As representatives of the counterculture movement, which was characterised by its inclinations towards consciousness-raising, AUS organisers were ethically obliged to respond appropriately to the questions about Indigenous permission and involvement in the Aquarius Festival at Nimbin. In addition to this political pressure, organisers in Nimbin began hearing stories of the area being cursed or taboo for women. This most likely originated from the tradition of Nimbin Rocks, a rocky outcrop one kilometre from Nimbin, as a place where only certain men could go. Jennifer Hoff explains that many major rock formations were immensely sacred places and were treated with great caution and respect. Only a few Elders and custodians could visit these places and many such locations were also forbidden for women. Ceremonies were conducted at places like Nimbin Rocks to ensure the wellbeing of all tribespeople. Stories of the Nimbin curse began to spread and most likely captivated a counterculture interested in mysticism. As organisers had hoped that news of the festival would spread on the “lips of the counterculture,” they were alarmed to hear how “fast the bad news of this curse was travelling” (Dunstan, e-mail). A diplomatic issue escalated with further challenges from the Black Power community when organisers discovered that word had spread to Sydney’s Indigenous community in Redfern. Organisers faced a hostile reaction to their alleged cultural insensitivity and were plagued by negative publicity with accusations the AUS were “violating sacred ground” (Janice Newton 62). Faced with such bad press, Dunstan was determined to repair what was becoming a public relations disaster. It seemed once prompted to the path, a sense of moral responsibility prevailed amongst the organisers and they took the unprecedented step of reaching out to Australia’s Indigenous people. Dunstan claimed that an expedition was made to the local Woodenbong mission to consult with Elder, Uncle Lyle Roberts. To connect with local people required crossing the great social divide present in that era of Australia’s history. Amy Nethery described how from the nineteenth century to the 1960s, a “system of reserves, missions and other institutions isolated, confined and controlled Aboriginal people” (9). She explains that the people were incarcerated as a solution to perceived social problems. For Foley, “the widespread genocidal activity of early “settlement” gave way to a policy of containment” (Foley, “Australia and the Holocaust”). Conditions on missions were notoriously bad with alcoholism, extreme poverty, violence, serious health issues and depression common. Of particular concern to mission administrators was the perceived need to keep Indigenous people separate from the non-indigenous population. Dunstan described the mission he visited as having “bad vibes.” He found it difficult to communicate with the elderly man, and was not sure if he understood Dunstan’s quest, as his “responses came as disjointed raves about Jesus and saving grace” (Dunstan, e-mail). Uncle Lyle, he claimed, did not respond affirmatively or negatively to the suggestion that Nimbin was cursed, and so Dunstan left assuming it was not true. Other organisers began to believe the curse and worried that female festival goers might get sick or worse, die. This interpretation reflected, as Vanessa Bible argues, a general Eurocentric misunderstanding of the relationship of Indigenous peoples with the land. Paul Joseph admits they were naïve whites coming into a place with very little understanding, “we didn’t know if we needed a witch doctor or what we needed but we knew we needed something from the Aborigines to lift the spell!”(Joseph and Hanley). Joseph, one of the first “hippies” who moved to the area, had joined forces with AUS organisers. He said, “it just felt right” to get Indigenous involvement and recounted how organisers made another trip to Woodenbong Mission to find Dickee (Richard) Donnelly, a Song Man, who was very happy to be invited. Whether the curse was valid or not it proved to be productive in further instigating respectful action. Perhaps feeling out of their depth, the organisers initiated another strategy to engage with Australian Indigenous people. A call out was sent through the AUS network to diversify the cultural input and it was recommended they engage the services of South African artist, Bauxhau Stone. Timing aligned well as in 1972 Australia had voted in a new Prime Minister, Gough Whitlam. Whitlam brought about significant political changes, many in response to socialist protests that left a buoyancy in the air for the counterculturalist movement. He made prodigious political changes in support of Indigenous people, including creating the Aboriginal Arts Board as part of the Australian Council of the Arts (ACA). As the ACA were already funding activities for the Aquarius Festival, organisers were successful in gaining two additional grants specifically for Indigenous participation (Farnham). As a result We were able to hire […] representatives, a couple of Kalahari bushmen. ‘Cause we were so dumb, we didn’t think we could speak to the black people, you know what I mean, we thought we would be rejected, or whatever, so for us to really reach out, we needed somebody black to go and talk to them, or so we thought, and it was remarkable. This one Bau, a remarkable fellow really, great artist, great character, he went all over Australia. He went to Pitjantjatjara, Yirrkala and we arranged buses and tents when they got here. We had a very large contingent of Aboriginal people come to the Aquarius Festival, thanks to Whitlam. (Joseph in Joseph and Henley) It was under the aegis of these government grants that Bauxhau Stone conducted his work. Stone embodied a nexus of contemporary issues. Acutely aware of the international movement for racial equality and its relevance to Australia, where conditions were “really appalling”, Stone set out to transform Australian race relations by engaging with the alternative arts movement (Stone). While his white Australian contemporaries may have been unaccustomed to dealing with the Indigenous racial issue, Stone was actively engaged and thus well suited to act as a cultural envoy for the Aquarius Festival. He visited several local missions, inviting people to attend and notifying them of ceremonies being conducted by respected Elders. Nimbin was then the site of the Aquarius Lifestyle and Celebration Festival, a two week gathering of alternative cultures, technologies and youth. It innovatively demonstrated its diversity of influences, attracted people from all over the world and was the first time that the general public really witnessed Australia’s counterculture (Derrett 224). As markers of cultural life, counterculture festivals of the 1960s and 1970s were as iconic as the era itself and many around the world drew on the unique Indigenous heritage of their settings in some form or another (Partridge; Perone; Broadley and Jones; Zolov). The social phenomenon of coming together to experience, celebrate and foster a sense of unity was triggered by protests, music and a simple, yet deep desire to reconnect with each other. Festivals provided an environment where the negative social pressures of race, gender, class and mores (such as clothes) were suspended and held the potential “for personal and social transformation” (St John 167). With the expressed intent to “take matters into our own hands” and try to develop alternative, innovative ways of doing things with collective participation, the Aquarius Festival thus became an optimal space for reinvigorating ancient and Indigenous ways (Dunstan, “A Survival Festival”). With philosophies that venerated collectivism, tribalism, connecting with the earth, and the use of ritual, the Indigenous presence at the Aquarius Festival gave attendees the opportunity to experience these values. To connect authentically with Nimbin’s landscape, forming bonds with the Traditional Owners was essential. Participants were very fortunate to have the presence of the last known initiated men of the area, Uncle Lyle Roberts and Uncle Dickee Donnely. These Elders represented the last vestiges of an ancient culture and conducted innovative ceremonies, song, teachings and created a sacred fire for the new youth they encountered in their land. They welcomed the young people and were very happy for their presence, believing it represented a revolutionary shift (Wedd; King; John Roberts; Cecil Roberts). Images 1 and 2: Ceremony and talks conducted at the Aquarius Festival (people unknown). Photographs reproduced by permission of photographer and festival attendee Paul White. The festival thus provided an important platform for the regeneration of cultural and spiritual practices. John Roberts, nephew of Uncle Lyle, recalled being surprised by the reaction of festival participants to his uncle: “He was happy and then he started to sing. And my God … I couldn’t get near him! There was this big ring of hippies around him. They were about twenty deep!” Sharing to an enthusiastic, captive audience had a positive effect and gave the non-indigenous a direct Indigenous encounter (Cecil Roberts; King; Oshlak). Estimates of the number of Indigenous people in attendance vary, with the main organisers suggesting 800 to 1000 and participants suggesting 200 to 400 (Stone; Wedd; Oshlak: Joseph; King; Cecil Roberts). As the Festival lasted over a two week period, many came and left within that time and estimates are at best reliant on memory, engagement and perspectives. With an estimated total attendance at the Festival between 5000 and 10,000, either number of Indigenous attendees is symbolic and a significant symbolic statistic for Indigenous and non-indigenous to be together on mutual ground in Australia in 1973. Images 3-5: Performers from Yirrkala Dance Group, brought to the festival by Stone with funding from the Federal Government. Photographs reproduced by permission of photographer and festival attendee Dr Ian Cameron. For Indigenous people, the event provided an important occasion to reconnect with their own people, to share their culture with enthusiastic recipients, as well as the chance to experience diverse aspects of the counterculture. Though the northern NSW region has a history of diverse cultural migration of Italian and Indian families, the majority of non-indigenous and Indigenous people had limited interaction with cosmopolitan influences (Kijas 20). Thus Nimbin was a conservative region and many Christianised Indigenous people were also conservative in their outlook. The Aquarius Festival changed that as the Indigenous people experienced the wide-ranging cultural elements of the alternative movement. The festival epitomised countercultural tendencies towards flamboyant fashion and hairstyles, architectural design, fantastical art, circus performance, Asian clothes and religious products, vegetarian food and nudity. Exposure to this bohemian culture would have surely led to “mind expansion and consciousness raising,” explicit aims adhered to by the movement (Roszak). Performers and participants from Africa, America and India also gave attending Indigenous Australians the opportunity to interact with non-European cultures. Many people interviewed for this paper indicated that Indigenous people’s reception of this festival experience was joyous. For Australia’s early counterculture, interest in Indigenous Australia was limited and for organisers of the AUS Aquarius Festival, it was not originally on the agenda. The counterculture in the USA and New Zealand had already started to engage with their Indigenous people some years earlier. However due to the Aquarius Festival’s origins in the student movement and its solidarities with the international Indigenous activist movement, they were forced to shift their priorities. The coincidental selection of a significant spiritual location at Nimbin to hold the festival brought up additional challenges and countercultural intrigue with mystical powers and a desire to connect authentically to the land, further prompted action. Essentially, it was the voices of empowered Indigenous activists, like Gary Foley, which in fact triggered the reaching out to Indigenous involvement. While the counterculture organisers were ultimately receptive and did act with unprecedented respect, credit must be given to Indigenous activists. The activist’s role is to trigger action and challenge thinking and in this case, it was ultimately productive. Therefore the Indigenous people were not merely passive recipients of beneficiary goodwill, but active instigators of appropriate cultural exchange. After the 1973 festival many attendees decided to stay in Nimbin to purchase land collectively and a community was born. Relationships established with local Indigenous people developed further. Upon visiting Nimbin now, one will see a vibrant visual display of Indigenous and psychedelic themed art, a central park with an open fire tended by local custodians and other Indigenous community members, an Aboriginal Centre whose rent is paid for by local shopkeepers, and various expressions of a fusion of counterculture and Indigenous art, music and dance. While it appears that reconciliation became the aspiration for mainstream society in the 1990s, Nimbin’s early counterculture history had Indigenous reconciliation at its very foundation. The efforts made by organisers of the 1973 Aquarius Festival stand as one of very few examples in Australian history where non-indigenous Australians have respectfully sought to learn from Indigenous people and to assimilate their cultural practices. It also stands as an example for the world, of reconciliation, based on hippie ideals of peace and love. They encouraged the hippies moving up here, even when they came out for Aquarius, old Uncle Lyle and Richard Donnelly, they came out and they blessed the mob out here, it was like the hairy people had come back, with the Nimbin, cause the Nimbynji is the little hairy people, so the hairy people came back (Jerome). References Barr-Melej, Patrick. “Siloísmo and the Self in Allende’s Chile: Youth, 'Total Revolution,' and the Roots of the Humanist Movement.” Hispanic American Historical Review 86.4 (Nov. 2006): 747-784. Bible, Vanessa. Aquarius Rising: Terania Creek and the Australian Forest Protest Movement. BA (Honours) Thesis. University of New England, Armidale, 2010. Broadley, Colin, and Judith Jones, eds. Nambassa: A New Direction. Auckland: Reed, 1979. Bryant, Gordon M. Parliament of Australia. Minister for Aboriginal Affairs. 1 May 1973. Australian Union of Students. Records of the AUS, 1934-1991. National Library of Australia MS ACC GB 1992.0505. Cameron, Ian. “Aquarius Festival Photographs.” 1973. Clarke, Jennifer. Aborigines and Activism: Race, Aborigines and the Coming of the Sixties to Australia. Crawley: University of Western Australia Press, 2008. Derrett, Ross. Regional Festivals: Nourishing Community Resilience: The Nature and Role of Cultural Festivals in Northern Rivers NSW Communities. PhD Thesis. Southern Cross University, Lismore, 2008. Dunstan, Graeme. “A Survival Festival May 1973.” 1 Aug. 1972. Pamphlet. MS 6945/1. Nimbin Aquarius Festival Archives. National Library of Australia, Canberra. ---. E-mail to author, 11 July 2012. ---. “The Aquarius Festival.” Aquarius Rainbow Region. n.d. Farnham, Ken. Acting Executive Officer, Aboriginal Council for the Arts. 19 June 1973. Letter. MS ACC GB 1992.0505. Australian Union of Students. Records of the AUS, 1934-1991. National Library of Australia, Canberra. Foley, Gary. “Australia and the Holocaust: A Koori Perspective (1997).” The Koori History Website. n.d. 20 May 2013 ‹http://www.kooriweb.org/foley/essays/essay_8.html›. ---. “Whiteness and Blackness in the Koori Struggle for Self-Determination (1999).” The Koori History Website. n.d. 20 May 2013 ‹http://www.kooriweb.org/foley/essays/essay_9.html›. ---. “Black Power in Redfern 1968-1972 (2001).” The Koori History Website. n.d. 20 May 2013 ‹http://www.kooriweb.org/foley/essays/essay_1.html›. ---. “An Evening with Legendary Aboriginal Activist Gary Foley.” Conference Session. Marxism 2012 “Revolution in the Air”, Melbourne, Mar. 2012. Hoff, Jennifer. Bundjalung Jugun: Bundjalung Country. Lismore: Richmond River Historical Society, 2006. Jacob, Jeffrey. New Pioneers: The Back-to-the-Land Movement and the Search for a Sustainable Future. Pennsylvania: Penn State Press, 1997. Jerome, Burri. Interview. 31 July 2012. Joseph, Paul. Interview. 7 Aug. 2012. Joseph, Paul, and Brendan ‘Mookx’ Hanley. Interview by Rob Willis. 14 Aug. 2010. Audiofile, Session 2 of 3. nla.oh-vn4978025. Rob Willis Folklore Collection. National Library of Australia, Canberra. Kijas, Johanna, Caravans and Communes: Stories of Settling in the Tweed 1970s & 1980s. Murwillumbah: Tweed Shire Council, 2011. King, Vivienne (Aunty Viv). Interview. 1 Aug. 2012. Munro-Clarke, Margaret. Communes of Rural Australia: The Movement Since 1970. Sydney: Hale and Iremonger, 1986. Nethery, Amy. “Aboriginal Reserves: ‘A Modern-Day Concentration Camp’: Using History to Make Sense of Australian Immigration Detention Centres.” Does History Matter? Making and Debating Citizenship, Immigration and Refugee Policy in Australia and New Zealand. Eds. Klaus Neumann and Gwenda Tavan. Canberra: Australian National University Press, 2009. 4. Newton, Janice. “Aborigines, Tribes and the Counterculture.” Social Analysis 23 (1988): 53-71. Newton, John. 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“There is nothing more public than privacy.” (Berlant and Warner, Sex) How did it come to this? How did it happen that a one-off, two-hour event at a public swimming pool in a suburb of outer Melbourne ignited international hate mail and generated media-fanned political anguish and debate about the proper use of public spaces? In 2010, women who attend a women’s only swim session on Sunday evenings at the Dandenong Oasis public swimming pool asked the pool management and the local council for permission to celebrate the end of Ramadan at the pool during the time of their regular swim session. The request was supported by the pool managers and the council and promoted by both as an opportunity for family and friends to get together in a spirit of multicultural learning and understanding. Responding to criticisms of the event as an unreasonable claim on public facilities by one group, the Mayor of the City of Greater Dandenong, Jim Memeti, rejected claims that this event discriminates against non-Muslim residents of the suburb. But here’s the rub. The event, to be held after hours at the pool, requires all participants older than ten years of age to follow a dress code of knee-length shorts and T-shirts. This is a suburban moment that is borne of but exceeds the local. It reflects and responds to a contemporary global conundrum of great political and theoretical significance—how to negotiate and govern the relations between multiculturalism, religion, gender, sexual freedom, and democracy. Specifically this event speaks to how multicultural democracy in the public sphere negotiates the public presence and expression of different cultural and religious frameworks related to gender and sexuality. This is demanding political stuff. Situated in the messy political and theoretical terrains of the relation between public space and the public sphere, this local moment called for political judgement about how cultural differences should be allowed to manifest in and through public space, giving consideration to the potential effects of these decisions on an inclusive multicultural democracy. The local authorities in Dandenong engaged in an admirable process of democratic labour as they puzzled over how to make decisions that were responsible and equitable, in the absence of a rulebook or precedents for success. Ultimately however this mode of experimental decision-making, which will become increasingly necessary to manage such predicaments in the future, was foreclosed by unwarranted and unhelpful media outrage. "Foreclosed" here stresses the preemptive nature of the loss; a lost opportunity for trialing approaches to governing cultural diversity that may fail, but might then be modified. It was condemned in advance of either success or failure. The role of the media rather than the discomfort of the local publics has been decisive in this event.This Multicultural SuburbDandenong is approximately 30 kilometres southeast of central Melbourne. Originally home to the Bunorong People of the Kulin nation, it was settled by pastoralists by the 1800s, heavily industrialised during the twentieth century, and now combines cultural diversity with significant social disadvantage. The City of Greater Dandenong is proud of its reputation as the most culturally and linguistically diverse municipality in Australia. Its population of approximately 138,000 comprises residents from 156 different language groups. More than half (56%) of its population was born overseas, with 51% from nations where English is not the main spoken language. These include Vietnam, Cambodia, Sri Lanka, India, China, Italy, Greece, Bosnia and Afghanistan. It is also a place of significant religious diversity with residents identifying as Buddhist (15 per cent) Muslim (8 per cent), Hindu (2 per cent) and Christian (52 per cent) [CGD]. Its city logo, “Great Place, Great People” evokes its twin pride in the placemaking power of its diverse population. It is also a brazen act of civic branding to counter its reputation as a derelict and dangerous suburb. In his recent book The Bogan Delusion, David Nichols cites a "bogan" website that names Dandenong as one of Victoria’s two most bogan areas. The other was Moe. (p72). The Sunday Age newspaper had already depicted Dandenong as one of two excessively dangerous suburbs “where locals fear to tread” (Elder and Pierik). The other suburb of peril was identified as Footscray.Central Dandenong is currently the site of Australia’s largest ever state sponsored Urban Revitalisation program with a budget of more than $290 million to upgrade infrastructure, that aims to attract $1billion in private investment to provide housing and future employment.The Cover UpIn September 2010, the Victorian and Civil and Administrative Appeals Tribunal (VCAT) granted the YMCA an exemption from the Equal Opportunity Act to allow a dress code for the Ramadan event at the Oasis swimming pool that it manages. The "Y" sees the event as “an opportunity for the broader community to learn more about Ramadan and the Muslim faith, and encourages all members of Dandenong’s diverse community to participate” (YMCA Ramadan). While pool management and the municipal council refer to the event as an "opening up" of the closed swimming session, the media offer a different reading of the VCAT decision. The trope of the "the cover up" has framed most reports and commentaries (Murphy; Szego). The major focus of the commentaries has not been the event per se, but the call to dress "appropriately." Dress codes however are a cultural familiar. They exist for workplaces, schools, nightclubs, weddings, racing and sporting clubs and restaurants, to name but a few. While some of these codes or restrictions are normatively imposed rather than legally required, they are not alien to cultural life in Australia. Moreover, there are laws that prohibit people from being meagerly dressed or naked in public, including at beaches, swimming pools and so on. The dress code for this particular swimming pool event was, however, perceived to be unusual and, in a short space of time, "unusual" converted to "social threat."Responses to media polls about the dress code reveal concerns related to the symbolic dimensions of the code. The vast majority of those who opposed the Equal Opportunity exemption saw it as the thin edge of the multicultural wedge, a privatisation of public facilities, or a denial of the public’s right to choose how to dress. Tabloid newspapers reported on growing fears of Islamisation, while the more temperate opposition situated the decision as a crisis of human rights associated with tolerating illiberal cultural practices. Julie Szego reflects this view in an opinion piece in The Age newspaper:the Dandenong pool episode is neither trivial nor insignificant. It is but one example of human rights laws producing outcomes that restrict rights. It raises tough questions about how far public authorities ought to go in accommodating cultural practices that sit uneasily with mainstream Western values. (Szego)Without enquiring into the women’s request and in the absence of the women’s views about what meaning the event held for them, most media commentators and their electronically wired audiences treated the announcement as yet another alarming piece of evidence of multicultural failure and the potential Islamisation of Australia. The event raised specific concerns about the double intrusion of cultural difference and religion. While the Murdoch tabloid Herald Sun focused on the event as “a plan to force families to cover up to avoid offending Muslims at a public event” (Murphy) the liberal Age newspaper took a more circumspect approach, reporting on its small vox pop at the Dandenong pool. Some people here referred to the need to respect religions and seemed unfazed by the exemption and the event. Those who disagreed thought it was important not to enforce these (dress) practices on other people (Carey).It is, I believe, significant that several employees of the local council informed me that most of the opposition has come from the media, people outside of Dandenong and international groups who oppose the incursion of Islam into non-Islamic settings. Opposition to the event did not appear to derive from local concern or opposition.The overwhelming majority of Herald Sun comments expressed emphatic opposition to the dress code, citing it variously as unAustralian, segregationist, arrogant, intolerant and sexist. The Herald Sun polled readers (in a self-selecting and of course highly unrepresentative on-line poll) asking them to vote on whether or not they agreed with the VCAT exemption. While 5.52 per cent (512 voters) agreed with the ruling, 94.48 per cent (8,760) recorded disagreement. In addition, the local council has, for the first time in memory, received a stream of hate-mail from international anti-Islam groups. Muslim women’s groups, feminists, the Equal Opportunity Commissioner and academics have also weighed in. According to local reports, Professor of Islamic Studies at the University of Melbourne, Shahram Akbarzadeh, considered the exemption was “nonsense” and would “backfire and the people who will pay for it will be the Muslim community themselves” (Haberfield). He repudiated it as an example of inclusion and tolerance, labeling it “an effort of imposing a value system (sic)” (Haberfield). He went so far as to suggest that, “If Tony Abbott wanted to participate in his swimwear he wouldn’t be allowed in. That’s wrong.” Tasneem Chopra, chairwoman of the Islamic Women’s Welfare Council and Sherene Hassan from the Islamic Council of Victoria, both expressed sensitivity to the group’s attempt to establish an inclusive event but would have preferred the dress code to be a matter of choice rather coercion (Haberfield, "Mayor Defends Dandenong Pool Cover Up Order"). Helen Szoke, the Commissioner of the Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission, defended the pool’s exemption from the Law that she oversees. “Matters such as this are not easy to resolve and require a balance to be achieved between competing rights and obligations. Dress codes are not uncommon: e.g., singlets, jeans, thongs etc in pubs/hotels” (in Murphy). The civil liberties organisation, Liberty Victoria, supported the ban because the event was to be held after hours (Murphy). With astonishing speed this single event not only transformed the suburban swimming pool to a theatre of extra-local disputes about who and what is entitled to make claims on public space and publically funded facilities, but also fed into charged debates about the future of multiculturalism and the vulnerability of the nation to the corrosive effects of cultural and religious difference. In this sense suburbs like Dandenong are presented as sites that not only generate fear about physical safety but whose suburban sensitivities to its culturally diverse population represent a threat to the safety of the nation. Thus the event both reflects and produces an antipathy to cultural difference and to the place where difference resides. This aversion is triggered by and mediated in this case through the figure, rather than the (corpo)reality, of the Muslim woman. In this imagining, the figure of the Muslim woman is assigned the curious symbolic role of "cultural creep." The debates around the pool event is not about the wellbeing or interests of the Muslim women themselves, nor are broader debates about the perceived, culturally-derived restrictions imposed on Muslim women living in Australia or other western countries. The figure of the Muslim woman is, I would argue, simply the ground on which the debates are held. The first debate relates to social and public space, access to which is considered fundamental to freedom and participatory democracy, and in current times is addressed in terms of promoting inclusion, preventing exclusion and finding opportunities for cross cultural encounters. The second relates not to public space per se, but to the public sphere or the “sphere of private people coming together as a public” for political deliberation (Habermas 21). The literature and discussions dealing with these two terrains have remained relatively disconnected (Low and Smith) with public space referring largely to activities and opportunities in the socio-cultural domain and the public sphere addressing issues of politics, rights and democracy. This moment in Dandenong offers some modest leeway for situating "the suburb" as an ideal site for coalescing these disparate discussions. In this regard I consider Iveson’s provocative and productive question about whether some forms of exclusions from suburban public space may actually deepen the democratic ideals of the public sphere. Exclusions may in such cases be “consistent with visions of a democratically inclusive city” (216). He makes his case in relation to a dispute about the exclusion of men exclusion from a women’s only swimming pool in the Sydney suburb of Coogee. The Dandenong case is similarly exclusive with an added sense of exclusion generated by an "inclusion with restrictions."Diversity, Difference, Public Space and the Public SphereAs a prelude to this discussion of exclusion as democracy, I return to the question that opened this article: how did it come to this? How is it that Australia has moved from its renowned celebration and pride in its multiculturalism so much in evidence at the suburban level through what Ghassan Hage calls an “unproblematic” multiculturalism (233) and what others have termed “everyday multiculturalism” (Wise and Velayutham). Local cosmopolitanisms are often evinced through the daily rituals of people enjoying the ethnic cuisines of their co-residents’ pasts, and via moments of intercultural encounter. People uneventfully rub up against and greet each other or engage in everyday acts of kindness that typify life in multicultural suburbs, generating "reservoirs of hope" for democratic and cosmopolitan cities (Thrift 147). In today’s suburbs, however, the “Imperilled Muslim women” who need protection from “dangerous Muslim men” (Razack 129) have a higher discursive profile than ethnic cuisine as the exemplar of multiculturalism. Have we moved from pleasure to hostility or was the suburban pleasure in racial difference always about a kind of “eating the other” (bell hooks 378). That is to ask whether our capacity to experience diversity positively has been based on consumption, consuming the other for our own enrichment, whereas living with difference entails a commitment not to consumption but to democracy. This democratic multicultural commitment is a form of labour rather than pleasure, and its outcome is not enrichment but transformation (although this labour can be pleasurable and transformation might be enriching). Dandenong’s prized cultural precincts, "Little India" and the "Afghan bazaar" are showcases of food, artefacts and the diversity of the suburb. They are centres of pleasurable and exotic consumption. The pool session, however, requires one to confront difference. In simple terms we can think about ethnic food, festivals and handicrafts as cultural diversity, and the Muslim woman as cultural difference.This distinction between diversity and difference is useful for thinking through the relation between multiculturalism in public space and multicultural democracy of the public sphere. According to the anthropologist Thomas Hylland Eriksen, while a neoliberal sensibility supports cultural diversity in the public space, cultural difference is seen as a major cause of social problems associated with immigrants, and has a diminishing effect on the public sphere (14). According to Eriksen, diversity is understood as aesthetic, or politically and morally neutral expressions of culture that are enriching (Hage 118) or digestible. Difference, however, refers to morally objectionable cultural practices. In short, diversity is enriching. Difference is corrosive. Eriksen argues that differences that emerge from distinct cultural ideas and practices are deemed to create conflicts with majority cultures, weaken social solidarity and lead to unacceptable violations of human rights in minority groups. The suburban swimming pool exists here at the boundary of diversity and difference, where the "presence" of diverse bodies may enrich, but their different practices deplete and damage existing culture. The imperilled Muslim woman of the suburbs carries a heavy symbolic load. She stands for major global contests at the border of difference and diversity in three significant domains, multiculturalism, religion and feminism. These three areas are positioned simultaneously in public space and of the public sphere and she embodies a specific version of each in this suburban setting. First, there a global retreat from multiculturalism evidenced in contemporary narratives that describe multiculturalism (both as official policy and unofficial sensibility) as failed and increasingly ineffective at accommodating or otherwise dealing with religious, cultural and ethnic differences (Cantle; Goodhart; Joppke; Poynting and Mason). In the UK, Europe, the US and Australia, popular media sources and political discourses speak of "parallel lives,"immigrant enclaves, ghettoes, a lack of integration, the clash of values, and illiberal cultural practices. The covered body of the Muslim woman, and more particularly the Muslim veil, are now read as visual signs of this clash of values and of the refusal to integrate. Second, religion has re-emerged in the public domain, with religious groups and individuals making particular claims on public space both on the basis of their religious identity and in accord with secular society’s respect for religious freedom. This is most evident in controversies in France, Belgium and Netherlands associated with banning niqab in public and other religious symbols in schools, and in Australia in court. In this sense the covered Muslim woman raises concerns and indignation about the rightful place of religion in the public sphere and in social space. Third, feminism is increasingly invoked as the ground from which claims about the imperilled Muslim woman are made, particularly those about protecting women from their dangerous men. The infiltration of the Muslim presence into public space is seen as a threat to the hard won gains of women’s freedom enjoyed by the majority population. This newfound feminism of the public sphere, posited by those who might otherwise disavow feminism, requires some serious consideration. This public discourse rarely addresses the discrimination, violation and lack of freedom experienced systematically on an everyday basis by women of majority cultural backgrounds in western societies (such as Australia). However, the sexism of racially and religiously different men is readily identified and decried. This represents a significant shift to a dubious feminist register of the public sphere such that: “[w]omen of foreign origin, ...more specifically Muslim women…have replaced the traditional housewife as the symbol of female subservience” (Tissot 41–42).The three issues—multiculturalism, religion and feminism—are, in the Dandenong pool context, contests about human rights, democracy and the proper use of public space. Szego’s opinion piece sees the Dandenong pool "cover up" as an example of the conundrum of how human rights for some may curtail the human rights of others and lead us into a problematic entanglement of universal "rights," with claims of difference. In her view the combination of human rights and multiculturalism in the case of the Dandenong Pool accommodates illiberal practices that put the rights of "the general public" at risk, or as she puts it, on a “slippery slope” that results in a “watering down of our human rights.” Ideas that entail women making a claim for private time in public space are ultimately not good for "us."Such ideas run counter to the West's more than 500-year struggle for individual freedom—including both freedom of religion and freedom from religion—and for gender equality. Our public authorities ought to be pushing back hardest when these values are under threat. Yet this is precisely where they've been buckling under pressure (Szego)But a different reading of the relation between public and private space, human rights, democracy and gender freedom is readily identifiable in the Dandenong event—if one looks for it. Living with difference, I have already suggested, is a problem of democracy and the public sphere and does not so easily correspond to consuming diversity, as it demands engagement with cultural difference. In what remains, I explore how multicultural democracy in the public sphere and women’s rights in public and private realms relate, firstly, to the burgeoning promise of democracy and civility that might emerge in public space through encounter and exchange. I also point out how this moment in Dandenong might be read as a singular contribution to dealing with this global problematic of living with difference; of democracy in the public sphere. Public urban space has become a focus for speculation among geographers and sociologists in particular, about the prospects for an enhanced civic appreciation of living with difference through encountering strangers. Random and repetitious encounters with people from all cultures typify contemporary urban life. It remains an open question however as to whether these encounters open up or close down possibilities for conviviality and understanding, and whether they undo or harden peoples’ fears and prejudices. There is, however, at least in some academic and urban planning circles, some hope that the "throwntogetherness" (Massey) and the "doing" of togetherness (Laurier and Philo) found in the multicultural city may generate some lessons and opportunities for developing a civic culture and political commitment to living with difference. Alongside the optimism of those who celebrate the city, the suburb, and public spaces as forging new ways of living with difference, there are those such as Gill Valentine who wonder how this might be achieved in practice (324). Ash Amin similarly notes that city or suburban public spaces are not necessarily “the natural servants of multicultural engagement” (Ethnicity 967). Amin and Valentine point to the limited or fleeting opportunities for real engagement in these spaces. Moreover Valentine‘s research in the UK revealed that the spatial proximity found in multicultural spaces did not so much give rise to greater mutual respect and engagement, but to a frustrated “white self-segregation in the suburbs.” She suggests therefore that civility and polite exchange should not be mistaken for respect (324). Amin contends that it is the “micro-publics” of social encounters found in workplaces, schools, gardens, sports clubs [and perhaps swimming pools] rather than the fleeting encounters of the street or park, that offer better opportunities for meaningful intercultural exchange. The Ramadan celebration at the pool, with its dress code and all, might be seen more fruitfully as a purposeful event engaging a micro-public in which people are able to “break out of fixed relations and fixed notions” and “learn to become different” (Amin, Ethnicity 970) without that generating discord and resentment.Micropublics, Subaltern Publics and a Democracy of (Temporary) ExclusionsIs this as an opportunity to bring the global and local together in an experiment of forging new democratic spaces for gender, sexuality, culture and for living with difference? More provocatively, can we see exclusion and an invitation to share in this exclusion as a precursor to and measure of, actually existing democracy? Painter and Philo have argued that democratic citizenship is questionable if “people cannot be present in public spaces (streets, squares, parks, cinemas, churches, town halls) without feeling uncomfortable, victimized and basically ‘out of place’…" (Iveson 216). Feminists have long argued that distinctions between public and private space are neither straightforward nor gender neutral. For Nancy Fraser the terms are “cultural classifications and rhetorical labels” that are powerful because they are “frequently deployed to delegitimate some interests, views and topics and to valorize others” (73). In relation to women and other subordinated minorities, the "rhetoric of privacy" has been historically used to restrict the domain of legitimate public contestation. In fact the notion of what is public and particularly notions of the "public interest" and the "public good" solidify forms of subordination. Fraser suggests the concept of "subaltern counterpublics" as an alternative to notions of "the public." These are discursive spaces where groups articulate their needs, and demands are circulated formulating their own public sphere. This challenges the very meaning and foundational premises of ‘the public’ rather than simply positing strategies of inclusion or exclusion. The twinning of Amin’s notion of "micro-publics" and Fraser’s "counterpublics" is, I suggest, a fruitful approach to interpreting the Dandenong pool issue. It invites a reading of this singular suburban moment as an experiment, a trial of sorts, in newly imaginable ways of living democratically with difference. It enables us to imagine moments when a limited democratic right to exclude might create the sorts of cultural exchanges that give rise to a more authentic and workable recognition of cultural difference. I am drawn to think that this is precisely the kind of democratic experimentation that the YMCA and Dandenong Council embarked upon when they applied for the Equal Opportunity exemption. I suggest that by trialing, rather than fixing forever a "critically exclusive" access to the suburban swimming pool for two hours per year, they were in fact working on the practical problem of how to contribute in small but meaningful ways to a more profoundly free democracy and a reworked public sphere. In relation to the similar but distinct example of the McIver pool for women and children in Coogee, New South Wales, Kurt Iveson makes the point that such spaces of exclusion or withdrawal, “do not necessarily serve simply as spaces where people ‘can be themselves’, or as sites through which reified identities are recognised—in existing conditions of inequality, they can also serve as protected spaces where people can take the risk of exploring who they might become with relative safety from attack and abuse” (226). These are necessary risks to take if we are to avoid entrenching fear of difference in a world where difference is itself deeply, and permanently, entrenched.ReferencesAmin, Ash. “Ethnicity and the Multicultural City: Living with Diversity.” Environment and Planning A 34 (2002): 959–80.———. “The Good City.” Urban Studies 43 (2006): 1009–23.Berlant, Lauren, and Michael Warner. “Sex in Public.” Critical Inquiry 24 (1998): 547–66.Cantle, Ted. Community Cohesion: A Report of the Independent Review Team. London, UK Home Office, 2001.Carey, Adam. “Backing for Pool Cover Up Directive.” The Age 17 Sep. 2010. ‹http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/backing-for-pool-coverup-directive-20100916-15enz.html›.Elder, John, and Jon Pierick. “The Mean Streets: Where the Locals Fear to Tread.” The Sunday Age 10 Jan. 2010. ‹http://www.theage.com.au/national/the-mean-streets-where-the-locals-fear-to-tread-20100109-m00l.html?skin=text-only›.Eriksen, Thomas Hyland. “Diversity versus Difference: Neoliberalism in the Minority Debate." The Making and Unmaking of Difference. Ed. Richard Rottenburg, Burkhard Schnepel, and Shingo Shimada. Bielefeld: Transaction, 2006. 13–36.Fraser, Nancy. “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy.” Social Text 25/26 (1990): 56–80.Goodhart, David. “Too Diverse.” Prospect 95 (2004): 30-37.Haberfield, Georgie, and Gilbert Gardner. “Mayor Defends Pool Cover-up Order.” Dandenong Leader 16 Sep. 2010 ‹http://dandenong-leader.whereilive.com.au/news/story/dandenong-oasis-tells-swimmers-to-cover-up/›.Habermas, Jürgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 2001.Hage, Ghassan. White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society. Sydney: Pluto, 1998.hooks, bell. "Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance." Media and Cultural Studies Keyworks. Eds. Meenakshi Gigi and Douglas Kellner. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001. 366-380.Iveson, Kurt. "Justifying Exclusion: The Politics of Public Space and the Dispute over Access to McIvers Ladies' Baths, Sydney.” Gender, Place and Culture 10.3 (2003): 215–28.Joppke, Christian. “The Retreat of Multiculturalism in the Liberal State: Theory and Policy.” The British Journal of Sociology 55.2 (2004): 237–57.Laurier, Chris, and Eric Philo. “Cold Shoulders and Napkins Handed: Gestures of Responsibility.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 31 (2006): 193–207.Low, Setha, and Neil Smith, eds. The Politics of Public Space. London: Routledge, 2006.Massey, Doreen. For Space. London: Sage, 2005.Murphy, Padraic. "Cover Up for Pool Even at Next Year's Ramadan.” Herald Sun 23 Sep. 2010. ‹http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/victoria/cover-up-for-pool-event-during-next-years-ramadan/story-e6frf7kx-1225924291675›.Nichols, David. The Bogan Delusion. Melbourne: Affirm Press, 2011.Poynting, Scott, and Victoria Mason. "The New Integrationism, the State and Islamophobia: Retreat from Multiculturalism in Australia." International Journal of Law, Crime and Justice 36 (2008): 230–46.Razack, Sherene H. “Imperilled Muslim Women, Dangerous Muslim Men and Civilised Europeans: Legal and Social Responses to Forced Marriages.” Feminist Legal Studies 12.2 (2004): 129–74.Szego, Julie. “Under the Cover Up." The Age 9 Oct. 2010. < http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/under-the-coverup-20101008-16c1v.html >.Thrift, Nigel. “But Malice Afterthought: Cities and the Natural History of Hatred.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 30 (2005): 133–50.Tissot, Sylvie. “Excluding Muslim Women: From Hijab to Niqab, from School to Public Space." Public Culture 23.1 (2011): 39–46.Valentine, Gill. “Living with Difference: Reflections on Geographies of Encounter.” Progress in Human Geography 32.3 (2008): 323–37.Wise, Amanda, and Selveraj Velayutham, eds. Everyday Multiculturalism. Houndsmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.YMCA. “VCAT Ruling on Swim Sessions at Dandenong Oasis to Open Up to Community During Ramadan Next Year.” 16 Sep. 2010. ‹http://www.victoria.ymca.org.au/cpa/htm/htm_news_detail.asp?page_id=13&news_id=360›.

Western images of Japan tell a seemingly incongruous story of love, sex and marriage – one full of contradictions and conflicting moral codes. We sometimes hear intriguing stories about the unique sexual culture of Japan – from vending machines that dispense soiled schoolgirl panties (Gerster 143), erotic manga (Ito 70; Newitz 2) to automated love hotels (Kersten 387) available for the discreet quickie. These Western portrayals seem to focus primarily on the unusual and quirky side of Japan’s culture constructing this modern Asian culture as simultaneously traditional and seemingly liberated. But what happens, when Japanese love goes global – when exotic others (Westerners) enter the picture? This article is shaped by an understanding of a new world space where cultural products and national images are becoming increasingly globalised, while at the same time more localised and “fragmented into contestatory enclaves of difference, coalition and resistance” (Wilson, 1). It examines ‘the local’, briefly exploring the racial and gender ideologies that pattern relationships between Western and Japanese adults living in Japan focussing on the unique perspective of Western women living and working in provincial Japan. Our research is based on four month’s ethnographic field work carried out within a small provincial Japanese city (which was home to 130 native English speakers, most of whom are employed as English language teachers) and interviews with 12 key participants. Japanese colloquialisms like sebun-irebun (seven eleven), burasagarizoku (arm hangers) and yellow cabs (women as easy to hail as taxis – by foreigners) are used to denote the sexual availability of some Japanese women (Kelskey, Flirting with the Foreign 178). Western women in this study have also invented a colloquialism to allude to sexual availability, with the term ‘zero to hero’ used to describe many Western men who, upon arrival in Japan, find themselves highly sought after by some Japanese women as prospective partners. Western women’s social appeal in the local heterosexual community, on the other hand, is in direct contrast to their male equivalents. A greater social distance exists between Japanese males and Western females, who report finding little genuine opportunity to date local males. Letting the c(h)at out of the bag While living and socialising with English language teachers we became privy to women’s conversation about interracial gender issues within Japan. Western women’s reflections about gender issues within Japan have, so far, been given little or no public voice. This is due, in part, to these women’s cultural and gender isolation while living in Japan, and a general reluctance to publicly voice their opinions, combined with issues about how much it is ‘politically correct’ to say. This reticence can be attributed to a genuine fear of being misconstrued as envious, either of their male colleagues’ newfound social status or Japanese women’s attractiveness. It may also be that, by voicing these observations about interracial gender relationships in Japan, these women will publicly position themselves as powerless and thus lose any voice they do have. Western women who arrive in Japan with expectations of living active (heterosexual) sex lives often find themselves left out in the cold (My Nippon), and while many of their male colleagues are busy pursuing and being pursued by Japanese women their own social interaction with Japanese males is often restricted to awkward conversations with seemingly wary, shy or aloof Japanese men or crude suggestive conversations at the hands of drunken Japanese males. Some women experience their sense of self-esteem, which relies partly on sexual identity and a sense of attractiveness, plummets in these circumstances. Clarissa, a 24-year-old Australian who spent a few months waiting for her partner to join her in Japan, noticed this happening to her. She was interviewed a week after her partner arrived in Japan. I noticed that a while ago I was feeling unattractive because nobody does anything to indicate desire or attractiveness but as soon as they get drunk they can’t get enough of you…. Sober they wouldn’t do anything but when they are drunk … they crack onto you like any Western guy. Participants in the study have proffered thoughtful explanations for this lack of Japanese male/Western female connection, other than in the comparatively uninhibited space of being ‘alcohol affected’. The reasons given include the independent personalities of those Western women who choose to move to Japan, patriarchal attitudes towards women in Japan and a general lack of communication due to cultural or language difficulties. A lot of the women who come over here are very strong and independent and they are feared [by Japanese men] the moment they get off the plane….We didn’t come over here because we are timid and shy and looking for men. Toni (above) also makes clear that her own Western expectations for romantic relationships may exclude her from having relationships with many Japanese males of less than fluent English speaking skills. I’m a talker and I like to talk about ideas and books and I would find it very difficult to have…. a more intense relationship with a person that I couldn’t communicate with on that level. Western notions of romance and marriage, particularly Western women’s expectations concerning sex and romance, involve demonstration of warmth and affection, as well as a meeting of minds or in-depth conversation. Lack of a shared language and different expectations of romantic liaisons and love are some of the factors that can combine to create cross-cultural distance and misunderstanding between Western women and Japanese men. Zero to heroes Japanese women often seek Western men living in this transnational borderland as an alternative to Japanese boyfriends and husbands (Kelskey, Japanese Women's Diaspora). Western women in this study used the term ‘zero to hero’ to depict sought-after Western men, specifically those Western males who misuse this rise in status and behave badly in Japan. These men, as reported, are greatly over-represented in Japan when compared to their respective home communities. Above average-looking European guy, with above average intelligence seeks above average-looking Japanese lady who can cook a little. (Tokyo classifieds) Open discussion about the appeal of Western men to Japanese women seems to elicit critical reactions on either side of the racial and gender divide. For instance online chat discussions about interracial gender issues in Japan evidences the fiercely defensive position many Western men take when confronted with this notion. (see Aldwinckle a, Aldwinkle b, Aldwinkle c). It is clear, therefore, that this phenomenon is not limited to our research location. Women participants in this particular study detailed many examples of ‘zero to heroes’ behaving badly including: overrated opinion of themselves; insulting and degrading behaviour towards women in public – particularly Japanese women; inability to work cooperatively with women superiors in the workplace; sexual liaisons outside of monogamous relationships and in some cases complicated webs of infidelity. You know one guy’s left his wife, his Japanese wife. I didn’t even realize he was married because he had a Japanese girlfriend. I thought he was playing up on his Japanese girlfriend when I saw him with someone else, but he was actually playing up on both his wife and his girlfriend…. I mean the guys are behaving in ways that they wouldn’t get away with in their own countries. So the women from those countries are, of course, appalled (Marie). Japanese women’s desire for the company of Western males seems based on essentialised notions of the Western male as being more gentle, romantic and egalitarian than Japanese males. Analysis by Creighton, along with our own observations, indicates that there is ‘prevalent use of foreigners, particularly white foreigners, or gaijin, in Japanese advertising (135)’, constructing a discourse of the ‘desirable other’. Western images and ideals are also communicated through media texts (particularly Japanese women’s magazines) and promote ideals like individuality, leisure, international sophistication and sexual expression. It is clear from this research and other studies (Kelskey, Japanese Women's Diaspora) that Japanese women (living in Japan) perceive Western men as being more affectionate, kind and egalitarian than Japanese males. However, the notion of a caring and romantic Western male does not seem to be based in the reality of the situation as described by in situ Western females. Here the zero to hero construction of Western masculinity holds sway. Western females in this transnational borderland portray many of their male counterparts as general losers. One participant explained the phenomenon thus: I think that consciously or subconsciously the reason a lot of these men come over here is because they can’t really find a relationship at home. [She explains further] somebody [Western male] told me that I remind them of everything that they are not back in their own country. Gerster describes the attraction Japanese women have for the West (America in particular) as a ‘fatal attraction’ because most of these women will not realize their desire to marry their Western boyfriends or lovers (146-148). These women’s desire for the West (which is accomplishable and articulated through a Western partner) seems doomed from the start and it is questionable as to whether these relationships fulfil the aspirations of many of these women. Nevertheless, some Japanese women and Western men are more aware of this and are relatively explicit about their own desires. Japanese cute girl seeking native speakers [native English speakers] who don’t lie, never betray, are funny and handsome. If you are a man like that, try me. (Tokyo classifieds) American, 33, from California looking for Japanese girl, 20s, for having fun together. No marriage-minded girls please. Japanese ok. (Tokyo classifieds) Conclusion The Japanese national desire to be viewed as progressive and modern is, as with most societies, closely aligned with material commodities, particularly Western commodities. This means that within Japan “Western images probably have more advantage over indigenous ones” (Gerster 165) particularly for Japanese women. The local assumptions and generalisations about the Western men and women living and teaching in this transnational borderland are seemingly constructed by essentialised understandings of Western masculinity and femininity and differentiating these with Japanese notions of masculinity and femininity. However, as Kelsky (Japanese Women's Diaspora) and the participants in this study suggest, those Japanese women (who desire the West) may find their expectations do not match the realities of dating Western males in Japan since many Western men do not seem to live up to this essentialized view of the Western male as a romantic and egalitarian male partner who is ready to commit to marriage. Works Cited Aldwinckle, Dave. ‘Gender Issues in Japan, Part one: The loneliness of the long-distance runner (Publication of Exerts from Postings on Issho Mailing List)’ Arudou Debito/Dave Aldwinckle's Activists’ Page (meaning information for people concerned with social issues who want to help make life better for everyone in Japan). 1998. http://www.debito.org/genderissues.html 21.02 2001. ----. ‘Gender Issues in Japan, Part two: greatest hits and apologia (Publication of Exerts from Postings on Issho Mailing List)’ Arudou Debito/Dave Aldwinckle's Activists’ Page (meaning information for people concerned with social issues who want to help make life better for everyone in Japan). 1998. http://www.debito.org/genderissuestwo.html 21.02 2001. ----. ‘Gender Issues in Japan Part three: my comeuppance (Publication of Exerts from Postings on Issho Mailing List)’ Arudou Debito/Dave Aldwinckle's Activists’ Page (meaning information for people concerned with social issues who want to help make life better for everyone in Japan). 1998. http://www.debito.org/genderissuesthree.... 21.02 2001. Creighton, Millie R. ‘Imaging the Other in Japanese Advertising Campaigns’. Occidentalism: Images of the West. Ed. James G. Carrier. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Gerster, Robin. Legless in Ginza: Orientating Japan. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1999. Ito., Kinko. ‘The World of Japanese Ladies' Comics: From Romantic Fantasy to Lustful Perversion’. Journal of Popular Culture 36.1 (2002): 68--86. ‘Japan Lovers Sex Life in Japan? Really!’. My Nippon E-zine . 2001. http://www.mynippon.com/index.htm. 28.04 2001. Kelsky, Karen. ‘Intimate Ideologies: Transnational Theory and Japan's "Yellow Cabs"’. Public Culture 6 (1994): 465-78. ----. ‘Flirting with the Foreign: Interracial Sex in Japan's "International" Age’. Global/Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imagery. Eds. Rob Wilson and Winmal Dissanayake. Durham: Duke University Press, 1996. 173 - 92. ----. ‘Japanese Women's Diaspora: An Interview’. Intersections 4 (2000): http://wwwsshe.murdoch.edu.au/intersecti... . 26.02 2002 Kersten., Joachim. ‘Culture, Masculinities and Violence against Women. (Masculinities, Social Relations and Crime)’. British Journal of Criminology, Summer 36.3 (1996): 381-96. ‘Men looking for women’. Tokyo Metropolis (2002) http://www.metropolis.co.jp/tokyo/curren... 11.10.2002 Newitz, Annalee. "Magicial Girls and Atomic Bomb Sperm: Japanese Animation in America." Film quarterly 49.1 (1995): 2-15. Wilson, Rob, and Wimal Dissanayake. ‘Introduction: Tracking the Global/Local’. Global/Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imagery. Eds. Rob Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake. Durham: Duke University Press, 1996. 1-18. ‘Women looking for men’. Metropolis. (2002) http://www.metropolis.co.jp/tokyo/curren... 11.10.2002 Links http://www.debito.org/genderissues.html http://www.metropolis.co.jp/tokyo/current/classifieds/13.03_personals.asp http://www.metropolis.co.jp/tokyo/current/classifieds/13.02_personals.asp http://www.elle.co.jp/home/index2.php3 http://wwwsshe.murdoch.edu.au/intersections/ http://www3.tky.3web.ne.jp/~edjacob/hotels.html http://www.dnp.co.jp/museum/nmp/nmp_i/articles/manga/manga2-1.html http://www.debito.org/genderissuesthree.html http://www.sshe.murdoch.edu.au/intersections/ http://www.mynippon.com/index.htm http://www.debito.org/genderissuestwo.html Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Holloway, Donell and Holloway, David. "Zero to hero" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.6 (2002). Dn Month Year < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0211/zerotohero.php>. APA Style Holloway, D. & Holloway, D., (2002, Nov 20). Zero to hero. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 5,(6). Retrieved Month Dn, Year, from http://www.media-culture.org.au/0211/zerotohero.html

Biracial Phenotypes as Ambivalent SignifiersRacialisation is the process of imbuing a body with meaning (Ahmed). Rockquemore et al.’s study on American Black-White middle-class college youth emphasises the importance of phenotypes in interracial children because “physical appearance is the primary cue for racial group membership… and remains the greatest factor in how mixed-race children are classified by others” (114). Wilson’s work on British mixed race 6 to 9-year-olds argues that interracial children classify other children based on how “they locate themselves in the racial structure and how they feel about the various racial groups” (64).However, interracial children often struggle with claiming a racial identity that does not correspond to their obvious physical appearance because society is more likely to classify or perceive the child based on their corporeal manifestations than their self-identified racial master status. In instances where they are unacknowledged or rejected by homoethinc groups, interracial persons may be deemed ‘illegitimate’ trespassers within social contexts. In response, interracial bodies may selectively hyper/under-visibilise one racial identity depending on personal connotations of the social group in particular settings (Choudhry 119). Choudhry’s book on the ‘chameleon identities’ of mixed race Black-Asian and White-Asian British young people sets out four ‘interpretative repertoires’ that interracials cognitively adopt: ‘Identity in Transition’ where individuals are still coming to terms with their master status; ‘One Ethnic Identity’ where individuals always privilege one race over the other regardless of context; ‘Interethnic Identity’ where individuals consciously and equally express their dual race and parentage at all times; and ‘Situational/Chameleon-like Identity’ where individuals selectively emphasise one race over the other when it benefits them (112-116). This paper follows on a similar mode of enquiry among Malay-Chinese women in Singapore, whose racial master status is situationally-based.In ethnically heterogeneous and culturally diverse Singapore, an individual’s racial phenotype is convenient shorthand that demarcates Others’ appropriate interactions with and expectations of them. Malbon describes these brief encounters in crowded urban settings as ‘mismeetings’, in which a body’s visual markers allow for a quick assessment and situation of a person’s identity and status. A visibly racialised body thus informs Others on how to negotiate cross-cultural sensitivities and understandings with them in a shared social space. For instance, this visibility may help inform the Other of an appropriate choice of mother tongue to be adopted in conversation with a stranger, or whether to extend non-halal food to a ‘Malay-looking’ – and by extension in most parts of South East Asia, Muslim – person.Unlike previous studies, this paper is not focused on interracial individuals’ felt-race, cognitive development, or the ethnic influence in their upbringing. Instead, it concentrates on their praxis of enacting corporeal markers to enable homophilous interactions with homoethnic social groups. Some Malay-Chinese in Singapore have phenotypic features that may not distinctly reflect their ethnic diversity. Hence, they are not readily acknowledged or accepted into some homoethnic contexts and are deemed ‘illegitimate’ trespassers. It is important for Others to be able to situate them since this “brings with it privileges or deprivations that affect [their] relationships with others and [their] relation to the world” (Mohanty 109). Every day interactions that affirm or negate one’s biraciality then become micropolitics of legitimating one’s in-group status; in the words of one woman’s reactions to Malay classmates excluding her from conversations about Hari Raya, “I also Melayu ok”. These women thus find themselves under- or hyper-visibilising facets of their biracial corporeality to negotiate legitimacy and sense of belonging. Through in-depth interviews with five young Malay-Chinese women who have had to renegotiate their biraciality in educational institutions each school year, this paper seeks to document the intentional under/hyper-performativity of biraciality through visible bodily signifiers. It argues that these biracial women who are perceived as illegitimate inhabitants of social settings have agentically adopted the ambivalence others display towards them as everyday micro-actions to exercise their autonomy, and strategically reposition themselves favourably.The five women were contacted through snowball sampling among personal networks in polytechnics and universities, which are education settings where students have the liberty to dress themselves, and thus, visibilise facets of their identity. These settings were also places in which the women had to continually under/hyper-visibilise and remark their race and ethnicity in rotating tutorial and lecture groups every semester, therefore (re)constructing their identities through peer interactions (Wilson in Choudhry 112).They were aged between 18 and 23 at the time of the interview. Their state-documented ‘official’ race, self-identified religion, and state-assigned mother tongue are tabulated below. Pseudonyms are employed.Semi-structured open-ended interviews were conducted to draw out personal nuances and interpretations of their bodies as read by Others. Our face-to-face interaction proved to be especially useful when informants physically referenced bodily markers or performed verbal cues to convey their under/hyper-visibility strategies.InformantNadiaAtiqahSaraClaireWahidaSexFemaleFemaleFemaleFemaleFemaleAge2322221822‘Official’ raceMalayMalayMalayMalayChineseReligionChristianMuslimChristianChristianMuslimMother tongueMandarinMalayMandarin MandarinMalayThe Body BeingAmong primary phenotypic cues, the women acknowledged popular perceptions of Chinese as fair-skinned and Malay as darker-skinned. This shorthand has been ingrained into society through rampant media images, especially in annual national-wide initiatives based in educational institutes such as Racial Harmony Day, International Friendship Day, and National Day. These settings utilise a ‘racial colour code’ to represent the CMIO – Chinese, Malay, Indian, Others; the four racial categories all Singaporeans are officially categorised into by the state – multiracialism in Singapore. Media imagery employs four children of different skin tones clad in ethnic dress, holding hands as symbolic of unity across diversity. So normative was this image even at the level of Primary School (7-12 year-olds) that Sara found her legitimacy in Chinese lessons questioned: “I used to be quite tanned in Primary School, quite Malay-looking… during Chinese lessons, the teacher always explained [difficult things] to me in English, as if I don’t understand Mandarin. But I even took higher Chinese...”The non-congruence of Sara’s apparently Malay phenotype and Mandarin mother tongue was perceived by her teacher as incompetence; Sara was an ‘illegitimate’ pupil in Mandarin class. Despite having been qualified enough to enrol in the higher Chinese stream that she says only takes in 10% of her cohort annually, Sara felt her high performance was negated because the visual marker of her Malayness took precedence during interactions with the teacher. Instead, English was adopted as a ‘neutral’ third language for conversing.In other instances, the women reported that while their skin tone generally enabled an audience to assign them a race, closer observations of their facial features such as their eyes signposted their racial hybridity. Claire states: “People always ask if I’m mixed blood because my eyelashes are very long and thick.” Sara experienced similar questioning gazes from strangers: “… maybe it’s my big eyes, and thick eyebrows… and my double eyelids are also very ‘Malay’?"Both Claire and Sara pointed out anatomic subtleties such as the folds of their eyelids, the size of their eyes, the volume of their eyebrows, and the length of their eyelashes as markers of their racial hybridity. There also emerged a consensus based on personal experience that Malays are more likely to have double eyelids, larger eyes, thicker eyebrows, and longer lashes, than to Chinese.Visual emphases on subtle characteristics thus help audiences interpret the biraciality of these women despite the apparent ‘incongruence’ of their skin tone and facial features. However, since racial identity is “influenced by historical, cultural, and contextual factors” (Rockquemore et al. 121), corporeal indications only serve as a primary racial cue. The next segment places these women in the context of secondary cues where the body is actively engaged in performing biraciality.The Body SpeakingThe women code-switched with choice of language, mother tongue, and manner of accents and vocal inflexions to contest initial readings of their racial status. Atiqah shares: “People always think I’m Chinese, until I open my mouth and speak Malay to ‘shock’ them. After that, they just ‘get’ that I am Malay.”Atiqah’s raised vocal inflexions and increasingly enthusiastic body language – she was clenching her fist as if to symbolically convey her victory at this point of the interview – seemed to imply that she relished in the ‘shock value’ of her big racial ‘reveal’. In a setting where her racial status was misidentified, she responded by asserting her racial legitimacy by displaying her competency of the Malay language.However, this has not always had a lasting impact in her interactions. She adds that within familiar social groups where she has long asserted her racial identity, she does not always feel acknowledged. Atiqah then attempts to ‘fit in’ by quietly deciphering her peers’ verbal exchanges: “… sometimes my Chinese friends forget that I’m ‘different’ because I’m so fair. They always talk in Mandarin… and I’ll try to figure out what they are saying from facial expressions and gestures.”Given her fair skin tone, Atiqah finds herself hypervisiblising her Malayness by utilizing the Malay language among Malay friends, even though they often converse in English themselves. In contrast, among Chinese friends where she feels her phenotypic Chinese features are visually dominant, she appears to under-visibilise this same Malayness by not speaking up about her language barrier. Language’s potential to demarcate social boundaries thus becomes a negotiative tool for Malay-Chinese women, while they simultaneously “shift their involvement and alliances” (Choudhry 119) to exercise choice over their identity.In another instance, Wahida is a fair skinned, tudung-clad, officially documented Chinese woman who identifies more as Malay. Her apparent ‘incongruence’ is of particular concern because Wahida had been attending a Madrasah up till the age of 18. Madrasahs are Islamic learning schools which also provide full-time education from Kindergarten to Junior College level, as an alternative to the mainstream track offered by the Ministry of Education in Singapore; a vast majority of Madrasah students self-identify as Malay Muslims. The desire for a sense of belonging encouraged Wahida to undervisibilise her Chineseness when she was younger:There was once my father came to pick me up from Madrasah… I forgot why but he scolded me so loudly in Mandarin! Everybody stared at me… I was so embarrassed! I already tried so hard to hide my Chinese-ness, he ruined it.Although Wahida never spoke Mandarin in school to underplay her Chineseness, ‘passing’ as a Malay necessitated intimate Others to sustain the racial construct. In this instance, her father had broken the ‘Malay’ persona she had deliberately crafted by conversing fluently in Malay in the Madrasah.Butler’s work on ‘gender as performed’ may be applied here in that what she describes as the “sustained set of acts” or a “stylization of the body” (xv) is also necessary to enact a sustained visual signifier of one’s racial identity. Although portrayed as a natural, innate, or unquestioned heritage in CMIO media portrays for Singapore, race is in fact an intentional construction. It is the practice of a certain regime of actions that contributes to the establishment of one’s raced personality. One is not naturally ‘Malay’ or ‘Chinese’ for these identities have to be carefully rehearsed and performed in order to translate one’s hereditary race into an outward expression of visible-race as practiced. As evidenced, this constant performance of Wahida’s racial self is fragile and dialectic, especially when other actors (such as her father) do not respond favourably to her intended presentation of self.Within a supposedly neutral third language such as English, the women also demonstrated their manipulation of accents emphasising or underplaying what they deem to be Malay or Chinese intonations and syllabic stresses. Sara explains:When I’m with my Malay friends, I speak with the mat [shortened from the local colloquial term matrep which loosely stands for the Malay version of a chav or a redneck] accent. Sometimes it’s subconscious… but sometimes it’s on purpose... they all speak like that… when I speak my ‘proper’ English, I feel out of place.Sara then demonstrates that Malay-accented English nasally accentuates the ‘N’ consonant, where words such ‘morning’ and ‘action’ have weighted pronunciations as ‘mornang’ and ‘actione’. Words that begin with a ‘C’ consonant are also developed into a voiced plosive ‘K’ sound, where words such as ‘corner’ and ‘concept’ are articulated as ‘korner’ and ‘koncept’, similar to the Malay language. Claire, who demonstrated similar Malay-accented utterances, supported this.Claire also noted that within Singlish – the colloquial spoken Singaporean English – Malay-accented English also tends towards end-sentence inflexions such as “seh”, “sia”, and “siol” in place of the more Mandarin-accented English that employs the end-sentence inflexions “ba”, and “ma”.Racialising spoken English is a symbolic interaction that interracial bodies may utilise to gain recognition and acceptance into a racial group that has not yet acknowledged their ‘legitimate’ membership. This is a manifestation of Cooley’s ‘looking glass self’ where an individual’s presentation of the body is based how they think other actors’ perceive them. In doing so, biracial bodies are able to exaggerate or obscure some corporeal traits to convey their preferred racial master status.The Body DoingPhysical gestures that constitute a ‘racial code’ are mirrored and socialised among children during their upbringing, since these designate one’s bodily boundaries and limits of exchange. Thus, while unseen by outsiders, insiders of the racial group may appropriate subtle gesticulations to demarcate and legitimate each other’s membership. Atiqah contends: “We [the Malays] always salaam each other when we first meet, it’s like a signal to show that we are ‘the same’ you know, so as long as I ‘act’ Malay, then my [colour] doesn’t really matter.”The salaam is a salutation of Islamic origin, signifying ‘peace to you’. It usually involves taking the back of the hand of a senior and bringing it to one’s forehead, heart, or lips. It is commonly practiced among Malays and Muslims. However, when a body’s phenotypic markers do not adequately signify racial identity, insiders may not extend such affective body language to them. As Nadia laments:When I first came to uni, the Malay kampong [literally translates into ‘village’, but figuratively stands for a social group in which reciprocal Malay cultural relationality is attached] couldn’t tell I was one of them… when I tried to salaam one of [the boys], he asked me why I was shaking his hand!Butler illuminated the notion of bodily signifiers (skin tone) marking access and limitations of corporeal exchange (salaam). Visual signifiers on biracial bodies must thus be significant enough to signpost one’s racial master status, in order to be positively assessed, acknowledged, and legitimated by Others.Among the women, only Wahida had committed to wearing a tudung at the time of the interview. Although a religious Islamic practice (as opposed to a culturally Malay one), such ethnic dress as ethnic signifier takes precedence over one’s ambivalent bodily markers. Wahida expressed that dressing in her jubah hyper-visualised her Malayness, especially when she was schooling in a Madrasah where fellow students dressed similarly.Omar’s concept of Masuk Melayu – literally ‘to enter Malayness’ – describes non-ethnic Malays who ‘become’ Malay through converting into Islam and practising the religion. Despite Wahida’s ambivalent fair skin tone, donning a tudung publically signifies her religious inclination and signals to Other Malays her racial master status. This thus earns her legitimacy in the social group more so than other ambivalent Malay-Chinese women without such religious symbolism.Agentic IllegitimacyIn negotiating their biraciality within the setting of educational institutions, these five Malay-Chinese women expressed the body ‘being’, ‘speaking’, and ‘doing’ strategies in which selected traits more commonly associated with Malayness or Chineseness were hyper-visibilised or under-visibilised, depending on the setting in which they find themselves (Wilson), and social group in which they want to gain membership and favour. Sara recalls having to choose an ethnic dress to wear to her Primary School’s Racial Harmony Day. Her father suggested “a mix” such as “a red baju kurung” or a “green cheong sum” (in Singapore, red is associated with the festivities of Chinese New Year and green with Hari Raya) where she could express her biraciality. Owing to this childhood memory, she says she still attempts to convey her racial hybridity by dressing strategically at festive family gatherings. Atiqah similarly peppers conversations with Chinese friends with the few Mandarin phrases she knows, partly to solicit an affective response when they tease her for “trying”, and also to subtly remind them of her desire for acknowledgement and inclusivity. Despite expressing similar frustrations over their exclusion and ‘illegitimate’ status in homoethnic settings, the women reacted agentically by continuously asserting emic readings of their corporeal ambivalence, and entering into spaces that give them the opportunity to reframe Others’ readings of their visual markers through microactions. However, enacting this agentic ethnic repertoire necessitates an intimate understanding of both Malay and Chinese social markers (Choudhry 120).None of the women suggested completely dissociating themselves from either Malayness or Chineseness, although they may selectively hyper-visibilise one over the other to legitimate their group membership. Instead, they engage in a continuously dialectic repositioning that requires reflexivity, self-awareness, and an attentiveness to how they are perceived from the etic. By inculcating Malay and Chinese social cues into their repertoire, these biracial women can strategically enact their desired racial master status fluently, treating ethnic identity as fluid and in flux (Choudhry 120). In transgressing popular perceptions of CMIO imagery, Malay-Chinese women use their bodies as a sustained site for contesting visual racial stereotypes and reframe their everyday ‘illegitimacy’ into agentic ambivalence, albeit only selectively in spaces where their racial membership would be favourable.ReferencesAhmed, Sara. “Racialized Bodies.” Real Bodies: A Sociological Introduction. Ed. Mary Evans, and Ellie Lee. New York: Palgrave, 2002. 46-63.Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1999.Choudhry, Sultana. Multifaceted Identity of Interethnic Young People: Chameleon Identities. Farnham, England: Ashgate, 2010.Cooley, Charles. Human Nature and the Social Order. New York: Scribner's, 1902. Katz, Ilan. The Construction of Racial Identity in Children of Mixed Parentage – Mixed Metaphors. London: J. Kingsley Publishers, 1996.Malbon, Ben. “The Club. Clubbing: Consumption, Identity and the Spatial Practices of Every-Night Life.” Cool Places: Geographies of Youth Cultures, Ed. Tracey Skelton, Gill Valentine. Routledge: London, 1997. 266-288.Mohanty, Satya P. “Epilogue. Colonial Legacies, Multicultural Futures: Relativism, Objectivity, and the Challenge of Otherness.” PMLA 110.1 (1995). 14 Sep 2014 ‹http://www.jstor.org/stable/463198›.Omar, Ariffin. Bangsa Melayu: Malay Concepts of Democracy and Community, 1945-1950. Oxford: Oxford University, 1993.Rockquemore, Kerry Ann, and Tracy A. Laszloffy. Raising Biracial Children. Lanham, MD: Altamira Press, 2005.Wilson, Anne. Mixed Race Children – A Study of Identity. London: Allen & Unwin, 1987.

A backyard sprinkler ... flower-headed fools jumping through a mist of crystal drops ... the constant buzz of giggling beneath a familiar tune, sung with pavlova-coated breath. Sound like an Australian childhood memory? Perhaps, but not quite. This was the final scene in the recent Belvoir St production of As You Like It, and was quite possibly the most enjoyable moment of theatrical magic I have experienced in a long time. Apart from being suitably impressed by the set -- a stage carpeted with real grass and fallen leaves, a working sprinkler and a brilliant midnight-blue tarpaulin sky filled with golden stars -- the cross-cultural consummation of desire between Rosalind (Deborah Mailman) and Orlando (Aaron Blabey), as they leapt through the sprinkler arm in arm, would surely have warmed even the hardest heart of a One Nation supporter. Yet perhaps it's all just wishful thinking, you know "dream on white boy, dream on black girl" as the INXS tune goes ... except that theatre companies around the country appear to be determined to make this dream a reality. On the stage at least. The following discussion is inspired by a current trend in contemporary Australian theatre of pro-active racial casting, and will focus specifically on two performances. The term 'desire' is in itself terribly slippery and the following banter positions the term in two quite different contexts. Firstly I look at desire in terms of a post-colonial concept of 'desire for the other' and how erotic desire in the performance text can problematise some tenets of post-colonial theory. Secondly, I look at the political desires of theatre companies who engage in this pro-diversity casting practise. Finally, I see these various desires intersecting with a larger community desire for reconciliation. In the space of one month on the east-coast of Australia there have been three productions by major theatre companies of Shakespearean texts in which indigenous actors have constituted at least half the cast: Romeo and Juliet produced by La Boîte and Kooemba Jdarra in Brisbane; As You Like It produced by Company B Belvoir; and Romeo and Juliet in Black and White produced by the Bell Shakespeare Company. My critical probe was left twitching by the observation of this shared element, spanning three different companies and in such a short period of time; I began to muse at what was fuelling this wonderful trend. I started to wonder about the implications of having 'racially marked' actors performing texts which have erotic desire as their central theme. The temptation to draw on the cultural currency of Benetton iconography, of black and white lips meeting in the perfect display of reciprocal desire is impossible to resist. Yet as Ebony and Ivory-esque as these productions may appear, one needs to consider whether this trend perpetuates an infatuation with a cultural 'other', thus maintaining the much touted, and arguably damaging, fetishistic approach to difference. Or alternatively, does this trend signal a genuine desire, a practical attempt at racial reconciliation? The following will discuss two of the three performances: Romeo and Juliet (La Boîte/Kooemba Jdarra) and As You Like It. Desire for the 'Cultural Other' or simply a yearning between lovers? A great deal of post-colonial theory refers to an intense desire for a cultural 'other'. Robert Young goes so far as to say that being "sick with desire for the other" is a condition which actually defines 'Englishness' (2). It would seem that in both As You Like It and Romeo and Juliet, being sick with desire for another is a core activity for the major characters. Does this mean, then, that casting the desiring couple with one black actor and one white actor in fact fits the model suggested by Young? Perhaps. Yet there is something different in the desires between Rosalind and Orlando and Romeo and Juliet. The condition Young outlines assumes a one-sided desire where the look at the other is through a one-way mirror. However, desire between these couples in question (Romeo/Juliet, Rosalind/Orlando) is evenly matched, the glass is most certainly two-way. Romeo is as infatuated with Juliet and she is with him, Rosalind is as mad about Orlando as he is about her. In fact for both plays to reach their climax it is absolutely crucial that desire between these couples does strike an equilibrium. For Rosalind and Orlando their equally overwhelming desires unite them forever in marriage; for Romeo and Juliet, their reciprocally insatiable desires leave them united forever in death. For both plot-lines to reach fruition, it is imperative that each side of the couple is as 'sick with desire' as their lover is. Certainly, a white Romeo spies on a black Juliet, but his gaze is ultimately returned. A white Orlando is lost in the eyes of a black Rosalind, but her eyes are wide open, similarly glazed with desire. The idea of being sick with desire for a cultural 'other' would thus seem to be made redundant by the mutual mirroring of desire in these cross-cultural performances. To be sick with desire for a cultural other also infers an even balance of 'other' and 'non-other'. Productions of Shakespearean plays often analysed in a post-colonial context like The Tempest or Othello, in which individual characters are set as 'other' against a "notional singularity" (Young 4), would certainly sustain an unequal balance of 'different' and 'normal'. Again though, there is something different about these two productions of As You Like It and Romeo and Juliet. As opposed to setting a single 'other' against many, both of these productions set up an indigenous family. I would suggest that by casting entire families with indigenous actors in these shows, the identity-forming structure suggested by Young is irrevocably confused; the 'notional singularity' is made redundant by the presence of more than one actor of colour on the stage. As opposed to setting a single 'other' as an object of desire to be fetishised by a majority of 'non-other', both of these productions cast almost equal numbers of indigenous and non-indigenous actors. Political desires: to be seen or not to be seen, that is the question. Having noted some of the theoretical and performative implications of desire in these two productions, I will turn now to the question of political desires and the desire for racial reconciliation. How does the political desire of a theatre company who might cast a show in this way intersect with desire in the text itself? In her introduction to Erotic Politics, Susan Zimmerman asks, "what is the relationship between politics and desire [?]" (1). The most important part of her response for my purposes here is that "the inter-subjective realm of desire connects to the public, political domain" (1). As noted above, the theatre performance itself embodies this connection through its very public display of a character's personal desires. However, the public display of the theatre company's political desire in these productions is also worth discussion. La Boîte/Kooemba Jdarra and Company B Belvoir differ in their public articulation of the politics behind the casting decision. In a statement which reinforces the desire to create a symbiotic link between politics and text, La Boîte director Sue Rider says, "as they [the Montagues and Capulets] reach towards the first tentative expression of true reconciliation, we know this is not the end. It is just the beginning" (Rider, Romeo and Juliet Programme). In keeping with the collaborative effort between the two companies, it is noteworthy also that the Chair of Kooemba Jdarra, Glenis Charlton, offers on the same page of the programme a brief statement including that "our hope is that the themes of prejudice, misunderstanding and the need for reconciliation within the play strike a resonant chord with today's audience". The desire of both companies to publicly announce their political aims was part and parcel of the production, a mirror for reconciliation in the text itself. In contrast to the publicly clear political desires of La Boîte and Kooemba Jdarra, Neil Armfield makes no reference whatsoever to race or reconciliation in his "Director's Note". However, the impact of such casting, regardless of whether it is publicly articulated by the company, does not pass by unobserved. In his review for The Australian of As You Like It, John McCallum notes that "the father, the exiled Duke, is played by another Aboriginal actor, Bob Maza, which gives the play's theme of reconciliation a contemporary focus. There is a multiplication of sexual as well as racial complications" (12). Indeed extra-textual discussions, those conversations which take place in newspaper reviews, in the foyer at intermission, over inner-city coffee tables, in kitchens, offices and on share-house verandahs are critical sites of cultural negotiation. That McCallum makes public the political implications of such casting in relation to the text is significant. Although the political desire of Company B Belvoir may have been made consciously ambiguous, the desire by the public to interpret the casting decision in relation to current political climates is inevitable. As is the disclaimer for most discussions which merely touch on a subject of much greater magnitude, this brief essay has overlooked a number of crucial elements which demand further investigation. Of special importance is how gender might impact upon desire in this context; both Rosalind and Juliet are played by indigenous actors (although the situation is reversed in the Bell Shakespeare Company's Romeo and Juliet in Black and White). Also, the question of funding bodies and their desire to fund projects which address race-based issues should necessarily be considered in any discussion which conjoins political and textual desires. Instead I will finish by reminding the reader of the visual beauty of a mixed cast, of the image of a distinguished Aboriginal Bob Maza jumping the backyard sprinkler, of how our desires for racial reconciliation can be realised in a moment of theatrical magic. Productions such as those discussed here are progressive and instrumental elements in the journey towards reconciliation. Furthermore, the conversations these plays provoke about race in Australia are absolutely essential in counteracting the racist sentiments appearing all too often in our national and local public arena. Performances As You Like It. By William Shakespeare. Performed at Belvoir St Theatre, Sydney. Produced by Company B Belvoir. Featuring Deborah Mailman, Aaron Blabey, Jacek Koman and Bob Maza. Romeo and Juliet. By William Shakespeare. Performed at La Boîte Theatre, Brisbane. Produced by La Boîte and Kooemba Jdarra. Featuring Maria Tusa, Christopher Morris, Roxanne McDonald and Damien Garvey. McCallum, John. Rev. of As You Like It, by William Shakespeare. Company B Belvoir. Belvoir Street Theatre, Sydney. The Australian 8 May 1999: 12. Rider, Sue. "Director's Note." Romeo and Juliet Programme. Brisbane: La Boite Theatre, 1999. Young, Robert J.C. Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race. London: Routledge, 1995. Zimmerman, Susan, ed. Introduction. Erotic Politics: Desire on the Renaissance Stage. New York: Routledge, 1992. 1-11. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Melissa Western. "Can't We Talk It Over in Bed?: Desiring Reconciliation in Recent Australian Theatre Productions of As You Like It and Romeo and Juliet." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.5 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9907/theatre.php>. Chicago style: Melissa Western, "Can't We Talk It Over in Bed?: Desiring Reconciliation in Recent Australian Theatre Productions of As You Like It and Romeo and Juliet," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 5 (1999), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9907/theatre.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Melissa Western. (1999) Can't we talk it over in bed?: desiring reconciliation in recent Australian theatre productions of As You Like It and Romeo and Juliet. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(5). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9907/theatre.php> ([your date of access]).

Introduction‘Dream’ has been researched across numerous fields in its multiplicity within both a physical and emotional capacity. For Pagel et al., there is no fixed definition of what ‘dream’ is or are. However, in an advertising context, ’dream’ is the idealised version of our desires, re-visualised in real life (Coombes and Batchelor 103). It could be said that for countless consumers, advertising imagery has elicited dreams of living the perfect life and procuring material pleasures (Manca et al.; Hood). Goodis asserts, “advertising doesn’t always mirror how people are acting but how they are dreaming, in a sense what we are doing is wrapping up your emotions and selling them back to you” (qtd. in Back and Quaade 65). One component of this notion of ‘dream’ in advertising is captured by wishful images of the face and body in their ‘perfect form’ presented in a field of other beauty ideals. For our purposes, ‘dream’ is a “philosophical concept” (Pagel et al. 14) by which dreams are a series of aspirations and desires that consumers internalise, while at the same time, find difficult to achieve. ‘Dream’, then, will be used to critically explore how the beauty and advertising industries collectively employ ethnic ambiguity in addition to other tactics and strategies to sell us dream-like visions of idealised beauty. Forever Dreaming: The Introduction of Ethnic AmbiguityWe can link dreams to beauty as both areas of analysis contain many cultural interpretations and can be deconstructed to reveal different meanings (Sontag). In many ways, beauty is another dream and Sontag notes that the concept of beauty is often linked to certain physical traits that an individual possesses. These physical traits are capitalised upon by product marketing by which Hood claims, aims to enhance one, or even more, of them. For example, lipstick is not marketed as simply as a mixture of wax and pigment but rather a way to “obtain beauty, find romance or gain confidence” (7). As a result, global beauty brands can find long term marketing success through meaningful product marketing. This long-term marketing success relies on influencing human behaviour and perceptions. As a result of meaningful marketing, consumers may find themselves driven to purchase implicit qualities in products advertised to reflect their dreams (Hood).Following the 1980s, this version of meaningful marketing has become a driving purpose for advertising agencies around the globe (Steel). Advertising agencies rely on deeper human insights, identifying latent desires to create a brief that must ultimately sell a dream (Steel). The ideal strategy needs to define something that will build brand loyalty and encourage consumers to have a symbiotic relationship connecting their dreams with the product being sold. As Hood argues, “advertising consists of selling not just things but also dreams”. While this concept is one that “some see as inherently damning”, it is also inherently necessary (7). We understand that people are emotional beings, investing in the artefacts they build, obtain or use with significance “beyond merely utilitarian” (7). For these reasons, beauty advertisers act as the purveyors of dreams in the form of physical perfection as an articulation of consumer’s own aspirations of beauty.These aspirations of dream beauty are a direct representation of our thoughts and feelings. As such, it should be noted that we as consumers are often encouraged to draw inspiration from imagery that is often times seen as ethnically ambiguous. “Ethnic ambiguity” is the absence of any one prominent ethnic or racial feature that is easily discernible to one specific group (Garcia 234; Harrison et al.). An example of this ethnic ambiguity can be seen in marketing campaigns by high end makeup artist and her eponymous range of cosmetics, Charlotte Tilbury. Most notably, in a 2015 launch for her “Makeup Wardrobe”, Tilbury’s makeup palettes boasted 10 aspirational ‘looks’ and personas that could be achieved simply through purchase. The images of women featured on a figurative ‘wheel of fortune’ digital display used to market products online. This digital ‘wheel of fortune’ comprised of ethnically ambiguous models against descriptive persona’s such as “The Dolce Vita” and “The Glamour Muse”. These kinds of digital marketing tools required consumers to make a decision based on what their dream ‘look’ is through an ethnically ambiguous lens and from here are guided to purchase their desired aesthetic. Like Charlotte Tilbury, the beauty industry has seen a growing body of cosmetic brands that employ ethnic ambiguity to sell dreams of homogenised beauty. We will see the ways in which modern day beauty brands, such as Kylie Jenner Cosmetics and Fenty Beauty have come to adopt ethnic ambiguity or embrace entire ethnic and racial groups in order to expand their consumer influence.Aspirational Ambiguity: Dreams of DisempowermentSince the early 2000s, beauty advertising has seen a prominent rise in the use of ethnically ambiguous models. Some see this as an effort to answer the global desire for diversity and inclusion. However, the notion that beauty standards transcend racial boundaries and is inclusive, is simply another form of appropriating and fetishising ethnicity (R. Sengupta). In many ways, these manufactured dream-like versions of beauty have evolved to reach wider markets, in the hope that consumers will be emboldened to both embrace their racial heritage, and at the same time conform to homogenised standards of beauty (Frith et al.; Harrison et al.).In this bid to diversify and extend consumer reach, there are three prominent reasons why ethnically ambiguous models are more likely to be featured over models whose African, Indigenous, and/or Asian heritage is more prominent. Firstly, ethnically ambiguous models do not seem to conform to a particular notion of what is considered beautiful. For many decades, popular culture has been saturated with images of thin, of young, of narrow noses and hips, of blonde, blue eyes, and Caucasian hair textures (Harrison et al.; Hunter; Saraswati). These Westernised beauty ideals have been historically shaped through years of colonial influence, grounded in an imbalance of power and imposed to create a culture of dominance and oppression (Saraswati). Secondly, ethnic models are featured to convey “the sense of the ‘exotic’, and their ‘otherness’ acts to normalise and entrench the dominant ideal of white beauty” (qtd. in Redmond 175). ‘Otherness’ can be defined as the opposite of the majority, in Westernised society this ‘other’ can mean “people who are other than white, male, able bodied, heterosexual” (qtd. in Graycar 74). This ‘otherness’ showcased by ethnically ambiguous models draws viewers in. Physical features that were possessed by one specific ethnic group such as African, Asian, Latinx or Indigenous peoples have now become blended and are no longer confined to one race. Additionally, ethnically ambiguous models enable white consumers to dream about an exotic local or lifestyle, while at the same time providing ethnic audiences a way to see themselves.Finally, it is undeniable that ethnically ambiguous and mixed-race models have become desirable due to a historical preference for light skin (Saraswati). The visual references of light-skinned beauty epitomise a colonial dream and this standardisation has been transferred to indigenous peoples, or ethnic minorities in Western countries. According to Harrison et al, “marketers use mixed-race representations as cultural currency by mythologising mixed-race bodies as the new beauty standard” to represent a racial bridge, “tailored to ameliorate perceived racial divides” (503). Therefore, ethnically ambiguous models have an assumed advantage over their racially dominant counterparts, because they appear to straddle various racial boundaries. They are constructed to embody whomever, from wherever and whenever, fetishising their roleplay for the industry, when it pleases. This further exoticises multi-racial beauty models and renders them a commodified fantasy for many consumers alike. The continued commodification of ethnic ambiguity is problematic as it exploits models with distinctly mixed-race heritage to continue to sell images of white-washed beauty (Solomon et al.). An argument could be made that scarcity contributes to mixed-race models’ value, and therefore the total number of advertising opportunities that are offered to mixed-race models remains limited. To date, numerous studies highlight a limited use of racially diverse models within the beauty industry and does not reflect the growing global body of diverse consumers with purchasing power (Wasylkiw et al.; Redmond; Johnson; Jung and Lee; Frith et al.). In fact, prior to globalisation, Yan and Bissell claim that “each culture had a unique standard of attractiveness, derived from traditional views about beauty as well as the physical features of the people” (197) and over time the construction of dream beauty is characterised using Western features combined with exoticised traits of indigenous ethnic groups. Akinro and Mbunyuza-Memani claim that this “trend of normalising white or 'western' feminine looks as the standard of beauty” has pervaded a number of these indigenous cultures, eventually disseminated through the media as the ultimate goal (308). It can also be argued that the “growing inclusion of mixed-race models in ads is driven less by the motivation to portray diversity and driven more by pragmatism,” and in a more practical sense has implications for the “financial future of the advertised brands and the advertising industry as a whole” (Harrison et al. 513). As a result, uses of mixed-race models “are rather understood as palatable responses within dominant white culture to racial and ethnic minority populations growing in … cultural prominence” (513) in a tokenistic bid to sell a dream of unified beauty.The Dream Girl: Normalisation of Mixed-RaceIn 2017, an article in CNN’s Style section highlighted the growing number of mixed-race models in Japan’s fashion and beauty industry as a modern-day phenomenon from Japan’s interlocking history with the United States (Chung and Ogura). These beauty and fashion influencers refer to themselves as hafu, an exclusionary term that historically represented an “othered” minority of mixed-race heritage in Japanese society signalling complex and troubled interactions with majority Japanese (Oshima). The complications once associated with the term ‘hafu’ are now being reclaimed by bi-racial beauty and fashion models and as such, these models are beginning to defy categorisation and, in some ways, national identity because of their chameleon-like qualities. However, while there is an increasing use of mixed-race Japanese models, everyday mixed-race women are regularly excluded within general society; which highlights the incongruent nature of ‘half’ identity. And yet there is an increasing preference and demand from fashion and beauty outlets to feature them in Japanese and Western popular culture (Harrison et al.; Chung and Ogura). Numéro Tokyo’s editorial director Sayumi Gunji, estimated that almost 30-40 per cent of runway models in present day Japan, identify as either bi-racial mixed-race or multi-racial (Chung and Ogura).Gunji claims:"Almost all top models in the their 20s are hafu, especially the top models of popular fashion magazines ... . [In] the Japanese media and market, a foreigner's flawless looks aren't as readily accepted -- they feel a little distant. But biracial models, who are taller, have bigger eyes, higher noses [and] Barbie-doll-like looks, are admired because they are dreamy looking but not totally different from the Japanese. That's the key to their popularity," she adds. (Qtd. in Chung and Ogura)The "dreamy look" that Gunji describes is attributed to a historical preference toward light skin and a kind of willingness and sensuality, that once, only white models could be seen to tout (Frith et al. 58). Frith et al. and O’Barr discuss that beauty in Japanese advertising mirrors “the way women are portrayed in advertising in the West” (qtd. in Frith et al. 58). The emergence of hafu in Japanese beauty advertising sees these two worlds, a mixture of doll-like and sensual beauty, converging to create a dream-like standard for Japanese consumers. The growing presence of Japanese-American models such as Kiko Mizuhara and Jun Hasegawa are both a direct example of the unattainable ‘dreamy look’ that pervades the Japanese beauty industry. Given this ongoing trend of mixed-race models in beauty advertising, a recent article on Refinery29 talks about the significance of how mixed-race models are disassembling their once marginalised status.A. Sengupta writes:In contrast to passing, in which mixedness was marginalized and hidden, visibly multiracial models now feature prominently in affirmative sites of social norms. Multiracial looks are normalized, and, by extension, mixed identity is validated. There’s no cohesive social movement behind it, but it’s a quiet sea change that’s come with broadened beauty standards and the slow dismantling of social hierarchies.Another example of the normalisation in multi-racial identity is Adwoa Aboah, a mixed-race British model and feminist activist who has been featured on the covers of numerous fashion publications and on runways worldwide. In British Vogue’s December 2017 issue, titled “Great BRITAIN”, Adwoa Aboah achieved front cover status, alongside her image featured other politically powerful names, perhaps suggesting that Aboah represents not only the changing face of a historically white publication but as an embodiment of an increasingly diverse consumer landscape. Not only is she seen as both as a voice for those disenfranchised by the industry, by which she is employed, but as a symbol of new dreams. To conclude this section, it seems the evolution of advertising’s inclusion of multi-racial models reveals a progressive step change for the beauty industry. However, relying simply on the faces of ethnically ambiguous talent has become a covert way to fulfil consumer’s desire for diversity without wholly dismantling the destructive hierarchies of white dominance. Over this time however, new beauty creations have entered the market and with it two modern day icons.Architecting Black Beauty through the American DreamAccording to Kiick, the conception of the ‘American Dream’ is born out of a desire to “seek out a more advantageous existence than the current situation” (qtd. in Manca et al. 84). As a result of diligent hard work, Americans were rewarded with an opportunity for a better life (Manca et al.). Kylie Jenner’s entry into the beauty space seemed like a natural move for the then eighteen-year-old; it was a new-age representation of the ‘American Dream’ (Robehmed 2018). In less than five years, Jenner has created Kylie Cosmetics, a beauty empire that has since amassed a global consumer base, helping her earn billionaire status. A more critical investigation into Jenner’s performance however illustrates that her eponymous range of beauty products sells dreams which have been appropriated from black culture (Phelps). The term cultural appropriation refers to the way dominant cultures “adopt and adapt certain aspects of another’s culture and make it their own” (qtd. in Han 9). In Jenner’s case, her connection to ethnic Armenian roots through her sisters Kourtney, Kim, and Khloe Kardashian have significantly influenced her expression of ‘othered’ culture and moreover ethnic beauty ideals such as curvier body shapes and textured hair. Jenner’s beauty advertisements have epitomised what it means to be black in America, cherry picking racialised features of black women (namely their lips, hips/buttocks and afro-braided hairstyles) and rearticulated them through a white lens. The omission of the ‘black experience’ in her promotion of product is problematic for three reasons. Firstly, representing groups or people without invitation enables room for systemic stereotyping (Han). Secondly, this stereotyping can lead to continued marginalisation of minority cultures (Kulchyski). And finally, the over exaggeration of physical attributes, such as Jenner’s lips, hips and buttocks, reinforces her complicity in exoticising and fetishising the “other”. As a result, consumers of social media beauty advertising may pay less attention to cultural appropriation if they are already unaware that the beauty imagery they consume is based on the exploitation of black culture.Another perspective on Jenner’s use of black culture is in large part due to her cultural appreciation of black beauty. This meaning behind Jenner’s cultural appreciation can be attributed to the inherent value placed on another person’s culture, in the recognition of the positive qualities and the celebration of all aspects of that culture (Han). This is evidenced by her recent addition of cosmetic products for darker complexions (Brown). However, Jenner’s supposed fascination with black culture may be in large part due to the environment in which she was nurtured (Phelps). As Phelps reveals, “consider the cultural significance of the Kardashian family, and the various ways in which the Kardashian women, who are tremendously wealthy and present as white, have integrated elements of black culture as seemingly “natural” in their public bodily performances” (9). Although the Kardashian-Jenner family have faced public backlash for their collective appropriation they have acquired a tremendous “capital gain in terms of celebrity staying power and hyper-visibility” (Phelps 9). Despite the negative attention, Kylie Jenner’s expression of black culture has resurfaced the very issues that had once been historically deemed insignificant. In spite of Jenner’s cultural appropriation of black beauty, her promotion through Kylie Cosmetics continues to sell dreams of idealised beauty through the white lens.In comparison, Rihanna Fenty’s cosmetic empire has been touted as a celebration of diversity and inclusion for modern-age beauty. Unlike Kylie Cosmetics, Fenty’s eponymous brand has become popular for its broader message of inclusivity across both skin tone, body shape and gender. Upon her product release, Fenty Beauty acknowledged a growing body of diverse consumers and as a direct response to feature models of diverse skin tones, cultural background and racial heritage. Perhaps more importantly, Fenty Beauty’s challenge to the ongoing debate around diversity and inclusion has been in stark contrast to Kylie Jenner’s ongoing appropriation of black culture. Images featured at the first brand and product launch of Fenty Beauty and in present day advertising, show South Sudanese model Duckie Thot and hijab-wearing model Halima Aden as central characters within the Fenty narrative, illustrating that inclusion need not remain ambiguous and diversity need not be appropriated. Fenty’s initial product line up included ninety products, but most notably, the Pro Filt’r foundation caused the most publicity. Since its introduction in 2017, the foundation collection contained range of 40 (now 50) inclusive foundation shades, 13 of these shades were designed to cater for much darker complexions, an industry first (Walters). As a result of the brand’s inclusion of diverse product shades and models, Fenty Beauty has been shown to push boundaries within the beauty industry and the social media landscape (Walters). Capitalising on all races and expanding beauty ideals, Fenty’s showcase of beauty subscribes to the notion that for women everywhere in the world, their dreams can and do come true. In conclusion, Fenty Beauty has played a critical role in re-educating global consumers about diversity in beauty (Walters) but perhaps more importantly Rihanna, by definition, has become a true embodiment of the ‘American Dream’.Conclusion: Future Dreams in BeautyIt is undeniable that beauty advertising has remained complicit in selling unattainable dreams to consumers. In the context of ‘dream’ as a philosophical concept, it is more important than ever to ensure our dreams are mirrored, not as an ambiguous body of consumers, but as diverse and unique individuals. Changemakers in the industry such as Fenty Beauty are challenging this status quo and beauty advertising in general will have to evolve their strategy in a bid to answer to an increasingly globalised market. It must be reinforced however, that while “beauty companies and advertisers work effectively to reach a growingly multicultural market, scholars have a responsibility to assess the ramifications that accompany such change,” (Harrison et al. 518). If advertising’s role is to mirror consumers’ dreams then, our roles as dreamers have never been so important. ReferencesAkinro, Ngozi, and Lindani Mbunyuza-Memani. "Black Is Not Beautiful: Persistent Messages and the Globalization of 'White' Beauty in African Women’s Magazines." 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What strikes me about the habits of the people who spend so much time on the Net—well, it’s so new that we don't know what will come next—is in fact precisely how niche in character it is. You ask people what nets they are on, and they’re all so specialised! The Argentines on the Argentine Net and so forth. And it’s particularly the Argentines who are not in Argentina. (Anderson, in Gower, par. 5) The preceding quotation, taken from his 1996 interview with Eric Gower, sees Benedict Anderson reflecting on the formation of imagined, transnational communities on the Internet. Anderson is, of course, famous for his work on how nationalism, as an “imagined community,” gets constructed through the shared consumption of print media (6-7, 26-27); although its readers will never all see each other face to face, people consuming a newspaper or novel in a shared language perceive themselves as members of a collective. In this more recent interview, Anderson recognised the specific groupings of people in online communities: Argentines who find themselves outside of Argentina link up online in an imagined diaspora community. Over the course of the last decade and a half since Anderson spoke about Argentinian migrants and diaspora communities, we have witnessed an exponential growth of new forms of digital communication, including social networking sites (e.g. Facebook), Weblogs, micro-blogging (e.g. Twitter), and video-sharing sites (e.g. YouTube). Alongside these new means of communication, our current epoch of globalisation is also characterised by migration flows across, and between, all continents. In his book Modernity at Large, Arjun Appadurai recognised that “the twin forces of mass migration and electronic mediation” have altered the ways the imagination operates. Furthermore, these two pillars, human motion and digital mediation, are in constant “flux” (44). The circulation of people and digitally mediatised content proceeds across and beyond boundaries of the nation-state and provides ground for alternative community and identity formations. Appadurai’s intervention has resulted in increasing awareness of local, transnational, and global networking flows of people, ideas, and culturally hybrid artefacts. In this article, we analyse the various innovative tactics taken up by migrant youth to imagine digital diasporas. Inspired by scholars such as Appadurai, Avtar Brah and Paul Gilroy, we tease out—from a postcolonial perspective—how digital diasporas have evolved over time from a more traditional understanding as constituted either by a vertical relationship to a distant homeland or a horizontal connection to the scattered transnational community (see Safran, Cohen) to move towards a notion of “hypertextual diaspora.” With hypertextual diaspora, these central axes which constitute the understanding of diaspora are reshuffled in favour of more rhizomatic formations where affiliations, locations, and spaces are constantly destabilised and renegotiated. Needless to say, diasporas are not homogeneous and resist generalisation, but in this article we highlight common ways in which young migrant Internet users renew the practices around diaspora connections. Drawing from research on various migrant populations around the globe, we distinguish three common strategies: (1) the forging of transnational public spheres, based on maintaining virtual social relations by people scattered across the globe; (2) new forms of digital diasporic youth branding; and (3) the cultural production of innovative hypertexts in the context of more rhizomatic digital diaspora formations. Before turning to discuss these three strategies, the potential of a postcolonial framework to recognise multiple intersections of diaspora and digital mediation is elaborated. Hypertext as a Postcolonial Figuration Postcolonial scholars, Appadurai, Gilroy, and Brah among others, have been attentive to diasporic experiences, but they have paid little attention to the specificity of digitally mediated diaspora experiences. As Maria Fernández observes, postcolonial studies have been “notoriously absent from electronic media practice, theory, and criticism” (59). Our exploration of what happens when diasporic youth go online is a first step towards addressing this gap. Conceptually, this is clearly an urgent need since diasporas and the digital inform each other in the most profound and dynamic of ways: “the Internet virtually recreates all those sites which have metaphorically been eroded by living in the diaspora” (Ponzanesi, “Diasporic Narratives” 396). Writings on the Internet tend to favour either the “gold-rush” mentality, seeing the Web as a great equaliser and bringer of neoliberal progress for all, or the more pessimistic/technophobic approach, claiming that technologically determined spaces are exclusionary, white by default, masculine-oriented, and heteronormative (Everett 30, Van Doorn and Van Zoonen 261). For example, the recent study by Ito et al. shows that young people are not interested in merely performing a fiction in a parallel online world; rather, the Internet gets embedded in their everyday reality (Ito et al. 19-24). Real-life commercial incentives, power hierarchies, and hegemonies also get extended to the digital realm (Schäfer 167-74). Online interaction remains pre-structured, based on programmers’ decisions and value-laden algorithms: “people do not need a passport to travel in cyberspace but they certainly do need to play by the rules in order to function electronically” (Ponzanesi, “Diasporic Narratives” 405). We began our article with a statement by Benedict Anderson, stressing how people in the Argentinian diaspora find their space on the Internet. Online avenues increasingly allow users to traverse and add hyperlinks to their personal websites in the forms of profile pages, the publishing of preferences, and possibilities of participating in and affiliating with interest-based communities. Online journals, social networking sites, streaming audio/video pages, and online forums are all dynamic hypertexts based on Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) coding. HTML is the protocol of documents that refer to each other, constituting the backbone of the Web; every text that you find on the Internet is connected to a web of other texts through hyperlinks. These links are in essence at equal distance from each other. As well as being a technological device, hypertext is also a metaphor to think with. Figuratively speaking, hypertext can be understood as a non-hierarchical and a-centred modality. Hypertext incorporates multiplicity; different pathways are possible simultaneously, as it has “multiple entryways and exits” and it “connects any point to any other point” (Landow 58-61). Feminist theorist Donna Haraway recognised the dynamic character of hypertext: “the metaphor of hypertext insists on making connections as practice.” However, she adds, “the trope does not suggest which connections make sense for which purposes and which patches we might want to follow or avoid.” We can begin to see the value of approaching the Internet from the perspective of hypertext to make an “inquiry into which connections matter, why, and for whom” (128-30). Postcolonial scholar Jaishree K. Odin theorised how hypertextual webs might benefit subjects “living at the borders.” She describes how subaltern subjects, by weaving their own hypertextual path, can express their multivocality and negotiate cultural differences. She connects the figure of hypertext with that of the postcolonial: The hypertextual and the postcolonial are thus part of the changing topology that maps the constantly shifting, interpenetrating, and folding relations that bodies and texts experience in information culture. Both discourses are characterised by multivocality, multilinearity, openendedness, active encounter, and traversal. (599) These conceptions of cyberspace and its hypertextual foundations coalesce with understandings of “in-between”, “third”, and “diaspora media space” as set out by postcolonial theorists such as Bhabha and Brah. Bhabha elaborates on diaspora as a space where different experiences can be articulated: “These ‘in-between’ spaces provide the terrain for elaborating strategies of selfhood—singular or communal—that initiate new signs of identity, and innovative sites of collaboration, and contestation (4). (Dis-)located between the local and the global, Brah adds: “diaspora space is the point at which boundaries of inclusion and exclusion, of belonging and otherness, of ‘us’ and ‘them,’ are contested” (205). As youths who were born in the diaspora have begun to manifest themselves online, digital diasporas have evolved from transnational public spheres to differential hypertexts. First, we describe how transnational public spheres form one dimension of the mediation of diasporic experiences. Subsequently, we focus on diasporic forms of youth branding and hypertext aesthetics to show how digitally mediated practices can go beyond and transgress traditional formations of diasporas as vertically connected to a homeland and horizontally distributed in the creation of transnational public spheres. Digital Diasporas as Diasporic Public Spheres Mass migration and digital mediation have led to a situation where relationships are maintained over large geographical distances, beyond national boundaries. The Internet is used to create transnational imagined audiences formed by dispersed people, which Appadurai describes as “diasporic public spheres”. He observes that, as digital media “increasingly link producers and audiences across national boundaries, and as these audiences themselves start new conversations between those who move and those who stay, we find a growing number of diasporic public spheres” (22). Media and communication researchers have paid a lot of attention to this transnational dimension of the networking of dispersed people (see Brinkerhoff, Alonso and Oiarzabal). We focus here on three examples from three different continents. Most famously, media ethnographers Daniel Miller and Don Slater focused on the Trinidadian diaspora. They describe how “de Rumshop Lime”, a collective online chat room, is used by young people at home and abroad to “lime”, meaning to chat and hang out. Describing the users of the chat, “the webmaster [a Trini living away] proudly proclaimed them to have come from 40 different countries” (though massively dominated by North America) (88). Writing about people in the Greek diaspora, communication researcher Myria Georgiou traced how its mediation evolved from letters, word of mouth, and bulletins to satellite television, telephone, and the Internet (147). From the introduction of the Web, globally dispersed people went online to get in contact with each other. Meanwhile, feminist film scholar Anna Everett draws on the case of Naijanet, the virtual community of “Nigerians Living Abroad”. She shows how Nigerians living in the diaspora from the 1990s onwards connected in global transnational communities, forging “new black public spheres” (35). These studies point at how diasporic people have turned to the Internet to establish and maintain social relations, give and receive support, and share general concerns. Establishing transnational communicative networks allows users to imagine shared audiences of fellow diasporians. Diasporic imagination, however, goes beyond singular notions of this more traditional idea of the transnational public sphere, as it “has nowadays acquired a great figurative flexibility which mostly refers to practices of transgression and hybridisation” (Ponzanesi, “Diasporic Subjects” 208). Below we recognise another dimension of digital diasporas: the articulation of diasporic attachment for branding oneself. Mocro and Nikkei: Diasporic Attachments as a Way to Brand Oneself In this section, we consider how hybrid cultural practices are carried out over geographical distances. Across spaces on the Web, young migrants express new forms of belonging in their dealing with the oppositional motivations of continuity and change. The generational specificity of this experience can be drawn out on the basis of the distinction between “roots” and “routes” made by Paul Gilroy. In his seminal book The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, Gilroy writes about black populations on both sides of the Atlantic. The double consciousness of migrant subjects is reflected by affiliating roots and routes as part of a complex cultural identification (19 and 190). As two sides of the same coin, roots refer to the stable and continuing elements of identities, while routes refer to disruption and change. Gilroy criticises those who are “more interested in the relationship of identity to roots and rootedness than in seeing identity as a process of movement and mediation which is more appropriately approached via the homonym routes” (19). He stresses the importance of not just focusing on one of either roots or routes but argues for an examination of their interplay. Forming a response to discrimination and exclusion, young migrants in online networks turn to more positive experiences such as identification with one’s heritage inspired by generational specific cultural affiliations. Here, we focus on two examples that cross two continents, showing routed online attachments to “be(com)ing Mocro”, and “be(coming) Nikkei”. Figure 1. “Leipe Mocro Flavour” music video (Ali B) The first example, being and becoming “Mocro”, refers to a local, bi-national consciousness. The term Mocro originated on the streets of the Netherlands during the late 1990s and is now commonly understood as a Dutch honorary nickname for youths with Moroccan roots living in the Netherlands and Belgium. A 2003 song, Leipe mocro flavour (“Crazy Mocro Flavour”) by Moroccan-Dutch rapper Ali B, familiarised a larger group of people with the label (see Figure 1). Ali B’s song is exemplary for a wider community of youngsters who have come to identify themselves as Mocros. One example is the Marokkanen met Brainz – Hyves (Mo), a community page within the Dutch social networking site Hyves. On this page, 2,200 youths who identify as Mocro get together to push against common stereotypes of Moroccan-Dutch boys as troublemakers and thieves and Islamic Moroccan-Dutch girls as veiled carriers of backward traditions (Leurs, forthcoming). Its description reads, “I assume that this Hyves will be the largest [Mocro community]. Because logically Moroccans have brains” (our translation): What can you find here? Discussions about politics, religion, current affairs, history, love and relationships. News about Moroccan/Arabic Parties. And whatever you want to tell others. Use your brains. Second, “Nikkei” directs our attention to Japanese migrants and their descendants. The Discover Nikkei website, set up by the Japanese American National Museum, provides a revealing description of being and becoming Nikkei: As Nikkei communities form in Japan and throughout the world, the process of community formation reveals the ongoing fluidity of Nikkei populations, the evasive nature of Nikkei identity, and the transnational dimensions of their community formations and what it means to be Nikkei. (Japanese American National Museum) This site was set up by the Japanese American National Museum for Nikkei in the global diaspora to connect and share stories. Nikkei youths of course also connect elsewhere. In her ethnographic online study, Shana Aoyama found that the social networking site Hi5 is taken up in Peru by young people of Japanese heritage as an avenue for identity exploration. She found group confirmation based on the performance of Nikkei-ness, as well as expressions of individuality. She writes, “instead of heading in one specific direction, the Internet use of Nikkei creates a starburst shape of identity construction and negotiation” (119). Mocro-ness and Nikkei-ness are common collective identification markers that are not just straightforward nationalisms. They refer back to different homelands, while simultaneously they also clearly mark one’s situation of being routed outside of this homeland. Mocro stems from postcolonial migratory flows from the Global South to the West. Nikkei-ness relates to the interesting case of the Japanese diaspora, which is little accounted for, although there are many Japanese communities present in North and South America from before the Second World War. The context of Peru is revealing, as it was the first South American country to accept Japanese migrants. It now hosts the second largest South American Japanese diaspora after Brazil (Lama), and Peru’s former president, Alberto Fujimoro, is also of Japanese origin. We can see how the importance of the nation-state gets blurred as diasporic youth, through cultural hybridisation of youth culture and ethnic ties, initiates subcultures and offers resistance to mainstream western cultural forms. Digital spaces are used to exert youthful diaspora branding. Networked branding includes expressing cultural identities that are communal and individual but also both local and global, illustrative of how “by virtue of being global the Internet can gift people back their sense of themselves as special and particular” (Miller and Slater 115). In the next section, we set out how youthful diaspora branding is part of a larger, more rhizomatic formation of multivocal hypertext aesthetics. Hypertext Aesthetics In this section, we set out how an in-between, or “liminal”, position, in postcolonial theory terms, can be a source of differential and multivocal cultural production. Appadurai, Bhabha, and Gilroy recognise that liminal positions increasingly leave their mark on the global and local flows of cultural objects, such as food, cinema, music, and fashion. Here, our focus is on how migrant youths turn to hypertextual forms of cultural production for a differential expression of digital diasporas. Hypertexts are textual fields made up of hyperlinks. Odin states that travelling through cyberspace by clicking and forging hypertext links is a form of multivocal digital diaspora aesthetics: The perpetual negotiation of difference that the border subject engages in creates a new space that demands its own aesthetic. This new aesthetic, which I term “hypertext” or “postcolonial,” represents the need to switch from the linear, univocal, closed, authoritative aesthetic involving passive encounters characterising the performance of the same to that of non-linear, multivocal, open, non-hierarchical aesthetic involving active encounters that are marked by repetition of the same with and in difference. (Cited in Landow 356-7) On their profile pages, migrant youth digitally author themselves in distinct ways by linking up to various sites. They craft their personal hypertext. These hypertexts display multivocal diaspora aesthetics which are personal and specific; they display personal intersections of affiliations that are not easily generalisable. In several Dutch-language online spaces, subjects from Dutch-Moroccan backgrounds have taken up the label Mocro as an identity marker. Across social networking sites such as Hyves and Facebook, the term gets included in nicknames and community pages. Think of nicknames such as “My own Mocro styly”, “Mocro-licious”, “Mocro-chick”. The term Mocro itself is often already multilayered, as it is often combined with age, gender, sexual preference, religion, sport, music, and generationally specific cultural affiliations. Furthermore, youths connect to a variety of groups ranging from feminist interests (“Women in Charge”), Dutch nationalism (“I Love Holland”), ethnic affiliations (“The Moroccan Kitchen”) to clothing (the brand H&M), and global junk food (McDonalds). These diverse affiliations—that are advertised online simultaneously—add nuance to the typical, one-dimensional stereotype about migrant youth, integration, and Islam in the context of Europe and Netherlands (Leurs, forthcoming). On the online social networking site Hi5, Nikkei youths in Peru, just like any other teenagers, express their individuality by decorating their personal profile page with texts, audio, photos, and videos. Besides personal information such as age, gender, and school information, Aoyama found that “a starburst” of diverse affiliations is published, including those that signal Japanese-ness such as the Hello Kitty brand, anime videos, Kanji writing, kimonos, and celebrities. Also Nikkei hyperlink to elements that can be identified as “Latino” and “Chino” (Chinese) (104-10). Furthermore, users can show their multiple affiliations by joining different “groups” (after which a hyperlink to the group community appears on the profile page). Aoyama writes “these groups stretch across a large and varied scope of topics, including that of national, racial/ethnic, and cultural identities” (2). These examples illustrate how digital diasporas encompass personalised multivocal hypertexts. With the widely accepted adagio “you are what you link” (Adamic and Adar), hypertextual webs can be understood as productions that reveal how diasporic youths choose to express themselves as individuals through complex sets of non-homogeneous identifications. Migrant youth connects to ethnic origin and global networks in eclectic and creative ways. The concept of “digital diaspora” therefore encapsulates both material and virtual (dis)connections that are identifiable through common traits, strategies, and aesthetics. Yet these hypertextual connections are also highly personalised and unique, offering a testimony to the fluid negotiations and intersections between the local and the global, the rooted and the diasporic. Conclusions In this article, we have argued that migrant youths render digital diasporas more complex by including branding and hypertextual aesthetics in transnational public spheres. Digital diasporas may no longer be understood simply in terms of their vertical relations to a homeland or place of origin or as horizontally connected to a clearly marked transnational community; rather, they must also be seen as engaging in rhizomatic digital practices, which reshuffle traditional understandings of origin and belonging. Contemporary youthful digital diasporas are therefore far more complex in their engagement with digital media than most existing theory allows: connections are hybridised, and affiliations are turned into practices of diasporic branding and becoming. There is a generational specificity to multivocal diaspora aesthetics; this specificity lies in the ways migrant youths show communal recognition and express their individuality through hypertext which combines affiliation to their national/ethnic “roots” with an embrace of other youth subcultures, many of them transnational. These two axes are constantly reshuffled and renegotiated online where, thanks to the technological possibilities of HTML hypertext, a whole range of identities and identifications may be brought together at any given time. We trust that these insights will be of interest in future discussion of online networks, transnational communities, identity formation, and hypertext aesthetics where much urgent and topical work remains to be done. References Adamic, Lada A., and Eytan Adar. “You Are What You Link.” 2001 Tenth International World Wide Web Conference, Hong Kong. 26 Apr. 2010. ‹http://www10.org/program/society/yawyl/YouAreWhatYouLink.htm›. Ali B. “Leipe Mocro Flavour.” ALIB.NL / SPEC Entertainment. 2007. 4 Oct. 2010 ‹http://www3.alib.nl/popupAlibtv.php?catId=42&contentId=544›. Alonso, Andoni, and Pedro J. Oiarzabal. Diasporas in the New Media Age. Reno: U of Nevada P, 2010. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Rev. ed. 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Introduction The genealogy of Feminist Standpoint Theory in the 1970s prioritised “locationality”, particularly the recognition of social and historical locations as valuable contribution to knowledge production. Pioneering figures such as Sandra Harding, Dorothy Smith, Patricia Hill Collins, Alison Jaggar, and Donna Haraway have argued that the oppressed must have some means (such as language, cultural practices) to enter the world of the oppressor in order to access some understanding of how the world works from the privileged perspective. In the essay “Meeting at the Edge of Fear: Theory on a World Scale”, the Australian social scientist Raewyn Connell explains that the production of feminist theory almost always comes from the global North. Connell critiques the hegemony of mainstream Northern feminism in her pyramidal model (59), showing how theory/knowledge is produced at the apex (global North) of a pyramid structure and “trickles down” (59) to the global South. Connell refers to a second model called mosaic epistemology which shows that multiple feminist ideologies across global North/South are juxtaposed against each other like tiles, with each specific culture making its own claims to validity.However, Nigerian feminist Bibi Bakare-Yusuf’s reflection on the fluidity of culture in her essay “Fabricating Identities” (5) suggests that fixing knowledge as Northern and Southern—disparate, discrete, and rigidly structured tiles—is also problematic. Connell proposes a third model called solidarity-based epistemology which involves mutual learning and critiquing with a focus on solidarity across differences. However, this is impractical in implementation especially given that feminist nomenclature relies on problematic terms such as “international”, “global North/South”, “transnational”, and “planetary” to categorise difference, spatiality, and temporality, often creating more distance than reciprocal exchange. Geographical specificity can be too limiting, but we also need to acknowledge that it is geographical locationality which becomes disadvantageous to overcome racial, cultural, and gender biases — and here are few examples.Nomenclatures: Global-North and Global South ParadigmThe global North/South terminology differentiating the two regions according to means of trade and relative wealth emerged from the Brandt Report’s delineation of the North as wealthy and South as impoverished in 1980s. Initially, these terms were a welcome repudiation of the hierarchical nomenclature of “developed” and “developing” nations. Nevertheless, the categories of North and South are problematic because of increased socio-economic heterogeneity causing erasure of local specificities without reflecting microscopic conflicts among feminists within the global North and the global South. Some feminist terms such as “Third World feminism” (Narayan), “global feminism” (Morgan), or “local feminisms” (Basu) aim to centre women's movements originating outside the West or in the postcolonial context, other labels attempt to making feminism more inclusive or reflective of cross-border linkages. These include “transnational feminism” (Grewal and Kaplan) and “feminism without borders” (Mohanty). In the 1980s, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality garnered attention in the US along with Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), which raised feminists’ awareness of educational, healthcare, and financial disparities among women and the experiences of marginalised people across the globe, leading to an interrogation of the aims and purposes of mainstream feminism. In general, global North feminism refers to white middle class feminist movements further expanded by concerns about civil rights and contemporary queer theory while global South feminism focusses on decolonisation, economic justice, and disarmament. However, the history of colonialism demonstrates that this paradigm is inadequate because the oppression and marginalisation of Black, Indigenous, and Queer activists have been avoided purposely in the homogenous models of women’s oppression depicted by white radical and liberal feminists. A poignant example is from Audre Lorde’s personal account:I wheeled my two-year-old daughter in a shopping cart through a supermarket in Eastchester in 1967, and a little white girl riding past in her mother’s cart calls out excitedly, ‘oh look, Mommy, a baby maid!’ And your mother shushes you, but does not correct you, and so fifteen years later, at a conference on racism, you can still find that story humorous. But I hear your laughter is full of terror and disease. (Lorde)This exemplifies how the terminology global North/South is a problem because there are inequities within the North that are parallel to the division of power and resources between North and South. Additionally, Susan Friedman in Planetary Modernisms observes that although the terms “Global North” and “Global South” are “rhetorically spatial” they are “as geographically imprecise and ideologically weighted as East/West” because “Global North” signifies “modern global hegemony” and “Global South” signifies the “subaltern, … —a binary construction that continues to place the West at the controlling centre of the plot” (Friedman, 123).Focussing on research-activism debate among US feminists, Sondra Hale takes another tack, emphasising that feminism in the global South is more pragmatic than the theory-oriented feminist discourse of the North (Hale). Just as the research-scholarship binary implies myopic assumption that scholarship is a privileged activity, Hale’s observations reveal a reductive assumption in the global North and global South nomenclature that feminism at the margins is theoretically inadequate. In other words, recognising the “North” as the site of theoretical processing is a euphemism for Northern feminists’ intellectual supremacy and the inferiority of Southern feminist praxis. To wit, theories emanating from the South are often overlooked or rejected outright for not aligning with Eurocentric framings of knowledge production, thereby limiting the scope of feminist theories to those that originate in the North. For example, while discussing Indigenous women’s craft-autobiography, the standard feminist approach is to apply Susan Sontag’s theory of gender and photography to these artefacts even though it may not be applicable given the different cultural, social, and class contexts in which they are produced. Consequently, Moroccan feminist Fatima Mernissi’s Islamic methodology (Mernissi), the discourse of land rights, gender equality, kinship, and rituals found in Bina Agarwal’s A Field of One’s Own, Marcia Langton’s “Grandmothers’ Law”, and the reflection on military intervention are missing from Northern feminist theoretical discussions. Moreover, “outsiders within” feminist scholars fit into Western feminist canonical requirements by publishing their works in leading Western journals or seeking higher degrees from Western institutions. In the process, Northern feminists’ intellectual hegemony is normalised and regularised. An example of the wealth of the materials outside of mainstream Western feminist theories may be found in the work of Girindrasekhar Bose, a contemporary of Sigmund Freud, founder of the Indian Psychoanalytic Society and author of the book Concept of Repression (1921). Bose developed the “vagina envy theory” long before the neo-Freudian psychiatrist Karen Horney proposed it, but it is largely unknown in the West. Bose’s article “The Genesis and Adjustment of the Oedipus Wish” discarded Freud’s theory of castration and explained how in the Indian cultural context, men can cherish an unconscious desire to bear a child and to be castrated, implicitly overturning Freud’s correlative theory of “penis envy.” Indeed, the case of India shows that the birth of theory can be traced back to as early as eighth century when study of verbal ornamentation and literary semantics based on the notion of dbvani or suggestion, and the aesthetic theory of rasa or "sentiment" is developed. If theory means systematic reasoning and conceptualising the structure of thought, methods, and epistemology, it exists in all cultures but unfortunately non-Western theory is largely invisible in classroom courses.In the recent book Queer Activism in India, Naisargi Dev shows that the theory is rooted in activism. Similarly, in her essay “Seed and Earth”, Leela Dube reveals how Eastern theories are distorted as they are Westernised. For instance, the “Purusha-Prakriti” concept in Hinduism where Purusha stands for pure consciousness and Prakriti stands for the entire phenomenal world is almost universally misinterpreted in terms of Western binary oppositions as masculine consciousness and feminine creative principle which has led to disastrous consequences including the legitimisation of male control over female sexuality. Dube argues how heteropatriarchy has twisted the Purusha-Prakriti philosophy to frame the reproductive metaphor of the male seed germinating in the female field for the advantage of patrilineal agrarian economies and to influence a homology between reproductive metaphors and cultural and institutional sexism (Dube 22-24). Attempting to reverse such distortions, ecofeminist Vandana Shiva rejects dualistic and exploitative “contemporary Western views of nature” (37) and employs the original Prakriti-Purusha cosmology to construct feminist vision and environmental ethics. Shiva argues that unlike Cartesian binaries where nature or Prakriti is inert and passive, in Hindu Philosophy, Purusha and Prakriti are inseparable and inviolable (Shiva 37-39). She refers to Kalika Purana where it is explained how rivers and mountains have a dual nature. “A river is a form of water, yet is has a distinct body … . We cannot know, when looking at a lifeless shell, that it contains a living being. Similarly, within the apparently inanimate rivers and mountains there dwells a hidden consciousness. Rivers and mountains take the forms they wish” (38).Scholars on the periphery who never migrated to the North find it difficult to achieve international audiences unless they colonise themselves, steeping their work in concepts and methods recognised by Western institutions and mimicking the style and format that western feminist journals follow. The best remedy for this would be to interpret border relations and economic flow between countries and across time through the prism of gender and race, an idea similar to what Sarah Radcliffe, Nina Laurie and Robert Andolina have called the “transnationalization of gender” (160).Migration between Global North and Global SouthReformulation of feminist epistemology might reasonably begin with a focus on migration and gender politics because international and interregional migration have played a crucial role in the production of feminist theories. While some white mainstream feminists acknowledge the long history of feminist imperialism, they need to be more assertive in centralising non-Western theories, scholarship, and institutions in order to resist economic inequalities and racist, patriarchal global hierarchies of military and organisational power. But these possibilities are stymied by migrants’ “de-skilling”, which maintains unequal power dynamics: when migrants move from the global South to global North, many end up in jobs for which they are overqualified because of their cultural, educational, racial, or religious alterity.In the face of a global trend of movement from South to North in search of a “better life”, visual artist Naiza Khan chose to return to Pakistan after spending her childhood in Lebanon before being trained at the University of Oxford. Living in Karachi over twenty years, Khan travels globally, researching, delivering lectures, and holding exhibitions on her art work. Auj Khan’s essay “Peripheries of Thought and Practise in Naiza Khan’s Work” argues: “Khan seems to be going through a perpetual diaspora within an ownership of her hybridity, without having really left any of her abodes. This agitated space of modern hybrid existence is a rich and ripe ground for resolution and understanding. This multiple consciousness is an edge for anyone in that space, which could be effectively made use of to establish new ground”. Naiza Khan’s works embrace loss or nostalgia and a sense of choice and autonomy within the context of unrestricted liminal geographical boundaries.Early work such as “Chastity Belt,” “Heavenly Ornaments”, “Dream”, and “The Skin She Wears” deal with the female body though Khan resists the “feminist artist” category, essentially because of limited Western associations and on account of her paradoxical, diasporic subjectivity: of “the self and the non-self, the doable and the undoable and the anxiety of possibility and choice” (Khan Webpage). Instead, Khan theorises “gender” as “personal sexuality”. The symbolic elements in her work such as corsets, skirts, and slips, though apparently Western, are purposely destabilised as she engages in re-constructing the cartography of the body in search of personal space. In “The Wardrobe”, Khan establishes a path for expressing women’s power that Western feminism barely acknowledges. Responding to the 2007 Islamabad Lal Masjid siege by militants, Khan reveals the power of the burqa to protect Muslim men by disguising their gender and sexuality; women escape the Orientalist gaze. For Khan, home is where her art is—beyond the global North and South dichotomy.In another example of de-centring Western feminist theory, the Indian-British sitar player Anoushka Shankar, who identifies as a radical pro-feminist, in her recent musical album “Land of Gold” produces what Chilla Bulbeck calls “braiding at the borderlands”. As a humanitarian response to the trauma of displacement and the plight of refugees, Shankar focusses on women giving birth during migration and the trauma of being unable to provide stability and security to their children. Grounded in maternal humility, Shankar’s album, composed by artists of diverse background as Akram Khan, singer Alev Lenz, and poet Pavana Reddy, attempts to dissolve boundaries in the midst of chaos—the dislocation, vulnerability and uncertainty experienced by migrants. The album is “a bit of this, and a bit of that” (borrowing Salman Rushdie’s definition of migration in Satanic Verses), both in terms of musical genre and cultural identities, which evokes emotion and subjective fluidity. An encouraging example of truly transnational feminist ethics, Shankar’s album reveals the chasm between global North and global South represented in the tension of a nascent friendship between a white, Western little girl and a migrant refugee child. Unlike mainstream feminism, where migration is often sympathetically feminised and exotified—or, to paraphrase bell hooks, difference is commodified (hooks 373) — Shankar’s album simultaneously exhibits regional, national, and transnational elements. The album inhabits multiple borderlands through musical genres, literature and politics, orality and text, and ethnographic and intercultural encounters. The message is: “the body is a continent / But may your heart always remain the sea" (Shankar). The human rights advocate and lawyer Randa Abdel-Fattah, in her autobiographical novel Does My Head Look Big in This?, depicts herself as “colourful adjectives” (such as “darkies”, “towel-heads”, or the “salami eaters”), painful identities imposed on her for being a Muslim woman of colour. These ultimately empower her to embrace her identity as a Palestinian-Egyptian-Australian Muslim writer (Abdel-Fattah 359). In the process, Abdel-Fattah reveals how mainstream feminism participates in her marginalisation: “You’re constantly made to feel as you’re commenting as a Muslim, and somehow your views are a little bit inferior or you’re somehow a little bit more brainwashed” (Abdel-Fattah, interviewed in 2015).With her parental roots in the global South (Egyptian mother and Palestinian father), Abdel-Fattah was born and brought up in the global North, Australia (although geographically located in global South, Australia is categorised as global North for being above the world average GDP per capita) where she embraced her faith and religious identity apparently because of Islamophobia:I refuse to be an apologist, to minimise this appalling state of affairs… While I'm sick to death, as a Muslim woman, of the hypocrisy and nonsensical fatwas, I confess that I'm also tired of white women who think the answer is flashing a bit of breast so that those "poor," "infantilised" Muslim women can be "rescued" by the "enlightened" West - as if freedom was the sole preserve of secular feminists. (Abdel-Fattah, "Ending Oppression")Abdel-Fattah’s residency in the global North while advocating for justice and equality for Muslim women in both the global North and South is a classic example of the mutual dependency between the feminists in global North and global South, and the need to recognise and resist neoliberal policies applied in by the North to the South. In her novel, sixteen-year-old Amal Mohamed chooses to become a “full-time” hijab wearer in an elite school in Melbourne just after the 9/11 tragedy, the Bali bombings which killed 88 Australians, and the threat by Algerian-born Abdel Nacer Benbrika, who planned to attack popular places in Sydney and Melbourne. In such turmoil, Amal’s decision to wear the hijab amounts to more than resistance to Islamophobia: it is a passionate search for the true meaning of Islam, an attempt to embrace her hybridity as an Australian Muslim girl and above all a step towards seeking spiritual self-fulfilment. As the novel depicts Amal’s challenging journey amidst discouraging and painful, humiliating experiences, the socially constructed “bloody confusing identity hyphens” collapse (5). What remains is the beautiful veil that stands for Amal’s multi-valence subjectivity. The different shades of her hijab reflect different moods and multiple “selves” which are variously tentative, rebellious, romantic, argumentative, spiritual, and ambitious: “I am experiencing a new identity, a new expression of who I am on the inside” (25).In Griffith Review, Randa-Abdel Fattah strongly criticises the book Nine Parts of Desire by Geraldine Brooks, a Wall-Street Journal reporter who travelled from global North to the South to cover Muslim women in the Middle East. Recognising the liberal feminist’s desire to explore the Orient, Randa-Abdel calls the book an example of feminist Orientalism because of the author’s inability to understand the nuanced diversity in the Muslim world, Muslim women’s purposeful downplay of agency, and, most importantly, Brooks’s inevitable veil fetishism in her trip to Gaza and lack of interest in human rights violations of Palestinian women or their lack of access to education and health services. Though Brooks travelled from Australia to the Middle East, she failed to develop partnerships with the women she met and distanced herself from them. This underscores the veracity of Amal’s observation in Abdel Fattah’s novel: “It’s mainly the migrants in my life who have inspired me to understand what it means to be an Aussie” (340). It also suggests that the transnational feminist ethic lies not in the global North and global South paradigm but in the fluidity of migration between and among cultures rather than geographical boundaries and military borders. All this argues that across the imperial cartography of discrimination and oppression, women’s solidarity is only possible through intercultural and syncretistic negotiation that respects the individual and the community.ReferencesAbdel-Fattah, Randa. Does My Head Look Big in This? Sydney: Pan MacMillan Australia, 2005.———. “Ending Oppression in the Middle East: A Muslim Feminist Call to Arms.” ABC Religion and Ethics, 29 April 2013. <http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2013/04/29/3747543.htm>.———. “On ‘Nine Parts Of Desire’, by Geraldine Brooks.” Griffith Review. <https://griffithreview.com/on-nine-parts-of-desire-by-geraldine-brooks/>.Agarwal, Bina. A Field of One’s Own: Gender and Land Rights in South Asia. Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1994.Amissah, Edith Kohrs. Aspects of Feminism and Gender in the Novels of Three West African Women Writers. Nairobi: Africa Resource Center, 1999.Andolina, Robert, Nina Laurie, and Sarah A. Radcliffe. Indigenous Development in the Andes: Culture, Power, and Transnationalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009.Anzaldúa, Gloria E. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987.Bakare-Yusuf, Bibi. “Fabricating Identities: Survival and the Imagination in Jamaican Dancehall Culture.” Fashion Theory 10.3 (2006): 1–24.Basu, Amrita (ed.). Women's Movements in the Global Era: The Power of Local Feminisms. Philadelphia: Westview Press, 2010.Bulbeck, Chilla. Re-Orienting Western Feminisms: Women's Diversity in a Postcolonial World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.Connell, Raewyn. “Meeting at the Edge of Fear: Theory on a World Scale.” Feminist Theory 16.1 (2015): 49–66.———. “Rethinking Gender from the South.” Feminist Studies 40.3 (2014): 518-539.Daniel, Eniola. “I Work toward the Liberation of Women, But I’m Not Feminist, Says Buchi Emecheta.” The Guardian, 29 Jan. 2017. <https://guardian.ng/art/i-work-toward-the-liberation-of-women-but-im-not-feminist-says-buchi-emecheta/>.Devi, Mahasveta. "Draupadi." Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Critical Inquiry 8.2 (1981): 381-402.Friedman, Susan Stanford. Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity across Time. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015.Grewal, Inderpal, and Caren Kaplan. Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994.Hale, Sondra. “Transnational Gender Studies and the Migrating Concept of Gender in the Middle East and North Africa.” Cultural Dynamics 21.2 (2009): 133-52.hooks, bell. “Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance.” Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston: South End Press, 1992.Langton, Marcia. “‘Grandmother’s Law’, Company Business and Succession in Changing Aboriginal Land Tenure System.” Traditional Aboriginal Society: A Reader. Ed. W.H. Edward. 2nd ed. Melbourne: Macmillan, 2003.Lazreg, Marnia. “Feminism and Difference: The Perils of Writing as a Woman on Women in Algeria.” Feminist Studies 14.1 (Spring 1988): 81-107.Liew, Stephanie. “Subtle Racism Is More Problematic in Australia.” Interview. music.com.au 2015. <http://themusic.com.au/interviews/all/2015/03/06/randa-abdel-fattah/>.Lorde, Audre. “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism.” Keynoted presented at National Women’s Studies Association Conference, Storrs, Conn., 1981.Mernissi, Fatima. The Veil and the Male Elite: A Feminist Interpretation of Women’s Rights in Islam. Trans. Mary Jo Lakeland. New York: Basic Books, 1991.Moghadam, Valentine. Modernizing Women: Gender and Social Change in the Middle East. London: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2003.Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003.Moreton-Robinson, Aileen. Talkin' Up to the White Woman: Aboriginal Women and Feminism. St Lucia: Queensland University Press, 2000.Morgan, Robin (ed.). Sisterhood Is Global: The International Women's Movement Anthology. New York: The Feminist Press, 1984.Narayan, Uma. Dislocating Cultures: Identities, Traditions, and Third World Feminism, 1997.

Introduction A snapshot, not unlike countless photographs likely to be found in any number of family albums, shows two figures sitting on a park bench: an elderly and amiable looking man grins beneath the rim of a golf cap; a young boy of twelve smiles wide for the camera — a rather banal scene, captured on film. And yet, this seemingly innocent and unexceptional photograph was the site of a remarkable and wide ranging discourse — encompassing American conservatism, celebrity politics, and the end of the Cold War — as the image circulated around the globe during the weeklong state funeral of Ronald Wilson Reagan, 40th president of the United States. Taken in 1997 by the young boy’s grandfather, Ukrainian immigrant Yakov Ravin, during a chance encounter with the former president, the snapshot is believed to be the last public photograph of Ronald Reagan. Published on the occasion of the president’s death, the photograph made “instant celebrities” of the boy, now a twenty-year-old college student, Rostik Denenburg and his grand dad. Throughout the week of Reagan’s funeral, the two joined a chorus of dignitaries, politicians, pundits, and “ordinary” Americans praising Ronald Reagan: “The Great Communicator,” the man who defeated Communism, the popular president who restored America’s confidence, strength, and prosperity. Yes, it was mourning in America again. And the whole world was watching. Not since Princess Diana’s sudden (and unexpected) death, have we witnessed an electronic hagiography of such global proportions. Unlike Diana’s funeral, however, Reagan’s farewell played out in distinctly partisan terms. As James Ridgeway (2004) noted, the Reagan state funeral was “not only face-saving for the current administration, but also perhaps a mask for the American military debacle in Iraq. Not to mention a gesture of America’s might in the ‘war on terror.’” With non-stop media coverage, the weeklong ceremonies provided a sorely needed shot in the arm to the Bush re-election campaign. Still, whilst the funeral proceedings and the attendant media coverage were undeniably excessive in their deification of the former president, the historical white wash was not nearly so vulgar as the antiseptic send off Richard Nixon received back in 1994. That is to say, the piety of the Nixon funeral was at once startling and galling to many who reviled the man (Lapham). By contrast, given Ronald Reagan’s disarming public persona, his uniquely cordial relationship with the national press corps, and most notably, his handler’s mastery of media management techniques, the Reagan idolatry was neither surprising nor unexpected. In this brief essay, I want to consider Reagan’s funeral, and his legacy, in relation to what cultural critics, referring to the production of celebrity, have described as “fame games” (Turner, Bonner & Marshall). Specifically, I draw on the concept of “flashpoints” — moments of media excess surrounding a particular personage — in consideration of the Reagan funeral. Throughout, I demonstrate how Reagan’s death and the attendant media coverage epitomize this distinctive feature of contemporary culture. Furthermore, I observe Reagan’s innovative approaches to electoral politics in the age of television. Here, I suggest that Reagan’s appropriation of the strategies and techniques associated with advertising, marketing and public relations were decisive, not merely in terms of his electoral success, but also in securing his lasting fame. I conclude with some thoughts on the implications of Reagan’s legacy on historical memory, contemporary politics, and what neoconservatives, the heirs of the Reagan Revolution, gleefully describe as the New American Century. The Magic Hour On the morning of 12 June 2004, the last day of the state funeral, world leaders eulogized Reagan, the statesmen, at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. Among the A-List political stars invited to speak were Margaret Thatcher, former president George H. W. Bush and, to borrow Arundhati Roi’s useful phrase, “Bush the Lesser.” Reagan’s one-time Cold War adversary, Mikhail Gorbachev, as well as former Democratic presidents, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton were also on hand, but did not have speaking parts. Former Reagan administration officials, Supreme Court justices, and congressional representatives from both sides of the aisle rounded out a guest list that read like a who’s who of the American political class. All told, Reagan’s weeklong sendoff was a state funeral at its most elaborate. It had it all—the flag draped coffin, the grieving widow, the riderless horse, and the procession of mourners winding their way through the Rotunda of the US Capitol. In this last regard, Reagan joined an elite group of seven presidents, including four who died by assassination — Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, William McKinley and John F. Kennedy — to be honored by having his remains lie in state in the Rotunda. But just as the deceased president was product of the studio system, so too, the script for the Gipper’s swan song come straight out of Hollywood. Later that day, the Reagan entourage made one last transcontinental flight back to the presidential library in Simi Valley, California for a private funeral service at sunset. In Hollywood parlance, the “magic hour” refers to the quality of light at dusk. It is an ideal, but ephemeral time favored by cinematographers, when the sunlight takes on a golden glow lending grandeur, nostalgia, and oftentimes, a sense of closure to a scene. This was Ronald Reagan’s final moment in the sun: a fitting end for an actor of the silver screen, as well as for the president who mastered televisual politics. In a culture so thoroughly saturated with the image, even the death of a minor celebrity is an occasion to replay film clips, interviews, paparazzi photos and the like. Moreover, these “flashpoints” grow in intensity and frequency as promotional culture, technological innovation, and the proliferation of new media outlets shape contemporary media culture. They are both cause and consequence of these moments of media excess. And, as Turner, Bonner and Marshall observe, “That is their point. It is their disproportionate nature that makes them so important: the scale of their visibility, their overwhelmingly excessive demonstration of the power of the relationship between mass-mediated celebrities and the consumers of popular culture” (3-4). B-Movie actor, corporate spokesman, state governor and, finally, US president, Ronald Reagan left an extraordinary photographic record. Small wonder, then, that Reagan’s death was a “flashpoint” of the highest order: an orgy of images, a media spectacle waiting to happen. After all, Reagan appeared in over 50 films during his career in Hollywood. Publicity stills and clips from Reagan’s film career, including Knute Rockne, All American, the biopic that earned Reagan his nickname “the Gipper”, King’s Row, and Bedtime for Bonzo provided a surreal, yet welcome respite from television’s obsessive (some might say morbidly so) live coverage of Reagan’s remains making their way across country. Likewise, archival footage of Reagan’s political career — most notably, images of the 1981 assassination attempt; his quip “not to make age an issue” during the 1984 presidential debate; and his 1987 speech at the Brandenburg Gate demanding that Soviet President Gorbachev, “tear down this wall” — provided the raw materials for press coverage that thoroughly dominated the global mediascape. None of which is to suggest, however, that the sheer volume of Reagan’s photographic record is sufficient to account for the endless replay and reinterpretation of Reagan’s life story. If we are to fully comprehend Reagan’s fame, we must acknowledge his seminal engagement with promotional culture, “a professional articulation between the news and entertainment media and the sources of publicity and promotion” (Turner, Bonner & Marshall 5) in advancing an extraordinary political career. Hitting His Mark In a televised address supporting Barry Goldwater’s nomination for the presidency delivered at the 1964 Republican Convention, Ronald Reagan firmly established his conservative credentials and, in so doing, launched one of the most remarkable and influential careers in American politics. Political scientist Gerard J. De Groot makes a compelling case that the strategy Reagan and his handlers developed in the 1966 California gubernatorial campaign would eventually win him the presidency. The centerpiece of this strategy was to depict the former actor as a political outsider. Crafting a persona he described as “citizen politician,” Reagan’s great appeal and enormous success lie in his uncanny ability to project an image founded on traditional American values of hard work, common sense and self-determination. Over the course of his political career, Reagan’s studied optimism and “no-nonsense” approach to public policy would resonate with an electorate weary of career politicians. Charming, persuasive, and seemingly “authentic,” Reagan ran gubernatorial and subsequent presidential campaigns that were distinctive in that they employed sophisticated public relations and marketing techniques heretofore unknown in the realm of electoral politics. The 1966 Reagan gubernatorial campaign took the then unprecedented step of employing an advertising firm, Los Angeles-based Spencer-Roberts, in shaping the candidate’s image. Leveraging their candidate’s ease before the camera, the Reagan team crafted a campaign founded upon a sophisticated grasp of the television industry, TV news routines, and the medium’s growing importance to electoral politics. For instance, in the days before the 1966 Republican primary, the Reagan team produced a five-minute film using images culled from his campaign appearances. Unlike his opponent, whose television spots were long-winded, amateurish and poorly scheduled pieces that interrupted popular programs, like Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show, Reagan’s short film aired in the early evening, between program segments (De Groot). Thus, while his opponent’s television spot alienated viewers, the Reagan team demonstrated a formidable appreciation not only for televisual style, but also, crucially, a sophisticated understanding of the nuances of television scheduling, audience preferences and viewing habits. Over the course of his political career, Reagan refined his media driven, media directed campaign strategy. An analysis of his 1980 presidential campaign reveals three dimensions of Reagan’s increasingly sophisticated media management strategy (Covington et al.). First, the Reagan campaign carefully controlled their candidate’s accessibility to the press. Reagan’s penchant for potentially damaging off-the-cuff remarks and factual errors led his advisors to limit journalists’ interactions with the candidate. Second, the character of Reagan’s public appearances, including photo opportunities and especially press conferences, grew more formal. Reagan’s interactions with the press corps were highly structured affairs designed to control which reporters were permitted to ask questions and to help the candidate anticipate questions and prepare responses in advance. Finally, the Reagan campaign sought to keep the candidate “on message.” That is to say, press releases, photo opportunities and campaign appearances focused on a single, consistent message. This approach, known as the Issue of the Day (IOD) media management strategy proved indispensable to advancing the administration’s goals and achieving its objectives. Not only was the IOD strategy remarkably effective in influencing press coverage of the Reagan White House, this coverage promoted an overwhelmingly positive image of the president. As the weeklong funeral amply demonstrated, Reagan was, and remains, one of the most popular presidents in modern American history. Reagan’s popular (and populist) appeal is instructive inasmuch as it illuminates the crucial distinction between “celebrity and its premodern antecedent, fame” observed by historian Charles L. Ponce de Leone (13). Whereas fame was traditionally bestowed upon those whose heroism and extraordinary achievements distinguished them from common people, celebrity is a defining feature of modernity, inasmuch as celebrity is “a direct outgrowth of developments that most of us regard as progressive: the spread of the market economy and the rise of democratic, individualistic values” (Ponce de Leone 14). On one hand, then, Reagan’s celebrity reflects his individualism, his resolute faith in the primacy of the market, and his defense of “traditional” (i.e. democratic) American values. On the other hand, by emphasizing his heroic, almost supernatural achievements, most notably his vanquishing of the “Evil Empire,” the Reagan mythology serves to lift him “far above the common rung of humanity” raising him to “the realm of the divine” (Ponce de Leone 14). Indeed, prior to his death, the Reagan faithful successfully lobbied Congress to create secular shrines to the standard bearer of American conservatism. For instance, in 1998, President Clinton signed a bill that officially rechristened one of the US capitol’s airports to Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. More recently, conservatives working under the aegis of the Ronald Reagan Legacy Project have called for the creation of even more visible totems to the Reagan Revolution, including replacing Franklin D. Roosevelt’s profile on the dime with Reagan’s image and, more dramatically, inscribing Reagan in stone, alongside Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt at Mount Rushmore (Gordon). Therefore, Reagan’s enduring fame rests not only on the considerable symbolic capital associated with his visual record, but also, increasingly, upon material manifestations of American political culture. The High Stakes of Media Politics What are we to make of Reagan’s fame and its implications for America? To begin with, we must acknowledge Reagan’s enduring influence on modern electoral politics. Clearly, Reagan’s “citizen politician” was a media construct — the masterful orchestration of ideological content across the institutional structures of news, public relations and marketing. While some may suggest that Reagan’s success was an anomaly, a historical aberration, a host of politicians, and not a few celebrities — Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Arnold Schwarzenegger among them — emulate Reagan’s style and employ the media management strategies he pioneered. Furthermore, we need to recognize that the Reagan mythology that is so thoroughly bound up in his approach to media/politics does more to obscure, rather than illuminate the historical record. For instance, in her (video taped) remarks at the funeral service, Margaret Thatcher made the extraordinary claim — a central tenet of the Reagan Revolution — that Ronnie won the cold war “without firing a shot.” Such claims went unchallenged, at least in the establishment press, despite Reagan’s well-documented penchant for waging costly and protracted proxy wars in Afghanistan, Africa, and Central America. Similarly, the Reagan hagiography failed to acknowledge the decisive role Gorbachev and his policies of “reform” and “openness” — Perestroika and Glasnost — played in the ending of the Cold War. Indeed, Reagan’s media managed populism flies in the face of what radical historian Howard Zinn might describe as a “people’s history” of the 1980s. That is to say, a broad cross-section of America — labor, racial and ethnic minorities, environmentalists and anti-nuclear activists among them — rallied in vehement opposition to Reagan’s foreign and domestic policies. And yet, throughout the weeklong funeral, the divisiveness of the Reagan era went largely unnoted. In the Reagan mythology, then, popular demonstrations against an unprecedented military build up, the administration’s failure to acknowledge, let alone intervene in the AIDS epidemic, and the growing disparity between rich and poor that marked his tenure in office were, to borrow a phrase, relegated to the dustbin of history. In light of the upcoming US presidential election, we ought to weigh how Reagan’s celebrity squares with the historical record; and, equally important, how his legacy both shapes and reflects the realities we confront today. Whether we consider economic and tax policy, social services, electoral politics, international relations or the domestic culture wars, Reagan’s policies and practices continue to determine the state of the union and inform the content and character of American political discourse. Increasingly, American electoral politics turns on the pithy soundbite, the carefully orchestrated pseudo-event, and a campaign team’s unwavering ability to stay on message. Nowhere is this more evident than in Ronald Reagan’s unmistakable influence upon the current (and illegitimate) occupant of the White House. References Covington, Cary R., Kroeger, K., Richardson, G., and J. David Woodward. “Shaping a Candidate’s Image in the Press: Ronald Reagan and the 1980 Presidential Election.” Political Research Quarterly 46.4 (1993): 783-98. De Groot, Gerard J. “‘A Goddamed Electable Person’: The 1966 California Gubernatorial Campaign of Ronald Reagan.” History 82.267 (1997): 429-48. Gordon, Colin. “Replace FDR on the Dime with Reagan?” History News Network 15 December, 2003. http://hnn.us/articles/1853.html>. Lapham, Lewis H. “Morte de Nixon – Death of Richard Nixon – Editorial.” Harper’s Magazine (July 1994). http://www.harpers.org/MorteDeNixon.html>. Ponce de Leon, Charles L. Self-Exposure: Human-Interest Journalism and the Emergence of Celebrity in America, 1890-1940. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2002. Ridgeway, James. “Bush Takes a Ride in Reagan’s Wake.” Village Voice (10 June 2004). http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0423/mondo5.php>. Turner, Graeme, Frances Bonner, and P. David Marshall. Fame Games: The Production of Celebrity in Australia. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000. Zinn, Howard. The Peoples’ History of the United States: 1492-Present. New York: Harper Perennial, 1995. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Howley, Kevin. "Always Famous: Or, The Electoral Half-Life of Ronald Reagan." M/C Journal 7.5 (2004). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0411/17-howley.php>. APA Style Howley, K. (Nov. 2004) "Always Famous: Or, The Electoral Half-Life of Ronald Reagan," M/C Journal, 7(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0411/17-howley.php>.

Samurai and Chinese martial arts themes inspire and permeate the uniquely philosophical lyrics and beats of Wu-Tang Clan, a New York-based hip-hop collective made popular in the mid-nineties with their debut album Enter the Wu-Tang: Return of the 36 Chambers. Original founder RZA (“Rizza”) scored his first full-length motion-picture soundtrack and made his feature film debut with Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (Jim Jarmusch, 2000). Through a critical exploration of the film’s musical filter, it will be argued that RZA’s aesthetic vision effectively deterritorialises the figure of the samurai, according to which the samurai “change[s] in nature and connect[s] with other multiplicities” (Deleuze and Guattari, 9). The soundtrack consequently emancipates and redistributes the idea of the samurai from within the dynamic context of a fundamentally different aesthetic intensity, which the Wu-Tang has always hoped to communicate, that is to say, an aesthetics of adaptation or of what is called in hip-hop music more generally: an aesthetics of flow. At the center of Jarmusch’s film is a fundamental opposition between the sober asceticism and deeply coded lifestyle of Ghost Dog and the supple, revolutionary, itinerant hip-hop beats that flow behind it and beneath it, and which serve at once as philosophical foil and as alternate foundation to the film’s themes and message. Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai tells the story of Ghost Dog (Forest Whitaker), a deadly and flawlessly precise contract killer for a small-time contemporary New York organised crime family. He lives his life in a late 20th-century urban America according to the strict tenets of the 18th century text Hagakure, which relates the principles of the Japanese Bushido (literally, the “way of the warrior,” but more often defined and translated as the “code of the samurai”). Others have noted the way in which Ghost Dog not only fails as an adaptation of the samurai genre but thematises this very failure insofar as the film depicts a samurai’s unsuccessful struggle to adapt in a corrupt and fractured postmodern, post-industrial reality (Lanzagorta, par. 4, 9; Otomo, 35-8). If there is any hope at all for these adaptations (Ghost Dog is himself an example), it lies, according to some, in the singular, outmoded integrity of his nostalgia, which despite the abstract jouissance or satisfaction it makes available, is nevertheless blank and empty (Otomo, 36-7). Interestingly, in his groundbreaking book Spectacular Vernaculars, and with specific reference to hip-hop, Russell Potter suggests that where a Eurocentric postmodernism posits a lack of meaning and collapse of value and authority, a black postmodernism that is neither singular nor nostalgic is prepared to emerge (6-9). And as I will argue there are more concrete adaptive strategies at work in the film, strategies that point well beyond the film to popular culture more generally. These are anti-nostalgic strategies of possibility and escape that have everything to do with the way in which hip-hop as soundtrack enables Ghost Dog in his becoming-samurai, a process by which a deterritorialised subject and musical flow fuse to produce a hybrid adaptation and identity. But hip-hip not only makes possible such a becoming, it also constitutes a potentially liberating adaptation of the past and of otherness that infuses the film with a very different but still concrete jouissance. At the root of Ghost Dog is a conflict between what Deleuze and Guattari call state and nomad authority, between the code that prohibits adaptation and its willful betrayer. The state apparatus, according to Deleuze and Guattari, is the quintessential form of interiority. The state nourishes itself through the appropriation, the bringing into its interior, of all that over which it exerts its control, and especially over those nomadic elements that constantly threaten to escape (Deleuze and Guattari, 380-7). In Ghost Dog, the code or state-form functions throughout the film as an omnipresent source of centralisation, authorisation and organisation. It is attested to in the intensely stratified urban environment in which Ghost Dog lives, a complicated and forbidding network of streets, tracks, rails, alleys, cemeteries, tenement blocks, freeways, and shipping yards, all of which serve to hem Ghost Dog in. And as race is highlighted in the film, it, too, must be included among the many ways in which characters are always already contained. What encounters with racism in the film suggest is the operative presence of a plurality of racial and cultural codes; the strict segregation of races and cultures in the film and the animosity which binds them in opposition reflect a racial stratification that mirrors the stratified topography of the cityscape. Most important, perhaps, is the way in which Bushido itself functions, at least in part, as code, as well as the way in which the form of the historical samurai in legend and reality circumscribes not only Ghost Dog’s existence but the very possibility of the samurai and the samurai film as such. On the one hand, Bushido attests to the absolute of religion, or as Deleuze and Guattari describe it: “a center that repels the obscure … essentially a horizon that encompasses” and which forms a “bond”, “pact”, or “alliance” between subject/culture and the all-encompassing embrace of its deity: in this case, the state-form which sanctions samurai existence (382-3). On the other hand, but in the same vein, the advent of Bushido, and in particular the Hagakure text to which Ghost Dog turns for meaning and guidance, coincides historically with the emergence of the modern Japanese state, or put another way, with the eclipse of the very culture it sponsors. In fact, samurai history as a whole can be viewed to some extent as a process of historical containment by which the state-form gradually encompassed those nomadic warring elements at the heart of early samurai existence. This is the socio-historical context of Bushido, insofar as it represents the codification of the samurai subject and the stratification of samurai culture under the pressures of modernisation and the spread of global capitalism. It is a social and historical context marked by the power of a bourgeoning military, political and economic organisation, and by policies of restraint, centralisation and sedentariness. Moreover, the local and contemporary manifestations of this social and historical context are revealed in many of the elements that permeate not only the traditional samurai films of Kurosawa, Mizoguchi or Kobayashi, but modern adaptations of the genre as well, which tend to convey a nostalgic mourning for this loss, or more precisely, for this failure to adapt. Thus the filmic atmosphere of Ghost Dog is dominated by the negative qualities of inaction, nonviolence and sobriety, and whether these are taken to express the sterility and impotence of postmodern existence or the emptiness of a nostalgia for an unbroken and heroic past, these qualities point squarely towards the transience of culture and towards the impossibility of adaptation and survival. Ghost Dog is a reluctant assassin, and the inherently violent nature of his task is always deflected. In the same way, most of Ghost Dog’s speech in the film is delivered through his soundless readings of the Hagakure, silent and austere moments that mirror as well the creeping, sterile atmosphere in which most of the film’s action takes place. It is an atmosphere of interiority that points not only towards the stratified environment which restricts possibility and expressivity but also squarely towards the meaning of Bushido as code. But this atmosphere meets resistance. For the samurai is above all a man of war, and, as Deleuze and Guattari suggest, “the man of war [that is to say, the nomad] is always committing an offence against” the State (383). In Ghost Dog, for all the ways in which Ghost Dog’s experience is stratified by the Bushido as code and by the post-industrial urban reality in which he lives and moves, the film shows equally the extent to which these strata or codes are undermined by nomadic forces that trace “lines of flight” and escape (Deleuze and Guattari, 423). Clearly it is the film’s soundtrack, and thus, too, the aesthetic intensities of the flow in hip-hop music, which both constitute and facilitate this escape: We have an APB on an MC killer Looks like the work of a master … Merciless like a terrorist Hard to capture the flow Changes like a chameleon (“Da Mystery of Chessboxin,” Enter) Herein lies the significance of (and difference between) the meaning of Bushido as code and as way, a problem of adaptation and translation which clearly reflects the central conflict of the film. A way is always a way out, the very essence of escape, and it always facilitates the breaking away from a code. Deleuze and Guattari describe the nomad as problematic, hydraulic, inseparable from flow and heterogeneity; nomad elements, as those elements which the State is incapable of drawing into its interior, are said to remain exterior and excessive to it (361-2). It is thus significant that the interiority of Ghost Dog’s readings from the Hagakure and the ferocious exteriority of the soundtrack, which along with the Japanese text helps narrate the tale, reflect the same relationship that frames the state and nomad models. The Hagakure is not only read in silence by the protagonist throughout the film, but the Hagakure also figures prominently inside the diegetic world of the film as a visual element, whereas the soundtrack, whether it is functioning diegetically or non-diegetically, is by its very nature outside the narrative space of the film, effectively escaping it. For Deleuze and Guattari, musical expression is inseparable from a process of becoming, and, in fact, it is fair to say that the jouissance of the film is supplied wholly by the soundtrack insofar as it deterritorialises the conventional language of the genre, takes it outside of itself, and then reinvests it through updated musical flows that facilitate Ghost Dog’s becoming-samurai. In this way, too, the soundtrack expresses the violence and action that the plot carefully avoids and thus intimately relates the extreme interiority of the protagonist to an outside, a nomadic exterior that forecloses any possibility of nostalgia but which suggests rather a tactics of metamorphosis and immediacy, a sublime deterritorialisation that involves music becoming-world and world becoming-music. Throughout the film, the appearance of the nomad is accompanied, even announced, by the onset of a hip-hop musical flow, always cinematically represented by Ghost Dog’s traversing the city streets or by lengthy tracking shots of a passenger pigeon in flight, both of which, to take just two examples, testify to purely nomadic concepts: not only to the sheer smoothness of open sky-space and flight with its techno-spiritual connotations, but also to invisible, inherited pathways that cross the stratified heart of the city undetected and untraceable. Embodied as it is in the Ghost Dog soundtrack, and grounded in what I have chosen to call an aesthetics of flow, hip-hop is no arbitrary force in the film; it is rather both the adaptive medium through which Ghost Dog and the samurai genre are redeemed and the very expression of this adaptation. Deleuze and Guattari write: The necessity of not having control over language, of being a foreigner in one’s own tongue, in order to draw speech to oneself and ‘bring something incomprehensible into the world.’ Such is the form of exteriority … that forms a war machine. (378) Nowhere else do Deleuze and Guattari more clearly outline the affinities that bind their notion of the nomad and the form of exteriority that is essential to it with the politics of language, cultural difference and authenticity which so color theories of race and critical analyses of hip-hop music and culture. And thus the key to hip-hop’s adaptive power lies in its spontaneity and in its bringing into the world of something incomprehensible and unanticipated. If the code in Ghost Dog is depicted as nonviolent, striated, interior, singular, austere and measured, then the flow in hip-hop and in the music of the Wu-Tang that informs Ghost Dog’s soundtrack is violent, fluid, exterior, variable, plural, playful and incalculable. The flow in hip-hop, as well as in Deleuze and Guattari’s work, is grounded in a kinetic linguistic spontaneity, variation and multiplicity. Its lyrical flow is a cascade of accelerating rhymes, the very speed and implausibility of which often creates a sort of catharsis in performers and spectators: I bomb atomically, Socrates’ philosophies and hypotheses can’t define how I be droppin’ these mockeries, lyrically perform armed robberies Flee with the lottery, possibly they spotted me Battle-scarred shogun, explosion. … (“Triumph”, Forever) Over and against the paradigm of the samurai, which as I have shown is connected with relations of content and interiority, the flow is attested to even more explicitly in the Wu-Tang’s embrace of the martial arts, kung-fu and Chinese cinematic traditions. And any understanding of the figure of the samurai in the contemporary hip-hop imagination must contend with the relationship of this figure to both the kung-fu fighting traditions and to kung-fu cinema, despite the fact that they constitute very different cultural and historical forms. I would, of course, argue that it is precisely this playful adaptation or literal deterritorialisation of otherwise geographically and culturally distinct realities that comprises the adaptive potential of hip-hop. Kung-fu, like hip-hop, is predicated on the exteriority of style. It is also a form of action based on precision and immediacy, on the fluid movements of the body itself deterritorialised as weapon, and thus it reiterates that blend of violence, speed and fluidity that grounds the hip-hop aesthetic: “I’ll defeat your rhyme in just four lines / Yeh, I’ll wax you and tax you and plus save time” (RZA and Norris, 211). Kung-fu lends itself to improvisation and to adaptability, essential qualities of combat and of lyrical flows in hip-hop music. For example, just as in kung-fu combat a fighter’s success is fundamentally determined by his ability to intuit and adapt to the style and skill and detailed movements of his adversary, the victory of a hip-hop MC engaged in, say, a freestyle battle will be determined by his capacity for improvising and adapting his own lyrical flow to counter and overcome his opponent’s. David Bordwell not only draws critical lines of difference between the Hong Kong and Hollywood action film but also hints at the striking differences between the “delirious kinetic exhilaration” of Hong Kong cinema and the “sober, attenuated, and grotesque expressivity” of the traditional Japanese samurai film (91-2). Moreover, Bordwell emphasises what the Wu-Tang Clan has always known and demonstrated: the sympathetic bond between kung-fu action or hand-to-hand martial arts combat and the flow in hip-hop music. Bordwell calls his kung-fu aesthetic “expressive amplification”, which communicates with the viewer through both a visual and physical intelligibility and which is described by Bordwell in terms of beats, exaggerations, and the “exchange and rhyming of gestures” (87). What is pointed to here are precisely those aspects of Hong Kong cinema that share essential similarities with hip-hop music as such and which permeate the Wu-Tang aesthetic and thus, too, challenge or redistribute the codified stillness and negativity that define the filmic atmosphere of Ghost Dog. Bordwell argues that Hong Kong cinema constitutes an aesthetics in action that “pushes beyond Western norms of restraint and plausibility,” and in light of my thesis, I would argue that it pushes beyond these same conventions in traditional Japanese cinema as well (86). Bruce Lee, too, in describing the difference between Chinese kung-fu and Japanese fighting forms in A Warrior’s Journey (Bruce Little, 2000) points to the latter’s regulatory principles of hesitation and segmentarity and to the former’s formlessness and shapelessness, describing kung-fu when properly practiced as “like water, it can flow or it can crash,” qualities which echo not only Bordwell’s description of the pause-burst-pause pattern of kung-fu cinema’s combat sequences but also the Wu-Tang Clan’s own self-conception as described by GZA (“Jizza”), a close relative of RZA and co-founder of the Wu-Tang Clan, when he is asked to explain the inspiration for the title of his album Liquid Swords: Actually, ‘Liquid Swords’ comes from a kung-fu flick. … But the title was just … perfect. I was like, ‘Legend of a Liquid Sword.’ Damn, this is my rhymes. This is how I’m spittin’ it. We say the tongue is symbolic of the sword anyway, you know, and when in motion it produces wind. That’s how you hear ‘wu’. … That’s the wind swinging from the sword. The ‘Tang’, that’s when it hits an object. Tang! That’s how it is with words. (RZA and Norris, 67) Thus do two competing styles animate the aesthetic dynamics of the film Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai: an aesthetic of codified arrest and restraint versus an aesthetic of nomadic resistance and escape. The former finds expression in the film in the form of the cultural and historical meanings of the samurai tradition, defined by negation and attenuated sobriety, and in the “blank parody” (Otomo, 35) of a postmodern nostalgia for an empty historical past exemplified in the appropriation of the Samurai theme and in the post-industrial prohibitions and stratifications of contemporary life and experience; the latter is attested to in the affirmative kinetic exhilaration of kung-fu style, immediacy and expressivity, and in the corresponding adaptive potential of a hip-hop musical flow, a distributive, productive, and anti-nostalgic becoming, the nomadic essence of which redeems the rhetoric of postmodern loss described by the film. References Bordwell, David. “Aesthetics in Action: Kungfu, Gunplay, and Cinematic Expressivity.” At Full Speed: Hong Kong Cinema in a Borderless World. Ed. and Trans. Esther Yau. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 2004. Bruce Lee: A Warrior’s Journey. Dir./Filmmaker John Little. Netflix DVD. Warner Home Video, 2000. Daidjo, Yuzan. Code of the Samurai. Trans. Thomas Cleary. Tuttle Martial Arts. Boston: Tuttle, 1999. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP,1987. Forman, Murray, and Mark Anthony Neal, eds. That’s the Joint!: The Hip-Hop Studies Reader. New York: Routledge, 2004. Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai. Dir. Jim Jarmusch. Netflix DVD. Artisan, 2000. Hurst, G. Cameron III. Armed Martial Arts of Japan. New Haven: Yale UP,1998. Ikegami, Eiko. The Taming of the Samurai. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1995. Jansen, Marius, ed. Warrior Rule in Japan. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995. Kurosawa, Akira. Seven Samurai and Other Screenplays. Trans. Donald Richie. London: Faber and Faber, 1992. Lanzagorta, Marco. “Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai.” Senses of Cinema. Sept-Oct 2002. http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/cteq/02/22/ghost_dog.htm>. Mol, Serge. Classical Fighting Arts of Japan. Tokyo/New York: Kodansha Int., 2001. Otomo, Ryoko. “‘The Way of the Samurai’: Ghost Dog, Mishima, and Modernity’s Other.” Japanese Studies 21.1 (May 2001) 31-43. Potter, Russell. Spectacular Vernaculars. Albany: SUNY P, 1995. RZA, The, and Chris Norris. The Wu-Tang Manual. New York: Penguin, 2005. Silver, Alain. The Samurai Film. Woodstock, New York: Overlook, 1983. Smith, Christopher Holmes. “Method in the Madness: Exploring the Boundaries of Identity in Hip-Hop Performativity.” Social Identities 3.3 (Oct 1997): 345-75. Watkins, Craig S. Representing: Hip Hop Culture and the Production of Black Cinema. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1998. Wu-Tang Clan. Enter the Wu-Tang: 36 Chambers. CD. RCA/Loud Records, 1993. ———. Wu-Tang Forever. CD. RCA/Loud Records, 1997. Xing, Yan, ed. Shaolin Kungfu. Trans. Zhang Zongzhi and Zhu Chengyao. Beijing: China Pictorial, 1996. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Eubanks, Kevin P. "Becoming-Samurai: Samurai (Films), Kung-Fu (Flicks) and Hip-Hop (Soundtracks)." M/C Journal 10.2 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/11-eubanks.php>. APA Style Eubanks, K. (May 2007) "Becoming-Samurai: Samurai (Films), Kung-Fu (Flicks) and Hip-Hop (Soundtracks)," M/C Journal, 10(2). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/11-eubanks.php>.

IntroductionThis paper explores the different meanings that individuals from diverse ethnic backgrounds associate with being authentic. It builds on previous research (Menendez 11) that found quantitative differences in terms of the meanings individuals from Eastern and Western backgrounds tend to associate with being authentic. Using qualitative analysis, it describes in more detail how individuals from these two backgrounds construct their different meanings of authenticity.Authenticity has become an overriding moral principle in contemporary Western societies and has only recently started to be contested (Feldman). From cultural products to individuals’ discourses, authenticity pervades Western culture (Lindholm; Potter; Vannini and Williams). On an individual level, the ideal of authenticity is reflected in the maxim “be true to yourself.” The social value of authenticity has a relatively recent history in the Western world of approximately 200 years (Trilling). It started to develop alongside the notion of individuality during modernity (Taylor, Sources; Trilling). The Romantic movement consolidated its cultural influence (Taylor, Sources). In the 1960s, the Hippy movement revived authenticity as a countercultural discourse, although it has progressively become mainstream through consumer culture and therapeutic discourses (Binkley).Most of the studies in the literature on authenticity as a cultural phenomenon are theoretical, conducted from a philosophical perspective (Ferrara; Guignon; Taylor, Ethics), but few of them are empirical, mostly from sociology (Erickson; Franzese, Thine; Turner, Quest; Vannini, Authenticity). Part of this dearth of empirical research on authenticity is due to the difficulties that researchers encounter in attempting to define what it means to be authentic (Franzese, Authenticity 87). Sociologists study the phenomenological experience of being true to oneself, but are less attentive to the metaphysical notion of being a “true self” (Vannini, Dead 236–37). Trying to preserve this open approach, without judging individuals on how “authentic” they are, is what makes defining authenticity difficult. For this reason, sociologists have defined being authentic in a broad sense as “an individual’s subjective sense that their behaviour, appearance, self, reflects their sense of core being. One’s sense of core being is composed of their values, beliefs, feelings, identities, self-meanings, etc.” (Franzese, Authenticity 87); this is the definition of authenticity that I use here. Besides being scarce, the sociological empirical studies on authenticity have been conducted with individuals from Western backgrounds and, thus, have privileged authenticity as a Western cultural construct. This paper tries to contribute to this field of research by: (1) contributing more empirical investigation and (2) providing cross-cultural comparison between individuals from Eastern and Western backgrounds.The literature on cross-cultural values associates Eastern societies with collective (Hofstede, Hofstede and Mirkov 95–97; 112–17) and material or survival (Inglehart and Welzel 51–57; 61–65) values, while Western societies tend to be linked to the opposite kind of values: individual, post-material or self-expression (WVS). For example, societies that score high in survival values are likely to be African (e.g., Zimbabwe) Middle Eastern (e.g., Morocco and Jordan) or Asian (e.g., Bangladesh) countries, while societies that score high in self-expression values tend to be European (e.g., Sweden) or English speaking (e.g., Australia) countries. Nevertheless, there are some exceptions, the case of Japan, for example, which tends to score high in self-expression values despite being an “Eastern” society (WVS). These differences also tend to be reflected among Eastern minorities living in Western countries (Chua and Rubenfeld). Collective values emphasise harmony in relations and prioritise the needs of the group over the individual; on the other hand, individual values emphasise self-expression. Material or survival values accentuate the satisfaction of “basic” needs, in Abraham Maslow’s terms (21), such as physiological or security needs, and imply practising thrift and delaying immediate gratification; by contrast, post-material or self-expression values stress the satisfaction of “higher” needs, such as freedom of speech, equality, or aesthetic needs.The sociologist Ralph Turner (Real) created a theoretical framework to organize individuals’ discourses around authenticity: the “impulsive” and “institutional” categories. One of Turner’s assumptions is particularly important in understanding the differences between these two categories: individuals tend to consider the self as an objective entity that, despite only existing in their minds, feels “real” to them. This can have consequences for the meanings they ascribe to certain internal subjective states, such as cognitions or emotions, which can be interpreted as indicators of their authentic selves (990–91).The institutional and impulsive categories are two different ways of understanding authenticity that present several differences (991–95). Two among them are most relevant to understand the differences that I discuss in this paper. The first one has to do with the individual’s locus of the self, whether the self is conceptualized as located “outside” or “inside” the individual. Impulsive interpretations of authenticity have an internal sense of authenticity as “being,” while institutional conceptualizations have an external sense of authenticity as “becoming.” For “impulsives,” the authentic self is something that must be searched for. Impulsives look within to discover their “true self,” which is often in opposition to society’s roles and its expectations of the individual. On the other hand, for “institutionals” authentic is achieved through external effort (Turner, Quest 155); it is something that individuals achieve through regular practice, often aligned with society’s roles and their expectations of the individual (Turner, Real 992).The second difference has to do with the management of emotions. For an institutional understanding of authenticity, individuals are true to their own authentic selves when they are in full control of their capacities and emotions. By contrast, from an impulsive point of view, individuals are true to themselves when they are spontaneous, accepting and freely expressing their emotions, often by breaking the internal or external controls that society imposes on them (Turner, Real 993).Although individuals can experience both types of authenticity, previous research on this topic (Menendez) has shown that institutional experiences tend to happen more frequently among Easterners, and impulsive experiences tend to occur more frequently among Westerners. In this paper, I show how Easterners and Westerners construct institutional and impulsive meanings of authenticity respectively; what kind of authenticity work individuals from these two backgrounds do when they conceptualize their authentic selves; how they interpret internal subjective states as expressions of who they are; and what stories they tell themselves about who they are.I suggest that these stories, although they may look purely individual, can also be social. Individuals from Western backgrounds tend to interpret impulsive experiences of authenticity as expressing their authentic selves, as they are informed by the individual and post-material values of Western societies. In contrast, individuals from Eastern backgrounds tend to interpret institutional experiences of authenticity as expressing their authentic selves, as they have been socialized in the more collective and material values of Eastern societies.Finally, and before I proceed to the analysis, I would like to acknowledge a limitation of this study. The dichotomies that I use to explain my argument, such as the Western and Eastern or the impulsive and institutional categories, can constitute a limitation for this paper because they cannot reflect nuances. They can be easily contested. For example, the division between Eastern and Western societies is often seen as ideological and Turner’s distinction between institutional and impulsive experiences of authenticity can create artificial separations between the notions of self and society or reason and passion (Solomon 173). However, these concepts have not been used for ideological or simplifying purposes, but to help explain distinguishable cultural orientations towards authenticity in the data.MethodologyI completed 20 interviews (from 50 minutes to 2 hours in length) with 20 students at La Trobe University (Australia), between September 2012 and April 2013. The 20 interviewees (9 females and 11 males), ranged from 18 to 58 years old (the median age was 24 years old). The sample was theoretically designed to cover as many diverse cultural backgrounds as possible. I asked the interviewees questions about: moments they had experienced that felt either authentic and inauthentic, what constitutes a life worth-living, and the impact their cultural backgrounds might have had on their conceptions of their true selves.The 20 interviewees were born in 13 different countries. According to the extensive dataset on cultural values, the World Values Survey (WVS), these 13 countries have different percentages of post-materialists—individuals who choose post-material instead of material values (Inglehart and Welzel 54–56). Table 1 shows the percentages of post-materialists in each of the interviewees’ countries of birth. Table 1: Percentages of post-materialists in the interviewees’ countries of birth Country % of post-materialists WVS Wave United Kingdom 22.8 2005 – 2009 Australia 20.5 2010 – 2014 United States 16.7 2010 – 2014 Israel 11.6 2000 – 2004 Finland 11.3 2005 – 2009 Greece (Turkey) 10.7 2010 – 2014 South Africa 7.7 2005 – 2009 Malaysia 5.6 2010 – 2014 Ghana 4.2 2010 – 2014 India 4 2005 – 2009 China 2.5 2010 – 2014 Egypt 1.1 2010 – 2014 Note: These data are based on the 4-item post-materialism index question (Y002) of World Values Survey (WVS). I use three different waves of data (2000–2004, 2005–2009, and 2010–2014). Greece did not have any data in World Values Survey, so its data have been estimated considering the results from Turkey, which is the most similar country in geographical and cultural terms that had data available.In my model, I consider “Western” societies as those that have more than 10% post-materialists, while “Eastern” societies have less than 10% post-materialists. As shown in Table 1 and mentioned earlier, Western countries (English speaking or European) tend to have higher percentages of post-materialists than Eastern societies (African, Asian and Middle Eastern).Thus, as Table 2 shows, the interviewees who were born in a Western society are ascribed to one group, while individuals born in an Eastern society are ascribed to another group. Although many overseas-born interviewees have lived in Australia for periods that range from 6 months to 10 years, they were ascribed to the “East” and “West” groups solely based on their country of birth. Even though these individuals may have had experiences of socialization in Australia, I assume that they have been primarily socialized in the values of their ethnic backgrounds and the countries where they were born, via their parents’ educational values or through direct experience, during the time that they lived in their countries of birth. According to my definition of authenticity, individuals’ values inform their understanding of authenticity, therefore, the values from their ethnic backgrounds can also influence their understanding of authenticity.In the first phase of the analysis, I used Grounded Theory (Charmaz), with categories directly emerging from the data, to analyse my interviewees’ stories. In the second stage, I reviewed these categories in combination with Turner’s categories of impulsive and institutional, applying them to classify the stories.Table 2: Distribution of participants between “East” and “West” West (n=11) East (n=9) Australia (n=5) China (n=2) United Kingdom (n=2) India (n=2) United States (n=1) South Korea (n=1) Greece (n=1) South Africa (n=1) Finland (n=1) Egypt (n=1) Israel (n=1) Ghana (n=1) Malaysia (n=1) ResultsAlthough I interviewed 20 participants, due to space-constraints, I illustrate my argument with only 4 interview extracts from 4 of the interviewees: 2 interviewees from Western backgrounds and 2 from Eastern backgrounds. However, these stories are representative of the trends found for the whole sample. I show how Easterners and Westerners construct their authentic selves in institutional and impulsive senses respectively through the two key characteristics that I presented in the introduction: locus of the self and management of emotions.In the first instance, Rachel (from Australia, 24 years old), a Western respondent, shows an impulsive locus of the self as “being.” Authenticity is discovered through self-acceptance of an uncomfortable emotion, like a “bad mood:”I think the times when I want to say, ‘oh, I wasn’t myself’, I usually was. My bad moods are more ‘me’. My bad moods are almost always the ‘real me’. [So you consider that your authentic self is something that is there, inside you, that you have to discover, or it is something outside yourself, that you can achieve?] I think it is something that you have to discover for yourself. I think it is different for everyone. [But would you say that it is something that is there already or it is something that you become?] No, I think it is something that is there already.On the other hand, Rani (from China, 24 years old), an Eastern respondent, interprets authenticity as “becoming;” authenticity does not pre-exist—as in the case of Rachel—but is something “external” to her idea of self. Rani becomes herself by convincing herself that she conforms to society’s ideals of physical beauty. Unlike the process of self-acceptance that Rachel described, Rani develops authentic selfhood by “lying” to herself or, as she says, “through some lies”:I have heard this sentence, like ‘you have to be yourself to others’, but I think it is really hard to do this. I think people still need some ‘acting’ things in their life. You need to act, not to say to act as another person, but sometimes like let’s say to be polite or make other people like you, you need acting. And sometimes if you are doing the ‘acting things’ a lot, you are going to believe this is true (she laughs). [Like others will believe that you are something that you are not?] I think at the beginning, maybe that’s not, but… because some people wake up every morning and say to the mirror, ‘you are very beautiful, you are the most beautiful girl in the world’, then, you will be happy and you will actually become beautiful. I think it is not like lie to yourself, but it is just being confident. Maybe at the beginning you are not going to believe that you are beautiful… like, what is this sentence? ‘Being true to yourself’, but actually doing this everyday, then that’s true, you will become, you will be confident. [So that means you can be yourself also through…] Through some lies. [So you don’t think that there is something inside you that you have to kind of discover?] No.Eastern and Western respondents also tend to interpret emotions differently. Westerners are more likely to interpret them in more impulsive terms than Easterners, who interpret them in a more institutional light. As we can see in the following extract, Sean, a Western respondent (born in Australia, but raised in England, 41 years old), feels inauthentic because he could not express his dislike of a co-worker he did not get along with:In a six months job I had before I came to Australia, I was an occupational therapist in a community. There was a girl in the administration department who was so rude. I wanted to say: ‘look darling you are so rude. It is really unpleasant talking to you. Can you just be nice? It would be just so much better and you will get more done and you will get more from me’. That’s what I should have said, but I didn’t say it. I didn’t, why? Maybe it is that sort of culture of not saying things or maybe it is me not being assertive enough. I don’t think I was being myself. Because my real self wanted to say: ‘look darling, you are not helping matters by being a complete bitch’. But I didn’t say that. I wasn’t assertive enough.In a similar type of incident, Ben, an Eastern respondent (from Ghana, 32 years old), describes an outburst he had with a co-worker who was annoying him. Unlike Sean, Ben expressed his anger to the co-worker, but he does not consider this to be a manifestation of his authentic self. For Ben, to act authentically one must control their emotions and try help others:I don’t know if that is myself or if that is not myself, but sometimes I get angry, I get upset, and I am the open type. I am the type that I can’t keep something in me, so sometimes when you make me annoyed, I just response. There is this time about this woman, in a class, that I was in Ghana. She was an older woman, a respected woman, she kept annoying me and there was one day that I couldn’t take it any longer, so I just burst up and I just… I don’t know what I said, I just… said a lot of bad things to her. The woman, she was shocked. I also felt shocked because I thought I could control myself, so that’s me… I don’t want to hide my feelings, I just want to come out with what I think when you make me annoyed, but those times, when I come out, I don’t like them, because I think it contradicts who I really am, someone who is supposed to help or care. I don’t like that aspect. You know somebody could be bossy, so he or she enjoys shouting everybody. I don’t enjoy that, but sometimes it is something that I cannot even control. Someone pushes me to the limit, and I just can’t keep that anger, and it comes out. I won’t say that is ‘me,’ I wouldn’t say that that is me. I don’t think that is a ‘true me’. [Why?] Because the true me would enjoy that experience the way I enjoy helping people instead.Unlike the two accounts from Rachel and Rani, these two last passages from Sean and Ben describe experiences of inauthenticity, where the authentic self cannot be expressed. What is important in these two passages is not their behaviour, but how they attribute their own emotions to their sense of authentic selfhood. Sean identifies his authentic self with the “impulsive” self who expresses his emotions, while Ben identifies his authentic self with the “institutional” self who is in control of his emotions. Sean feels inauthentic because he could not express his angry feelings to the co-worker, whereas Ben feels inauthentic because he could not control his outburst. Ben still hesitates about which side of himself can be attributed to his authentic self, for example, he says that he is “the open type” or that he does not want to “hide [his] feelings”, but he eventually identifies his authentic self with his institutional self.The choices that Sean and Ben make about the emotions that they attribute to their authentic selves could be motivated by their respective ethnic backgrounds. Like Rachel, Sean identifies his authentic self with a socially unacceptable emotion: anger. Consistent with his Western background, Sean’s sense of authenticity emphasizes the needs of the individual over the group and sees suppression of emotions as repressive. On the other hand, Ben reasons that since he does not enjoy being angry as much as he enjoys helping others, expressing anger is not a manifestation of authenticity. His authentic self is linked to his institutional self. Ben’s values are infused with altruism, which reflects the collective values that tend to be associated with his Eastern background. For him, suppression of emotions might not mean repression, but can foster authenticity instead.DiscussionBoth ways of interpreting authenticity, impulsive and institutional, look for self-consistency and the need to tell a coherent story to ourselves about who we are. The results section of this paper showed how Easterners and Westerners conceptualize authenticity. Easterners understand authenticity differently to Western discourses of the authentic. These alternative understandings offer viable solutions to the self-consistency problem. They present external, rather than internal, ways of conceiving the authentic self, and regulative, rather than expressive, approaches to emotions. As I mentioned earlier, Eastern societies are associated with collective and material values, while Western ones are related to individual and post-material values. These divisions in terms of values are reflected in individuals’ self-constructs. Individuals in Western societies tend to have a more independent idea of the self, whereas individuals in Eastern societies are more likely to have an interdependent one (Kitayama). An interdependent idea of the self values connectedness and conceptualizes the self in relation to others, so it can generate an institutional approach to authenticity, where the idea of the authentic self is not something that individuals search for inside themselves, but something that individuals become through their participation in social roles. This was evident in the example of Rani, whose idea of being authentic as “becoming” seemed to be an extension of her more interdependent self-construct and the need to fit in society.A regulative approach to emotions has also been associated with Easterners (Cheung and Park), on the basis of their collective values and interdependent self-constructs. For individuals from a Western background, with a more independent sense of self, as in the case of Sean, suppressing emotions tends to be seen negatively as being inauthentic, a form of repression. However, for individuals with interdependent self-constructs, this can be not only less harmful (feeling less inauthentic), but can even be beneficial because they tend to prioritize the needs of others (Le and Impett). This is evident in the example of Ben, for whom suppressing aanger does not make him feel inauthentic because he identifies his authentic self with the self that is in control of his emotions and helps others. This understanding of authenticity is aligned with the collective values of his ethnic background.In sum, ideas of authenticity seem to vary culturally according to the repertoires and values systems that inform them. Thus, even what we think might be our most intimate or individual experiences, like our experiences of authenticity and ideas of who we are, can also be socially constructed. This paper has tried to demonstrate the importance of sociology for the study of authenticity as a cultural phenomenon.ReferencesBinkley, Sam. Getting Loose: Lifestyle Consumption in the 1970s. Durham: Duke UP, 2007.Charmaz, Kathy. Constructing Grounded Theory. London: Sage, 2013.Cheung, Rebecca and Irene Park. “Anger Supression, Interdependent Self-Construal, and Depression among Asian American and European American College Students”. Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology 16.4 (2010): 517–25.Chua, Amy, and Jed Rubenfeld. The Triple Package: How Three Unlikely Traits Explain the Rise and Fall of Cultural Groups in America. New York: The Penguin P, 2014.Erickson, Rebecca J. When Emotion Is the Product: Self, Society, and (In)Authenticity in a Postmodern World. 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Markus. “Culture and the Self: Implications for Cognition, Emotion, and Motivation.” Psychological Review 98.2 (1991): 224–53.Le, Bonnie M., and Emily A. Impett. “When Holding Back Helps: Supressing Negative Emotions during Sacrifice Feels Authentic and Is Beneficial for Highly Interdependent People”. Pscyhological Science 24.9 (2013): 1809–15.Lindholm, Charles. Culture and Authenticity. Malden: Blackwell, 2008.Maslow, Abraham H. Toward a Psychology of Being. Princeton: Van Nostrand, 1968.Menendez, Ramon. “The Culture of Authenticity: An Empirical Study of La Trobe University Students from Diverse Cultural Backgrounds.” Proceedings of The Australian Sociological Association (TASA) Conference, 25-28 November. Melbourne: Monash U, 2013.Potter, Andrew. The Authenticity Hoax How We Get Lost Finding Ourselves. Carlton North: Scribe, 2010.Solomon, Robert C. “Notes on Emotion, ‘East and West.’” Philosophy East and West 45.2 (1995): 171–202.Taylor, Charles. Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989.———. The Ethics of Authenticity. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1991.Trilling, Lionel. Sincerity and Authenticity. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1972.Turner, Ralph. “Is There a Quest for Identity?” The Sociological Quarterly 16.2 (1975): 148–61.———. “The Real Self: From Institution to Impulse.” The American Journal of Sociology 81.5 (1976): 989–1016.Vannini, Phillip. Authenticity and Power in the Academic Profession. Ph.D. Thesis, Whasington: Whashington State U, 2004.———. “Dead Poet’s Society: Teaching, Publish-or-Perish, and Professors’ Experiences of Authenticity.” Symbolic Interaction 29.2 (2006): 235–57.———, and J. Patrick Williams. Authenticity in Culture, Self, and Society. Farnham: Ashgate, 2009.WVS. World Values Survey. World Values Survey Association. 18 Feb. 2015 ‹http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/wvs.jsp›.

At last year’s Tour de France—the three-week cycling race—the winner of one stage was disqualified for allegedly obstructing a competitor. In newspapers and on social media, cycling fans immediately started a heated debate about the decision and about the actual course of events. They uploaded photographs and videos, which they had often edited and augmented with graphics to support their interpretation of the situation or to direct attention to some neglected detail (Simpson; "Tour de France").Due to their competitive character and their audience’s partisanship, modern media sports continuously create controversial moments like this, thereby providing ample opportunities for what Jason Mittell—with respect to complex narratives in recent TV drama—called “forensic fandom” ("Forensic;" Complex), in which audience members collectively investigate ambivalent or enigmatic elements of a media product, adding their own interpretations and explanations.Not unlike that of TV drama, sport’s forensic fandom is stimulated through complex forms of seriality—e.g. the successive stages of the Tour de France or the successive games of a tournament or a league, but also the repetition of the same league competition or tournament every (or, in the case of the Olympics, every four) year(s). To articulate their take on the disqualification of the Tour de France rider, fans refer to comparable past events, activate knowledge about rivalries between cyclists, or note character traits that they condensed from the alleged perpetrator’s prior appearances. Sport thus creates a continuously evolving and recursive storyworld that, like all popular seriality, proliferates across different media forms (texts, photos, films, etc.) and different media platforms (television, social media, etc.) (Kelleter).In the following I will use two examples (from 1908 and 1966) to analyse in greater detail why and how sport’s seriality and forensic attitude contribute to the highly dynamic “transmedia intertextuality” (Kinder 35) of media sport. Two arguments are of special importance to me: (1) While social media (as the introductory example has shown) add to forensic fandom’s proliferation, it was sport’s strongly serialized evaluation of performances that actually triggered the “spreadability” (Jenkins, Ford, and Green) of sport-related topics across different media, first doing so at the end of the 19th century. What is more, modern sport owes its very existence to the cross-media circulation of its events. (2) So far, transmedia has mainly been researched with respect to fictional content (Jenkins; Evans), yet existing research on documentary transmedia forms (Kerrigan and Velikovsky) and social media seriality (Page) has shown that the inclusion of non-fiction can broaden our knowledge of how storytelling sprawls across media and takes advantage of their specific affordances. This, I want to argue, ensures that sport is an insightful and important example for the understanding of transmedia world-building.The Origins of Sport, the Olympics 1908, and World-BuildingSome authors claim that it was commercial television that replaced descriptive accounts of sporting events with narratives of heroes and villains in the 1990s (Fabos). Yet even a cursory study of past sport reporting shows that, even back when newspapers had to explain the controversial outcome of the 1908 Olympic Marathon to their readers, they could already rely on a well-established typology of characters and events.In the second half of the 19th century, the rules of many sports became standardized. Individual events were integrated in organized, repetitive competitions—leagues, tournaments, and so on. This development was encouraged by the popular press, which thus enabled the public to compare performances from different places and across time (Werron, "On Public;" Werron, "World"). Rankings and tables condensed contests in easily comparable visual forms, and these were augmented by more narrative accounts that supplemented the numbers with details, context, drama, and the subjective experiences of athletes and spectators. Week by week, newspapers and special-interest magazines alike offered varying explanations for the various wins and losses.When London hosted the Olympics in 1908, the scheduled seriality and pre-determined settings and protagonists allowed for the announcement of upcoming events in advance and for setting up possible storylines. Two days before the marathon race, The Times of London published the rules of the race, the names of the participants, a distance table listing relevant landmarks with the estimated arrival times, and a turn-by-turn description of the route, sketching the actual experience of running the race for the readers (22 July 1908, p. 11). On the day of the race, The Times appealed to sport’s seriality with a comprehensive narrative of prior Olympic Marathon races, a map of the precise course, a discussion of the alleged favourites, and speculation on factors that might impact the performances:Because of their inelasticity, wood blocks are particularly trying to the feet, and the glitter on the polished surface of the road, if the sun happens to be shining, will be apt to make a man who has travelled over 20 miles at top speed turn more than a little dizzy … . It is quite possible that some of the leaders may break down here, when they are almost within sight of home. (The Times 24 July 1908, p. 9)What we see here can be described as a world-building process: The rules of a competition, the participating athletes, their former performances, the weather, and so on, all form “a more or less organized sum of scattered parts” (Boni 13). These parts could easily be taken up by what we now call different media platforms (which in 1908 included magazines, newspapers, and films) that combine them in different ways to already make claims about cause-and-effect chains, intentions, outcomes, and a multitude of subjective experiences, before the competition has even started.The actual course of events, then, like the single instalment in a fictional storyworld, has a dual function: on the one hand, it specifies one particular storyline with a few protagonists, decisive turning points, and a clear determination of winners and losers. On the other hand, it triggers the multiplication of follow-up stories, each suggesting specific explanations for the highly contingent outcome, thereby often extending the storyworld, invoking props, characters, character traits, causalities, and references to earlier instalments in the series, which might or might not have been mentioned in the preliminary reports.In the 1908 Olympic Marathon, the Italian Dorando Pietri, who was not on The Times’ list of favourites, reached the finish first. Since he was stumbling on the last 300 meters of the track inside the stadium and only managed to cross the finish line with the support of race officials, he was disqualified. The jury then declared the American John Hayes, who came in second, the winner of the race.The day after the marathon, newspapers gave different accounts of the race. One, obviously printed too hastily, declared Pietri dead; others unsurprisingly gave the race a national perspective, focusing on the fate of “their” athletes (Davis 161, 166). Most of them evaluated the event with respect to athletic, aesthetic, or ethical terms—e.g. declaring Pietri the moral winner of the race (as did Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in The Daily Mail of July 25). This continues today, as praising sport performers often figures as a last resort “to reconstruct unproblematic heroism” (Whannel 44).The general endeavour of modern sport to scrutinize and understand the details of the performance provoked competing explanations for what had happened: was it the food, the heat, or the will power? In a forensic spirit, many publications added drawings or printed one of the famous photographs displaying Pietri being guided across the finish line (these still regularly appear in coffee-table books on sports photography; for a more extensive analysis, see Stauff). Sport—just like other non-fictional transmedia content—enriches its storyworld through “historical accounts of places and past times that already have their own logic, practice and institutions” (Kerrigan and Velikovsky 259).The seriality of sport not only fostered this dynamic by starting the narrative before the event, but also by triggering references to past instalments through the contingencies of the current one. The New York Times took the biggest possible leap, stating that the 1908 marathon must have been the most dramatic competition “since that Marathon race in ancient Greece, where the victor fell at the goal and, with a wave of triumph, died” (The New York Times 25 July 1908, p. 1). Dutch sport magazine De Revue der Sporten (6 August 1908, p. 167) used sport’s seriality more soberly to assess Hayes’ finishing time as not very special (conceding that the hot weather might have had an effect).What, hopefully, has become clear by now, is that—starting in the late 19th century—sporting events are prepared by, and in turn trigger, varying practices of transmedia world-building that make use of the different media’s affordances (drawings, maps, tables, photographs, written narratives, etc.). Already in 1908, most people interested in sport thus quite probably came across multiple accounts of the event—and thereby could feel invited to come up with their own explanation for what had happened. Back then, this forensic attitude was mostly limited to speculation about possible cause-effect chains, but with the more extensive visual coverage of competitions, especially through moving images, storytelling harnessed an increasingly growing set of forensic tools.The World Cup 1966 and Transmedia ForensicsThe serialized TV live transmissions of sport add complexity to storytelling, as they multiply the material available for forensic proliferations of the narratives. Liveness provokes a layered and constantly adapting process transforming the succession of actions into a narrative (the “emplotment”). The commentators find themselves “in the strange situation of a narrator ignorant of the plot” (Ryan 87), constantly balancing between mere reporting of events and more narrative explanation of incidents (Barnfield 8).To create a coherent storyworld under such circumstances, commentators fall back on prefabricated patterns (“overcoming bad luck,” “persistence paying off,” etc.) to frame the events while they unfold (Ryan 87). This includes the already mentioned tropes of heroism or national and racial stereotypes, which are upheld as long as possible, even when the course of events contradicts them (Tudor). Often, the creation of “non-retrospective narratives” (Ryan 79) harnesses seriality, “connecting this season with last and present with past and, indeed, present with past and future” (Barnfield 10).Instant-replay technology, additionally, made it possible (and necessary) for commentators to scrutinize individual actions while competitions are still ongoing, provoking revisions of the emplotment. With video, DVD, and online video, the second-guessing and re-telling of elements—at least in hindsight—became accessible to the general audience as well, thereby dramatically extending the playing field for sport’s forensic attitude.I want to elaborate this development with another example from London, this time the 1966 Men’s Football World Cup, which was the first to systematically use instant replay. In the extra time of the final, the English team scored a goal against the German side: Geoff Hurst’s shot bounced from the crossbar down to the goal line and from there back into the field. After deliberating with the linesman, the referee called it a goal. Until today it remains contested whether the ball actually was behind the goal line or not.By 1966, 1908’s sparsity of visual representation had been replaced by an abundance of moving images. The game was covered by the BBC and by ITV (for TV) and by several film companies (in colour and in black-and-white). Different recordings of the famous goal, taken from different camera angles, still circulate and are re-appropriated in different media even today. The seriality of sport, particularly World Cup Football’s return every four years, triggers the re-telling of this 1966 game just as much as media innovations do.In 1966, the BBC live commentary—after a moment of doubt—pretty soberly stated that “it’s a goal” and observed that “the Germans are mad at the referee;” the ITV reporter, more ambivalently declared: “the linesman says no goal … that’s what we saw … It is a goal!” The contemporary newsreel in German cinemas—the Fox Tönende Wochenschau—announced the scene as “the most controversial goal of the tournament.” It was presented from two different perspectives, the second one in slow motion with the commentary stating: “these images prove that it was not a goal” (my translation).So far, this might sound like mere opposing interpretations of a contested event, yet the option to scrutinize the scene in slow motion and in different versions also spawned an extended forensic narrative. A DVD celebrating 100 years of FIFA (FIFA Fever, 2002) includes the scene twice, the first time in the chapter on famous controversies. Here, the voice-over avoids taking a stand by adopting a meta-perspective: The goal guaranteed that “one of the most entertaining finals ever would be the subject of conversation for generations to come—and therein lies the beauty of controversies.” The scene appears a second time in the special chapter on Germany’s successes. Now the goal itself is presented with music and then commented upon by one of the German players, who claims that it was a bad call by the referee but that the sportsmanlike manner in which his team accepted the decision advanced Germany’s global reputation.This is only included in the German version of the DVD, of course; on the international “special deluxe edition” of FIFA Fever (2002), the 1966 goal has its second appearance in the chapter on England’s World Cup history. Here, the referee’s decision is not questioned—there is not even a slow-motion replay. Instead, the summary of the game is wrapped up with praise for Geoff Hurst’s hat trick in the game and with images of the English players celebrating, the voice-over stating: “Now the nation could rejoice.”In itself, the combination of a nationally organized media landscape with the nationalist approach to sport reporting already provokes competing emplotments of one and the same event (Puijk). The modularity of sport reporting, which allows for easy re-editing, replacing sound and commentary, and retelling events through countless witnesses, triggers a continuing recombination of the elements of the storyworld. In the 50 years since the game, there have been stories about the motivations of the USSR linesman and the Swiss referee who made the decision, and there have been several reconstructions triggered by new digital technology augmenting the existing footage (e.g. King; ‘das Archiv’).The forensic drive behind these transmedia extensions is most explicit in the German Football Museum in Dortmund. For the fiftieth anniversary of the World Cup in 2016, it hosted a special exhibition on the event, which – similarly to the FIFA DVD – embeds it in a story of gaining global recognition for the fairness of the German team ("Deutsches Fußballmuseum").In the permanent exhibition of the German Football Museum, the 1966 game is memorialized with an exhibit titled “Wembley Goal Investigation” (“Ermittlung Wembley-Tor”). It offers three screens, each showing the goal from a different camera angle, a button allowing the visitors to stop the scene at any moment. A huge display cabinet showcases documents, newspaper clippings, quotes from participants, and photographs in the style of a crime-scene investigation—groups of items are called “corpus delicti,” “witnesses,” and “analysis.” Red hand-drawn arrows insinuate relations between different items; yellow “crime scene, do not cross” tape lies next to a ruler and a pair of tweezers.Like the various uses of the slow-motion replays on television, in film, on DVD, and on YouTube, the museum thus offers both hegemonic narratives suggesting a particular emplotment of the event that endow it with broader (nationalist) meaning and a forensic storyworld that offers props, characters, and action building-blocks in a way that invites fans to activate their own storytelling capacities.Conclusion: Sport’s Trans-Seriality Sport’s dependency on a public evaluation of its performances has made it a dynamic transmedia topic from the latter part of the 19th century onwards. Contested moments especially prompt a forensic attitude that harnesses the affordances of different media (and quickly takes advantage of technological innovations) to discuss what “really” happened. The public evaluation of performances also shapes the role of authorship and copyright, which is pivotal to transmedia more generally (Kustritz). Though the circulation of moving images from professional sporting events is highly restricted and intensely monetized, historically this circulation only became a valuable asset because of the sprawling storytelling practices about sport, individual competitions, and famous athletes in press, photography, film, and radio. Even though television dominates the first instance of emplotment during the live transmission, there is no primordial authorship; sport’s intense competition and partisanship (and their national organisation) guarantee that there are contrasting narratives from the start.The forensic storytelling, as we have seen, is structured by sport’s layered seriality, which establishes a rich storyworld and triggers ever new connections between present and past events. Long before the so-called seasons of radio or television series, sport established a seasonal cycle that repeats the same kind of competition with different pre-conditions, personnel, and weather conditions. Likewise, long before the complex storytelling of current television drama (Mittell, Complex TV), sport has mixed episodic with serial storytelling. On the one hand, the 1908 Marathon, for example, is part of the long series of marathon competitions, which can be considered independent events with their own fixed ending. On the other hand, athletes’ histories, continuing rivalries, and (in the case of the World Cup) progress within a tournament all establish narrative connections across individual episodes and even across different seasons (on the similarities between TV sport and soap operas, cf. O’Connor and Boyle).From its start in the 19th century, the serial publication of newspapers supported (and often promoted) sport’s seriality, while sport also shaped the publication schedule of the daily or weekly press (Mason) and today still shapes the seasonal structure of television and sport related computer games (Hutchins and Rowe 164). This seasonal structure also triggers wide-ranging references to the past: With each new World Cup, the famous goal from 1966 gets integrated into new highlight reels telling the German and the English teams’ different stories.Additionally, together with the contingency of sport events, this dual seriality offers ample opportunity for the articulation of “latent seriality” (Kustritz), as a previously neglected recurring trope, situation, or type of event across different instalments can eventually be noted. As already mentioned, the goal of 1966 is part of different sections on the FIFA DVDs: as the climactic final example in a chapter collecting World Cup controversies, as an important—but rather ambivalent—moment of German’s World Cup history, and as the biggest triumph in the re-telling of England’s World Cup appearances. In contrast to most fictional forms of seriality, the emplotment of sport constantly integrates such explicit references to the past, even causally disconnected historical events like the ancient Greek marathon.As a result, each competition activates multiple temporal layers—only some of which are structured as narratives. It is important to note that the public evaluation of performances is not at all restricted to narrative forms; as we have seen, there are quantitative and qualitative comparisons, chronicles, rankings, and athletic spectacle, all of which can create transmedia intertextuality. Sport thus might offer an invitation to more generally analyse how transmedia seriality combines narrative and other forms. Even for fictional transmedia, the immersion in a storyworld and the imagination of extended and alternative storylines might only be two of many dynamics that structure seriality across different media.AcknowledgementsThe two anonymous reviewers and Florian Duijsens offered important feedback to clarify the argument of this text.ReferencesBarnfield, Andrew. "Soccer, Broadcasting, and Narrative: On Televising a Live Soccer Match." Communication & Sport (2013): 326–341.Boni, Marta. "Worlds Today." World Building: Transmedia, Fans, Industries. Ed. Marta Boni. Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP, 2017. 9–27."Das Archiv: das Wembley-Tor." Karambolage, 19 June 2016. 6 Feb. 2018 <https://sites.arte.tv/karambolage/de/das-archiv-das-wembley-tor-karambolage>.The Daily Mail, 25 July 1908.Davis, David. Showdown at Shepherd’s Bush: The 1908 Olympic Marathon and the Three Runners Who Launched a Sporting Craze. 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Media of Serial Narrative. Ed. Frank Kelleter. Columbus: The Ohio State UP, 2017. 7–34.Kerrigan, Susan, and J.T. Velikovsky. "Examining Documentary Transmedia Narratives through the Living History of Fort Scratchley Project." Convergence 22.3 (2016): 250–268.Kinder, Marsha. "Playing with Power on Saturday Morning Television and on Home Video Games." Quarterly Review of Film and Television 14 (1992): 29–59.King, Dominic. "Geoff Hurst’s Goal against West Germany DID Cross the Line!" Daily Mail Online. 4 Jan. 2016. 6 Feb. 2018 <http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-3384366/Geoff-Hurst-s-goal-against-West-Germany-DID-cross-line-Sky-Sports-finally-prove-linesman-right-award-controversial-strike-1966-World-Cup-final.html>.Kustritz, Anne. "Seriality and Transmediality in the Fan Multiverse: Flexible and Multiple Narrative Structures in Fan Fiction, Art, and Vids." TV/Series 6 (2014): 225–261.Mason, Tony. "Sporting News, 1860-1914." The Press in English Society from the Seventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries. Eds. Michael Harris and Alan Lee. Associated UP, 1986. 168–186.Mittell, Jason. Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling. New York: NYU Press, 2015.———. "Forensic Fandom and the Drillable Text." Spreadable Media. 17 Dec. 2012. 4 Jan. 2018 <http://spreadablemedia.org/essays/mittell/>.The New York Times 25 July 1908.O’Connor, Barbara, and Raymond Boyle. "Dallas with Balls: Televised Sport, Soap Opera and Male and Female Pleasures." Leisure Studies 12.2 (1993): 107–119.Page, Ruth. "Seriality and Storytelling in Social Media." StoryWorlds: A Journal of Narrative Studies 5.1 (2013): 31–54.Puijk, Roel. "A Global Media Event? Coverage of the 1994 Lillehammer Olympic Games." International Review for the Sociology of Sport 35.3 (2000): 309–330.De Revue der Sporten, 6 August 1908.Ryan, Marie-Laure. Avatars of Story. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006.Simpson, Christopher. "Peter Sagan’s 2017 Tour de France Disqualification Appeal Rejected by CAS." Bleacher Report. 6 July 2017. 6 Feb. 2018 <https://bleacherreport.com/articles/2720166-peter-sagans-2017-tour-de-france-disqualification-appeal-rejected-by-cas>.Stauff, Markus. "The Pregnant-Moment-Photograph: The London 1908 Marathon and the Cross-Media Evaluation of Sport Performances." Historical Social Research (forthcoming). The Times, 22 July 1908.The Times, 24 July 1908."Tour de France: Peter Sagan Disqualified for Elbowing Mark Cavendish." 4 July 2017. 6 Feb. 2018 <https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/cycling/2017/07/04/demare-wins-tour-stage-as-cavendish-involved-in-nasty-crash/103410284/>.Tudor, Andrew. "Them and Us: Story and Stereotype in TV World Cup Coverage." European Journal of Communication 7 (1992): 391–413.Werron, Tobias. "On Public Forms of Competition." Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies 14.1 (2014): 62–76.———. "World Sport and Its Public. On Historical Relations of Modern Sport and the Media." Observing Sport: System-Theoretical Approaches to Sport as a Social Phenomenon. Eds. Ulrik Wagner and Rasmus Storm. Schorndorf: Hofmann, 2010. 33–59.Whannel, Garry. Media Sport Stars. Masculinities and Moralities. London/New York: Routledge, 2001.

Neil Jordan’s Breakfast on Pluto (2005) reconceives transience and domesticity together. This queer Irish road film collapses opposition between mobility and home by uncoupling them from heteronormative structures of gender, desire, and space—male/female, public/private. The film’s protagonist, Patrick “Kitten” Braden (Cillian Murphy), wanders in search of a loved one without whom she does not feel at home. Along the way, the film exposes and exploits the doubleness of both “mobility” and “home” in the traditional road narrative, queering the conventions of the road film to convey the desire and possibilities for an alternative domesticity. In its rerouting of the traditional road plot, Breakfast on Pluto does not follow a hero escaping the obligations of home and family to find autonomy on the road. Instead, the film charts Kitten’s quest to realise a sense of home through trans-domesticity—that is, to find shelter in non-heteronormative, mutual care while in both transient and public spaces.I affix “trans-” to “domesticity” to signal both the queerness and mobility that transform understandings of domestic spaces and practices in Breakfast on Pluto. To clarify, trans-domesticity is not queer assimilation to heteronormative domesticity, nor is it a relegation of queer culture to privatised and demobilised spaces. Rather, trans-domesticity challenges the assumption that all forms of domesticity are inherently normalising and demobilising. In other words, trans-domesticity uncovers tensions and violence swept under the rugs of hegemonic domesticity. Moreover, this alternative domesticity moves between and beyond the terms of gender and spatial oppositions that delimit the normative home.Specifically, “trans-domesticity” names non-normative homemaking practices that arise out of the “desire to feel at home”, a desire that Anne-Marie Fortier identifies in queer diasporic narratives (1890-90). Accordingly, “trans-domesticity” also registers the affective processes that foster the connectedness and belonging of “home” away from private domestic spaces and places of origin, a “rethinking of the concept of home”, which Ed Madden traces in lesbian and gay migrant narratives (175-77). Building on the assumption of queer diaspora theorists “that not only can one be at home in movement, but that movement can be one’s very own home” (Rapport and Dawson 27), trans-domesticity focuses critical attention on the everyday practices and emotional labour that create a home in transience.As Breakfast on Pluto tracks its transgender protagonist’s movement between a small Irish border town, Northern Ireland, and London, the film invokes both a specifically Irish migration and the broader queer diaspora of which it is a part. While trans-domesticity is a recurring theme across a wide range of queer diasporic narratives, in Breakfast on Pluto it also simultaneously drives the plot and functions as a narrative frame. The film begins and ends with Kitten telling her story as she wanders through the streets of Soho and cares for a member of her made family, her friend Charlie’s baby.Although I am concerned with the film adaptation, Patrick McCabe’s “Prelude” to his novel, Breakfast on Pluto (1998), offers a useful point of departure: Patrick “Pussy” Braden’s dream, “as he negotiates the minefields of this world”, is “ending, once and for all, this ugly state of perpetual limbo” and “finding a map which might lead to that place called home” (McCabe x). In such a place, McCabe’s hero might lay “his head beneath a flower-bordered print that bears the words at last ‘You’re home’”(McCabe xi). By contrast, the film posits that “home” is never a “place” apart from “the minefields of this world”, and that while being in transit and in limbo might be a perpetual state, it is not necessarily an ugly one.Jordan’s film thus addresses the same questions as does Susan Fraiman in her book Extreme Domesticity: “But what about those for whom dislocation is not back story but main event? Those who, having pulled themselves apart, realize no timely arrival at a place of their own, so that being not-unpacked is an ongoing condition?” (155). Through her trans-domestic shelter-making and caregiving practices, Kitten enacts “home” in motion and in public spaces, and thereby realises the elision in the flower-bordered print in McCabe’s “Prelude” (xi), which does not assure “You are at home” but, rather, “You are home”.From Housed to Trans-Domestic SubjectivitySelf and home are equated in the dominant cultural narratives of Western modernity, but “home” in such formulations is assumed to be a self-owned, self-contained space. Psychoanalytic theorist Carl Jung describes this Ur-house as “a concretization of the individuation process, […] a symbol of psychic wholeness” (225). Philosopher Gaston Bachelard sees in the home “the topography of our intimate being”, a structure that “concentrates being within limits that protect” (xxxii). However, as historian Carolyn Steedman suggests, the mythic house that has become “the stuff of our ‘cultural psychology,’ the system of everyday metaphors by which we see ourselves”, is far from universal; rather, it reflects “the topography of the houses” of those who stand “in a central relationship to the dominant culture” (75, 17).For others, the lack of such housing correlates with political marginalisation, as the house functions as both a metaphor and material marker for culturally-recognised selfhood. As cultural geographer John Agnew argues, in capitalist societies the self-owned home is both a sign of autonomous individuality and a prerequisite for full political subjectivity (60). Philosopher Rosi Braidotti asserts that this figuration of subjectivity in “the phallo-Eurocentric master code” treats as “disposable” the “bodies of women, youth, and others who are racialised or marked off by age, gender, sexuality, and income” (6). These bodies are “reduced to marginality” and subsequently “experience dispossession of their embodied and embedded selves, in a political economy of repeated and structurally enforced eviction” (Braidotti 6).To shift the meaning of “home” and the intimately-linked “self” from a privately-owned, autonomous structure to trans-domesticity, to an ethos of care enacted even, and especially in, transient and public spaces, is not to romanticise homelessness or to deny the urgent necessity of material shelter. Breakfast on Pluto certainly does not allow viewers to do either. Rather, the figure of a trans-domestic self, like Braidotti’s “nomadic subject”, has the potential to challenge and transform the terms of power relations. Those now on the margins might then be seen as equally-embodied selves and full political subjects with the right to shelter and care.Such a political project also entails recognising and revaluing—without appropriating and demobilising—existing trans-domesticity. As Fraiman argues, “domesticity” must be “map[ped] from the margins” in order to include the homemaking practices of gender rebels and the precariously housed, of castaways and outcasts (4-5). This alternative map would allow “outsiders to normative domesticity” to “claim domesticity while wrenching it away from such things as compulsory heterosexuality […] and the illusion of a safely barricaded life” (Fraiman 4-5). Breakfast on Pluto shares in this re-mapping work by exposing the violence embedded in heteronormative domestic structures, and by charting the radical political potential of trans-domesticity.Unsettling HousesIn the traditional road narrative, “home” tends to be a static, confining structure from which the protagonist escapes, a space that then functions as “a structuring absence” on the road (Robertson 271). Bachelard describes this normative structure as a “dream house” that constitutes “a body of images that give mankind proofs or illusions of stability” (17); the house functions, Henri Lefebvre argues, as “the epitome of immobility” (92). Whether the dream is to escape and/or to return, “to write of houses”, as Adam Hanna asserts, “is to raise ideas of shelters that are fixed and secure” (113).Breakfast on Pluto quickly gives lie to those expectations. Kitten is adopted by Ma Braden (Ruth McCabe), a single woman who raises Kitten and her adopted sister in domestic space that is connected to, and part of, a public house. That spatial contiguity undermines any illusion of privacy and security, as is evident in the scene in which a school-aged Kitten, who thought herself safely home alone and thus able to dress in her mother’s and sister’s clothes, is discovered in the act by her mother and sister from the pub’s street entrance. Further, the film lays bare the built-in mechanisms of surveillance and violence that reinforce heteronormative, patriarchal structures. After discovering Kitten in women’s clothes, Ma Braden violently scrubs her clean and whacks her with a brush until Kitten says, “I’m a boy, not a girl”. The public/house space facilitates Ma Braden’s close monitoring of Kitten thereafter.As a young writer in secondary school, Kitten satirises the violence within the hegemonic home by narrating the story of the rape of her biological mother, Eily Bergin (Eva Birthistle), by Kitten’s father, Father Liam (Liam Neeson) in a scene of hyper-domesticity set in the rectory kitchen. As Patrick Mullen notes, “the rendition of the event follows the bubble-gum logic and tone of 1950s Hollywood culture” (130). The relationship between the ideal domesticity thereby invoked and the rape then depicted exposes the sexual violence for what it is: not an external violation of the double sanctity of church and home space, but rather an internal and even intrinsic violence that reinforces and is shielded by the power structures from which normative domesticity is never separate.The only sense of home that seems to bind Kitten to her place of origin is based in her affective bonds to friends Charlie (Ruth Negga) and Lawrence (Seamus Reilly). When Lawrence is killed by a bomb, Kitten is no longer at home, and she leaves town to search for the “phantom” mother she never knew. The impetus for Kitten’s wandering, then, is connection rather than autonomy, and neither the home she leaves, nor the sense of home she seeks, are fixed structures.Mobile Homes and Queering of the Western RoadBreakfast on Pluto tracks how the oppositions that seem to structure traditional road films—such as that between home and mobility, and between domestic and open spaces—continually collapse. The film invokes the “cowboy and Indian” mythology from which the Western road narrative descends (Boyle 19), but to different ends: to capture a desire for non-heteronormative affective bonds rather than “lone ranger” autonomy, and to convey a longing for domesticity on the trail, for a home that is both mobile and open. Across the past century of Irish fiction and film, “cowboy and Indian” mythology has often intersected with queer wandering, from James Joyce’s Dubliners story “An Encounter” (1914) to Lenny Abrahamson’s film Adam & Paul (2004). In this tradition, Breakfast on Pluto queers “cowboy and Indian” iconography to convey an alternative conception of domesticity and home. The prevailing ethos in the film’s queered Western scenes is of trans-domesticity—of inclusion and care during transience and in open spaces. After bar bouncers exclude Kitten and friends because of her transgenderism and Lawrence’s Down syndrome, “The Border Knights” (hippie-bikers-cum-cowboys) ride to their rescue and bring them to their temporary home under the stars. Once settled around the campfire, the first biker shares his philosophy with a cuddled-up Kitten: “When I’m riding my hog, you think I’m riding the road? No way, man. I’m travelling from the past into the future with a druid at my back”. “Druid man or woman?” Kitten asks. “That doesn’t matter”, the biker clarifies, “What matters is the journey”. What matters is not place as fixed destination or gender as static difference, but rather the practice of travelling with open relationships to space, to time, and to others. The bikers welcome all to their fire and include both Kitten and Lawrence in their sharing of jokes and joints. The only exclusion is of reference to political violence, which Charlie’s boyfriend, Irwin (Laurence Kinlan), tries to bring into the conversation.Further, Kitten uses domesticity to try to establish a place for herself while on the road with “Billy Hatchett and The Mohawks”, the touring band that picks her up when she leaves Ma Braden’s. As Mullen notes, “Kitten literally works herself into the band by hand sewing a ‘squaw’ outfit to complement the group’s glam-rock Native American image” (Mullen 141). The duet that Kitten performs with Billy (Gavin Friday), a song about a woman inviting “a wandering man” to share the temporary shelter of her campfire, invokes trans-domesticity. But the film intercuts their performance with scenes of violent border-policing: first, by British soldiers at a checkpoint who threaten the group and boast about the “13 less to deal with” in Derry, and then by members of the Republican Prisoners Welfare Association, who throw cans at the group and yell them off stage. A number of critics have noted the postcolonial implications of Breakfast on Pluto’s use of Native American iconography, which in these intercut scenes clearly raises the national stakes of constructions of domestic belonging (see, for instance, Winston 153-71). In complementary ways, the film queers “cowboy and Indian” mythology to reimagine “mobility” and “home” together.After Kitten is forced out by the rest of the band, Billy sets her up in a caravan, a mobile home left to him by his mother. Though Billy “wouldn’t exactly call it a house”, Kitten sees in it her first chance at a Bachelardian “dream house”: she calls it a “house of dreams and longing” and cries, “Oh, to have a little house, to own the hearth, stool, and all”. Kitten ecstatically begins to tidy the place, performing what Fraiman terms a “hyper-investment in homemaking” that functions “as compensation for domestic deprivation” (20).Aisling Cormack suggests that Kitten’s hyper-investment in homemaking signals the film’s “radical disengagement with politics” to a “femininity that is inherently apolitical” (169-70). But that reading holds only if viewers assume a gendered, spatial divide between public and private, and between the political and the domestic. As Fraiman asserts, “the political meaning of fixating on domestic arrangements is more complex […] For the poor or transgendered person, the placeless immigrant or the woman on her own, aspiring to a safe, affirming home doesn’t reinforce hierarchical social relations but is pitched, precisely, against them” (20).Trans-Domesticity as Political ActEven as Kitten invokes the idea of a Bachelardian dream house, she performs a trans-domesticity that exposes the falseness of the gendered, spatial oppositions assumed to structure the normative home. Her domesticity is not an apolitical retreat; rather, it is pitched, precisely, against the violence that public/private and political/domestic oppositions enable within the house, as well as beyond it. As she cleans, Kitten discovers that violence is literally embedded in her caravan home when she finds a cache of Irish Republican Army (IRA) guns under the floor. After a bomb kills Lawrence, Kitten throws the guns into a reservoir, a defiant act that she describes to the IRA paramilitaries who come looking for the guns as “spring cleaning”. Cormack asserts that Kitten “describing her perilous destruction of the guns in terms of domestic labor” strips it “of all political significance” (179). I argue instead that it demonstrates the radical potential of trans-domesticity, of an ethos of care-taking and shelter-making asserted in public and political spaces. Kitten’s act is not apolitical, though it is decidedly anti-violence.From the beginning of Breakfast on Pluto, Kitten’s trans-domesticity exposes the violence structurally embedded in heteronormative domestic ideology. Additionally, the film’s regular juxtaposition of scenes of Kitten’s homemaking practices with scenes of political violence demonstrates that no form of domesticity functions as a private, apolitical retreat from “the minefields of this world” (McCabe x). This latter counterpoint throws into relief the political significance of Kitten’s trans-domesticity. Her domestic practices are her means of resisting and transforming the structural violence that poses an existential threat to marginalised and dispossessed people.After Kitten is accused of being responsible for an IRA bombing in London, the ruthless, violent interrogation of Kitten by British police officers begins to break down her sense of self. Throughout this brutal scene, Kitten compulsively straightens the chairs and tidies the room, and she responds to her interrogators with kindness and even affection. Fraiman’s theorisation of “extreme domesticity” helps to articulate how Kitten’s homemaking in carceral space—she calls it “My Sweet Little Cell”—is an “urgent” act that, “in the wake of dislocation”, can mean “safety, sanity, and self-expression; survival in the most basic sense” (25). Cormack reads Kitten’s reactions in this scene as “masochistic” and the male police officers’ nurturing response as of a piece with the film’s “more-feminine-than-feminine disengagement from political realities” (185-89). However, I disagree: Kitten’s trans-domesticity is a political act that both sustains her within structures that would erase her and converts officers of the state to an ethos of care and shelter. Inspector Routledge, for example, gently carries Kitten back to her cell, and after her release, PC Wallis ensures that she is safely (if not privately) housed with a cooperatively-run peep show, the address at which an atoning Father Liam locates her in London.After Kitten and a pregnant Charlie are burned out of the refuge that they temporarily find with Father Liam, Kitten and Charlie return to London, where Charlie’s baby is born soon after into the trans-domesticity that opens the film. Rejoining the story’s frame, Breakfast on Pluto ends close to where it begins: Kitten and the baby meet Charlie outside a London hospital, where Kitten sees Eily Bergin with her new son, Patrick. Instead of meeting where their paths intersect, the two families pass each other and turn in opposite directions. Kitten now knows that hers is both a different road and a different kind of home. “Home”, then, is not a place gained once and for all. Rather, home is a perpetual practice that does not separate one from the world, but can create the shelter of mutual care as one wanders through it.The Radical Potential and Structural Limits of Trans-DomesticityBreakfast on Pluto demonstrates the agency that trans-domesticity can afford in the lives of marginalised and dispossessed individuals, as well as the power of the structures that militate against its broader realisation. The radical political potential of trans-domesticity manifests in the transformation in the two police officers’ relational practices. Kitten’s trans-domesticity also inspires a reformation in Father Liam, the film’s representative of the Catholic Church and a man whose relationship to others transmutes from sexual violence and repressive secrecy to mutual nurturance and inclusive love. Although these individual conversions do not signify changes in structures of power, they do allow viewers to imagine the possibility of a state and a church that cherish, shelter, and care for all people equally. The film’s ending conveys this sense of fairy-tale-like possibility through its Disney-esque chattering birds and the bubble-gum pop song, “Sugar Baby Love”.In the end, the sense of hopefulness that closes Breakfast on Pluto coexists with the reality that dominant power structures will not recognise Kitten’s trans-domestic subjectivity and family, and that those structures will work to contain any perceived threat, just as the Catholic Church banishes the converted Father Liam to Kilburn Parish. That Kitten and Charlie nevertheless realise a clear contentment in themselves and in their made family demonstrates the vital importance of trans-domesticity and other forms of “extreme domesticity” in the lives of those who wander.ReferencesAgnew, John. “Home Ownership and Identity in Capitalist Societies.” Housing and Identity: Cross Cultural Perspectives. Ed. James S. Duncan. New York: Holmes and Meier, 1982. 60–97.Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. 1957. Trans. Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon Press, 1969.Boyle, Kevin Jon, ed. Rear View Mirror: Automobile Images and American Identities. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.Braidotti, Rosi. Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory. 2nd ed. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011.Breakfast on Pluto. Dir. Neil Jordan. Pathé Pictures International, 2005.Cormack, Aisling B. “Toward a ‘Post-Troubles’ Cinema? The Troubled Intersection of Political Violence and Gender in Neil Jordan’s The Crying Game and Breakfast on Pluto.” Éire-Ireland 49.1–2 (2014): 164–92.Fortier, Anne-Marie. “Queer Diaspora.” Handbook of Lesbian and Gay Studies. Eds. Diane Richardson and Steven Seidman. London: Sage Publishing, 2002. 183–97.Fraiman, Susan. Extreme Domesticity: A View from the Margins. New York: Columbia University Press, 2017.Hanna, Adam. Northern Irish Poetry and Domestic Space. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Jung, Carl. Memories, Dreams, Reflections. 1957. Ed. Aniela Jaffe. Trans. Clara Winston and Richard Winston. New York: Vintage Books, 1989.Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Social Space. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.Madden, Ed. “Queering the Irish Diaspora: David Rees and Padraig Rooney.” Éire-Ireland 47.1–2 (2012): 172–200.McCabe, Patrick. Breakfast on Pluto. London: Picador, 1998.Mullen, Patrick R. The Poor Bugger’s Tool: Irish Modernism, Queer Labor, and Postcolonial History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.Rapport, Nigel, and Andrew Dawson. Migrants of Identity: Perceptions of ‘Home’ in a World of Movement. Oxford: Berg, 1998.Robertson, Pamela. “Home and Away: Friends of Dorothy on the Road in Oz.” The Road Movie Book. Eds. Steven Cohen and Ina Rae Hark. London: Routledge, 1997. 271–306.Steedman, Carolyn. Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987.Winston, Greg. “‘Reluctant Indians’: Irish Identity and Racial Masquerade.” Irish Modernism and the Global Primitive. Eds. Maria McGarrity and Claire A. Culleton. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. 153–71.

“Human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them [...] life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.” (Garcia Marquez 165) Introduction The refugee experience is, at heart, one of rebirth. Just as becoming a new, distinctive being—biological birth—necessarily involves the physical separation of mother and infant, so becoming a refugee entails separation from a "mother country." This mother country may or may not be a recognised nation state; the point is that the refugee transitions from physical connectedness to separation, from insider to outsider, from endemic to alien. Like babies, refugees may have little control over the timing and conditions of their expulsion. Successful resettlement requires not one rebirth but multiple rebirths—resettlement is a lifelong process (Layton)—which in turn require hope, imagination, and energy. In rebirthing themselves over and over again, people who have fled or been forced from their homelands become both mother and child. They do not go through this rebirthing alone. A range of agencies and individuals may be there to assist, including immigration officials, settlement services, schools and teachers, employment agencies and employers, English as a Second Language (ESL) resources and instructors, health-care providers, counsellors, diasporic networks, neighbours, church groups, and other community organisations. The nature, intensity, and duration of these “midwives’” interventions—and when they occur and in what combinations—vary hugely from place to place and from person to person, but there is clear evidence that post-migration experiences have a significant impact on settlement outcomes (Fozdar and Hartley). This paper draws on qualitative research I did in 2012 in a regional town in New South Wales to illuminate some of the ways in which settlement aides ease, or impede, refugees’ rebirth as fully recognised and participating Australians. I begin by considering what it means to be resilient before tracing some of the dimensions of the resettlement process. In doing so, I draw on data from interviews and focus groups with former refugees, service providers, and other residents of the town I shall call Easthaven. First, though, a word about Easthaven. As is the case in many rural and regional parts of Australia, Easthaven’s population is strongly dominated by Anglo Celtic and Saxon ancestries: 2011 Census data show that more than 80 per cent of residents were born in Australia (compared with a national figure of 69.8 per cent) and about 90 per cent speak only English at home (76.8 per cent). Almost twice as many people identify as Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander as the national figure of 2.5 per cent (Australian Bureau of Statistics). For several years Easthaven has been an official “Refugee Welcome Zone”, welcoming hundreds of refugees from diverse countries in Africa and the Middle East as well as from Myanmar. This reflects the Department of Immigration and Citizenship’s drive to settle a fifth of Australia’s 13,750 humanitarian entrants a year directly in regional areas. In Easthaven’s schools—which is where I focused my research—almost all of the ESL students are from refugee backgrounds. Defining Resilience Much of the research on human resilience is grounded in psychology, with a capacity to “bounce back” from adverse experiences cited in many definitions of resilience (e.g. American Psychological Association). Bouncing back implies a relatively quick process, and a return to a state or form similar to that which existed before the encounter with adversity. Yet resilience often requires sustained effort and significant changes in identity. As Jerome Rugaruza, a former UNHCR refugee, says of his journey from the Democratic Republic of Congo to Australia: All the steps begin in the burning village: you run with nothing to eat, no clothes. You just go. Then you get to the refugee camp […] You have a little bread and you thank god you are safe. Then after a few years in the camp, you think about a future for your children. You arrive in Australia and then you learn a new language, you learn to drive. There are so many steps and not everyone can do it. (Milsom) Not everyone can do it, but a large majority do. Research by Graeme Hugo, for example, shows that although humanitarian settlers in Australia face substantial barriers to employment and initially have much higher unemployment rates than other immigrants, for most nationality groups this difference has disappeared by the second generation: “This is consistent with the sacrifice (or investment) of the first generation and the efforts extended to attain higher levels of education and English proficiency, thereby reducing the barriers over time.” (Hugo 35). Ingrid Poulson writes that “resilience is not just about bouncing. Bouncing […] is only a reaction. Resilience is about rising—you rise above it, you rise to the occasion, you rise to the challenge. Rising is an active choice” (47; my emphasis) I see resilience as involving mental and physical grit, coupled with creativity, aspiration and, crucially, agency. Dimensions of Resettlement To return to the story of 41-year-old Jerome Rugaruza, as related in a recent newspaper article: He [Mr Rugaruza] describes the experience of being a newly arrived refugee as being like that of a newborn baby. “You need special care; you have to learn to speak [English], eat the different food, create relationships, connections”. (Milsom) This is a key dimension of resettlement: the adult becomes like an infant again, shifting from someone who knows how things work and how to get by to someone who is likely to be, for a while, dependent on others for even the most basic things—communication, food, shelter, clothing, and social contact. The “special care” that most refugee arrivals need initially (and sometimes for a long time) often results in their being seen as deficient—in knowledge, skills, dispositions, and capacities as well as material goods (Keddie; Uptin, Wright and Harwood). As Fozdar and Hartley note: “The tendency to use a deficit model in refugee resettlement devalues people and reinforces the view of the mainstream population that refugees are a liability” (27). Yet unlike newborns, humanitarian settlers come to their new countries with rich social networks and extensive histories of experience and learning—resources that are in fact vital to their rebirth. Sisay (all names are pseudonyms), a year 11 student of Ethiopian heritage who was born in Kenya, told me with feeling: I had a life back in Africa [her emphasis]. It was good. Well, I would go back there if there’s no problems, which—is a fact. And I came here for a better life—yeah, I have a better life, there’s good health care, free school, and good environment and all that. But what’s that without friends? A fellow student, Celine, who came to Australia five years ago from Burundi via Uganda, told me in a focus group: Some teachers are really good but I think some other teachers could be a little bit more encouraging and understanding of what we’ve gone through, because [they] just look at you like “You’re year 11 now, you should know this” […] It’s really discouraging when [the teachers say] in front of the class, “Oh, you shouldn’t do this subject because you haven’t done this this this this” […] It’s like they’re on purpose to tell you “you don’t have what it takes; just give up and do something else.” As Uptin, Wright and Harwood note, “schools not only have the power to position who is included in schooling (in culture and pedagogy) but also have the power to determine whether there is room and appreciation for diversity” (126). Both Sisay and Celine were disheartened by the fact they felt some of their teachers, and many of their peers, had little interest in or understanding of their lives before they came to Australia. The teachers’ low expectations of refugee-background students (Keddie, Uptin, Wright and Harwood) contrasted with the students’ and their families’ high expectations of themselves (Brown, Miller and Mitchell; Harris and Marlowe). When I asked Sisay about her post-school ambitions, she said: “I have a good idea of my future […] write a documentary. And I’m working on it.” Celine’s response was: “I know I’m gonna do medicine, be a doctor.” A third girl, Lily, who came to Australia from Myanmar three years ago, told me she wanted to be an accountant and had studied accounting at the local TAFE last year. Joseph, a father of three who resettled from South Sudan seven years ago, stressed how important getting a job was to successful settlement: [But] you have to get a certificate first to get a job. Even the job of cleaning—when I came here I was told that somebody has to go to have training in cleaning, to use the different chemicals to clean the ground and all that. But that is just sweeping and cleaning with water—you don’t need the [higher-level] skills. Simple jobs like this, we are not able to get them. In regional Australia, employment opportunities tend to be limited (Fozdar and Hartley); the unemployment rate in Easthaven is twice the national average. Opportunities to study are also more limited than in urban centres, and would-be students are not always eligible for financial assistance to gain or upgrade qualifications. Even when people do have appropriate qualifications, work experience, and language proficiency, the colour of their skin may still mean they miss out on a job. Tilbury and Colic-Peisker have documented the various ways in which employers deflect responsibility for racial discrimination, including the “common” strategy (658) of arguing that while the employer or organisation is not prejudiced, they have to discriminate because of their clients’ needs or expectations. I heard this strategy deployed in an interview with a local businesswoman, Catriona: We were advertising for a new technician. And one of the African refugees came to us and he’d had a lot of IT experience. And this is awful, but we felt we couldn't give him the job, because we send our technicians into people's houses, and we knew that if a black African guy rocked up at someone’s house to try and fix their computer, they would not always be welcomed in all—look, it would not be something that [Easthaven] was ready for yet. Colic-Peisker and Tilbury (Refugees and Employment) note that while Australia has strict anti-discrimination legislation, this legislation may be of little use to the people who, because of the way they look and sound (skin colour, dress, accent), are most likely to face prejudice and discrimination. The researchers found that perceived discrimination in the labour market affected humanitarian settlers’ sense of satisfaction with their new lives far more than, for example, racist remarks, which were generally shrugged off; the students I interviewed spoke of racism as “expected,” but “quite rare.” Most of the people Colic-Peisker and Tilbury surveyed reported finding Australians “friendly and accepting” (33). Even if there is no active discrimination on the basis of skin colour in employment, education, or housing, or overt racism in social situations, visible difference can still affect a person’s sense of belonging, as Joseph recounts: I think of myself as Australian, but my colour doesn’t [laughs] […] Unfortunately many, many Australians are expecting that Australia is a country of Europeans … There is no need for somebody to ask “Where do you come from?” and “Do you find Australia here safe?” and “Do you enjoy it?” Those kind of questions doesn’t encourage that we are together. This highlights another dimension of resettlement: the journey from feeling “at home” to feeling “foreign” to, eventually, feeling at home again in the host country (Colic-Peisker and Tilbury, Refugees and Employment). In the case of visibly different settlers, however, this last stage may never be completed. Whether the questions asked of Joseph are well intentioned or not, their effect may be the same: they position him as a “forever foreigner” (Park). A further dimension of resettlement—one already touched on—is the degree to which humanitarian settlers actively manage their “rebirth,” and are allowed and encouraged to do so. A key factor will be their mastery of English, and Easthaven’s ESL teachers are thus pivotal in the resettlement process. There is little doubt that many of these teachers have gone to great lengths to help this cohort of students, not only in terms of language acquisition but also social inclusion. However, in some cases what is initially supportive can, with time, begin to undermine refugees’ maturity into independent citizens. Sharon, an ESL teacher at one of the schools, told me how she and her colleagues would give their refugee-background students lifts to social events: But then maybe three years down the track they have a car and their dad can drive, but they still won’t take them […] We arrive to pick them up and they’re not ready, or there’s five fantastic cars in the driveway, and you pick up the student and they say “My dad’s car’s much bigger and better than yours” [laughs]. So there’s an expectation that we’ll do stuff for them, but we’ve created that [my emphasis]. Other support services may have more complex interests in keeping refugee settlers dependent. The more clients an agency has, the more services it provides, and the longer clients stay on its books, the more lucrative the contract for the agency. Thus financial and employment imperatives promote competition rather than collaboration between service providers (Fozdar and Hartley; Sidhu and Taylor) and may encourage assumptions about what sorts of services different individuals and groups want and need. Colic-Peisker and Tilbury (“‘Active’ and ‘Passive’ Resettlement”) have developed a typology of resettlement styles—“achievers,” “consumers,” “endurers,” and “victims”—but stress that a person’s style, while influenced by personality and pre-migration factors, is also shaped by the institutions and individuals they come into contact with: “The structure of settlement and welfare services may produce a victim mentality, leaving members of refugee communities inert and unable to see themselves as agents of change” (76). The prevailing narrative of “the traumatised refugee” is a key aspect of this dynamic (Colic-Peisker and Tilbury, “‘Active’ and ‘Passive’ Resettlement”; Fozdar and Hartley; Keddie). Service providers may make assumptions about what humanitarian settlers have gone through before arriving in Australia, how they have been affected by their experiences, and what must be done to “fix” them. Norah, a long-time caseworker, told me: I think you get some [providers] who go, “How could you have gone through something like that and not suffered? There must be—you must have to talk about this stuff” […] Where some [refugees] just come with the [attitude] “We’re all born into a situation; that was my situation, but I’m here now and now my focus is this.” She cited failure to consider cultural sensitivities around mental illness and to recognise that stress and anxiety during early resettlement are normal (Tilbury) as other problems in the sector: [Newly arrived refugees] go through the “happy to be here” [phase] and now “hang on, I’ve thumped to the bottom and I’m missing my own foods and smells and cultures and experiences”. I think sometimes we’re just too quick to try and slot people into a box. One factor that appears to be vital in fostering and sustaining resilience is social connection. Norah said her clients were “very good on the mobile phone” and had links “everywhere,” including to family and friends in their countries of birth, transition countries, and other parts of Australia. A 2011 report for DIAC, Settlement Outcomes of New Arrivals, found that humanitarian entrants to Australia were significantly more likely to be members of cultural and/or religious groups than other categories of immigrants (Australian Survey Research). I found many examples of efforts to build both bonding and bridging capital (Putnam) in Easthaven, and I offer two examples below. Several people told me about a dinner-dance that had been held a few weeks before one of my visits. The event was organised by an African women’s group, which had been formed—with funding assistance—several years before. The dinner-dance was advertised in the local newspaper and attracted strong interest from a broad cross-section of Easthaveners. To Debbie, a counsellor, the response signified a “real turnaround” in community relations and was a big boon to the women’s sense of belonging. Erica, a teacher, told me about a cultural exchange day she had organised between her bush school—where almost all of the children are Anglo Australian—and ESL students from one of the town schools: At the start of the day, my kids were looking at [the refugee-background students] and they were scared, they were saying to me, "I feel scared." And we shoved them all into this tiny little room […] and they had no choice but to sit practically on top of each other. And by the end of the day, they were hugging each other and braiding their hair and jumping and playing together. Like Uptin, Wright and Harwood, I found that the refugee-background students placed great importance on the social aspects of school. Sisay, the girl I introduced earlier in this paper, said: “It’s just all about friendship and someone to be there for you […] We try to be friends with them [the non-refugee students] sometimes but sometimes it just seems they don’t want it.” Conclusion A 2012 report on refugee settlement services in NSW concludes that the state “is not meeting its responsibility to humanitarian entrants as well as it could” (Audit Office of New South Wales 2); moreover, humanitarian settlers in NSW are doing less well on indicators such as housing and health than humanitarian settlers in other states (3). Evaluating the effectiveness of formal refugee-centred programs was not part of my research and is beyond the scope of this paper. Rather, I have sought to reveal some of the ways in which the attitudes, assumptions, and everyday practices of service providers and members of the broader community impact on refugees' settlement experience. What I heard repeatedly in the interviews I conducted was that it was emotional and practical support (Matthews; Tilbury), and being asked as well as told (about their hopes, needs, desires), that helped Easthaven’s refugee settlers bear themselves into fulfilling new lives. References Audit Office of New South Wales. Settling Humanitarian Entrants in New South Wales—Executive Summary. May 2012. 15 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.audit.nsw.gov.au/ArticleDocuments/245/02_Humanitarian_Entrants_2012_Executive_Summary.pdf.aspx?Embed=Y>. Australian Bureau of Statistics. 2011 Census QuickStats. Mar. 2013. 11 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.censusdata.abs.gov.au/census_services/getproduct/census/2011/quickstat/0>. Australian Survey Research. Settlement Outcomes of New Arrivals—Report of Findings. Apr. 2011. 15 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.immi.gov.au/media/publications/research/_pdf/settlement-outcomes-new-arrivals.pdf>. Brown, Jill, Jenny Miller, and Jane Mitchell. “Interrupted Schooling and the Acquisition of Literacy: Experiences of Sudanese Refugees in Victorian Secondary Schools.” Australian Journal of Language and Literacy 29.2 (2006): 150-62. Colic-Peisker, Val, and Farida Tilbury. “‘Active’ and ‘Passive’ Resettlement: The Influence of Supporting Services and Refugees’ Own Resources on Resettlement Style.” International Migration 41.5 (2004): 61-91. ———. Refugees and Employment: The Effect of Visible Difference on Discrimination—Final Report. Perth: Centre for Social and Community Research, Murdoch University, 2007. Fozdar, Farida, and Lisa Hartley. “Refugee Resettlement in Australia: What We Know and Need To Know.” Refugee Survey Quarterly 4 Jun. 2013. 12 Aug. 2013 ‹http://rsq.oxfordjournals.org/search?fulltext=fozdar&submit=yes&x=0&y=0>. Garcia Marquez, Gabriel. Love in the Time of Cholera. London: Penguin Books, 1989. Harris, Vandra, and Jay Marlowe. “Hard Yards and High Hopes: The Educational Challenges of African Refugee University Students in Australia.” International Journal of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education 23.2 (2011): 186-96. Hugo, Graeme. A Significant Contribution: The Economic, Social and Civic Contributions of First and Second Generation Humanitarian Entrants—Summary of Findings. Canberra: Department of Immigration and Citizenship, 2011. Keddie, Amanda. “Pursuing Justice for Refugee Students: Addressing Issues of Cultural (Mis)recognition.” International Journal of Inclusive Education 16.12 (2012): 1295-1310. Layton, Robyn. "Building Capacity to Ensure the Inclusion of Vulnerable Groups." Creating Our Future conference, Adelaide, 28 Jul. 2012. Milsom, Rosemarie. “From Hard Luck Life to the Lucky Country.” Sydney Morning Herald 20 Jun. 2013. 12 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.smh.com.au/national/from-hard-luck-life-to-the-lucky-country-20130619-2oixl.html>. Park, Gilbert C. “’Are We Real Americans?’: Cultural Production of Forever Foreigners at a Diversity Event.” Education and Urban Society 43.4 (2011): 451-67. Poulson, Ingrid. Rise. Sydney: Pan Macmillan Australia, 2008. Putnam, Robert D. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000. Sidhu, Ravinder K., and Sandra Taylor. “The Trials and Tribulations of Partnerships in Refugee Settlement Services in Australia.” Journal of Education Policy 24.6 (2009): 655-72. Tilbury, Farida. “‘I Feel I Am a Bird without Wings’: Discourses of Sadness and Loss among East Africans in Western Australia.” Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 14.4 (2007): 433-58. ———, and Val Colic-Peisker. “Deflecting Responsibility in Employer Talk about Race Discrimination.” Discourse & Society 17.5 (2006): 651-76. Uptin, Jonnell, Jan Wright, and Valerie Harwood. “It Felt Like I Was a Black Dot on White Paper: Examining Young Former Refugees’ Experience of Entering Australian High Schools.” The Australian Educational Researcher 40.1 (2013): 125-37.

IntroductionThe American artist Ryan Trecartin makes digital videos that centre on the self-presentations common to video-sharing sites such as YouTube. Named by New Yorker critic Peter Schjeldahl as “the most consequential artist to have emerged since the 1980s” (84), Trecartin’s works are like high-octane domestic dramas told in the first-person, blending carnivalesque and horror sensibilities through multi-layered imagery, fast-paced editing, sprawling mise-en-scène installations and heavy-handed digital effects. Featuring narcissistic young-adult characters (many of whom are played by the artist and his friends), Trecartin’s scripted videos portray the self as fundamentally performed and kaleidoscopically mediated. His approach is therefore exemplary of some of the key concepts of automediality, which, although originating in literary studies, address concerns relevant to contemporary art, such as the blurring of life-story, self-performance, identity, persona and technological mediation. I argue that Trecartin’s work is a form of automedial art that combines camp personas with what Sianne Ngai calls the “zany” aesthetics of neoliberalism—the 24/7 production of affects, subjectivity and sociability which complicate distinctions between public and private life.Performing the Script: The Artist as Automedial ProsumerBoth “automedia” and “automediality” hold that the self (the “auto”) and its forms of expression (its “media”) are intimately linked, imbricated within processes of cultural and technological mediation. However, whereas “automedia” refers to general modes of self-presentation, “automediality” was developed by Jörg Dünne and Christian Moser to explicitly relate to the autobiographical. Noting a tendency in literary studies to under-examine how life stories are shaped by their mediums, Dünne and Moser argued that the digital era has made it more apparent how literary forms are involved in complex processes of mediation. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, in response, called for an expansion of autobiography into “life writing,” claiming that automediality is useful as a theoretical frame for contemplating the growth of self-presentation platforms online, shifting from the life-narrative genre of autobiography towards more discursive and irresolute forms of first-person expression (4). One’s life story, in this context, can be communicated obliquely and performatively, with the choice of media inextricably contributing to the subjectivity that is being produced, not just as a tool for rendering a pre-existent self. Lauren Berlant conceives of life writing as a laboratory for “theorizing ‘the event’” of life rather than its narration or transcription (Prosser 181). Smith and Watson agree, describing automediality as the study of “life acts” that operate as “prosthetic extension[s] of the self in networks” (78). Following this, both “automedia” and “automediality” can be understood as expanding upon the “underlying intermedial premises” (Winthrop-Young 188) of media theory, addressing how technologies and mediums do not just constitute sensory extensions of the body (Mcluhan) but also sensory extensions of identity—armed with the potential to challenge traditional ideas of how a “life” is conveyed. For Julie Rak, “automedia” describes both the theoretical framing of self-presentation acts and the very processes of mediation the self-presenter puts themselves through (161). She prefers “automedia” over “automediality” due to the latter’s tendency to be directed towards the textual products of self-presentation, rather than their processes (161). Given Trecartin’s emphasis on narrative, poetic text, performativity, technology and commodification, both “automedia” and “automediality” will be relevant to my account here, highlighting not just the crossovers between the two terms but also the dual roles his work performs. Firstly, Trecartin’s videos express his own identity through the use of camp personas and exaggerated digital tropes. Secondly, they reflexively frame the phenomenon of online self-presentation, aestheticizing the “slice of life” and “personal history” posturings found on YouTube in order to better understand them. The line between self-presenter and critic is further muddied by the fact that Trecartin makes many of his videos free to download online. As video artist and YouTuber, he is interested in the same questions that Smith and Watson claim are central to automedial theory. When watching Youtube performers, they remind themselves to ask: “How is the aura of authenticity attached to an online performance constructed by a crew, which could include a camera person, sound person, director, and script-writer? Do you find this self-presentation to be sincere or to be calculated authenticity, a pose or ‘manufactured’ pseudo-individuality?” (124). Rather than setting out to identify “right” from “wrong” subjectivities, the role of both the automedia and automediality critic is to illuminate how and why subjectivity is constructed across distinct visual and verbal forms, working against the notion that subjectivity can be “an entity or essence” (Smith and Watson 125).Figure 1: Ryan Trecartin, Item Falls (2013), digital video stillGiven its literary origins, automediality is particularly relevant to Trecartin’s work because writing is so central to his methods, grounding his hyperactive self-presentations in the literary as well as the performative. According to Brian Droitcour, all of Trecartin’s formal devices, from the camerawork to the constructed sets his videos are staged in, are prefigured by the way he uses words. What appears unstructured and improvised is actually closely scripted, with Trecartin building on the legacies of conceptual poetry and flarf poetry (an early 2000s literary genre in which poetry is composed of collages of serendipitously found words and phrases online) to bring a loose sense of narrativization to his portrayals of characters and context. Consider the following excerpt from the screenplay for K-Corea INC. K (Section A) (2009)— a work which centres on a CEO named Global Korea (a pun on “career”) who presides over symbolic national characters whose surnames are also “Korea”:North America Korea: I specialize in Identity Tourism, ?Agency...I just stick HERE, and I Hop Around–HEY GLOBAL KOREA!?Identifiers: That’s Global, That’s Global, That’s GlobalFrench adaptation Korea: WHAT!?Global Korea: Guys I just Wanted to show You Your New Office!Health Care, I don’t Care, It’s All WE Care, That’s WhyWE don’t Care.THIS IS GLOBAL!Identified: AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHGlobal Korea: Global, Global !!Identified: AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHFigure 2: Ryan Trecartin, K-Corea INC. K (Section A) (2009), digital video stillTrecartin’s performers are guided by their lines, even down to the apparently random use of commas, question marks and repeated capital letters. As a consequence, what can be alienating on the page is made lively when performed, his words instilled with the over-the-top personalities of each performer. For Droitcour, Trecartin’s genius lies in his ability to use words to subliminally structure his performances. Each character makes the artist’s poetic texts—deranged and derivative-sounding Internet-speak—their own “at the moment of the utterance” (Droitcour). Wayne Koestenbaum similarly argues that voice, which Trecartin often digitally manipulates, is the “anxiety point” in his works, fixing his “retardataire” energies on the very place “where orality and literacy stage their war of the worlds” (276).This conflict that Koestenbaum describes, between orality and literacy, is constitutive of Trecartin’s automedial positioning of the self, which presents as a confluence of life narrative, screenplay, social-media posing, flarf poetry and artwork. His videos constantly criss-cross between pre-production, production and postproduction, creating content at every point along the way. This circuitousness is reflected by the many performers who are portrayed filming each other as they act, suggesting that their projected identities are entangled with the technologies that facilitate them.Trecartin’s A Family Finds Entertainment (2004)—a frenetic straight-to-camera chronicle of the coming-out of a gay teenager named Skippy (played by the artist)—was included in the 2006 Whitney Biennial, after which time his work became known around the world as an example of “postproduction” art. This refers to French curator and theorist Nicholas Bourriaud’s 2001 account of the blurring of production and consumption, following on from his 1997 theory of relational aesthetics, which became paradigmatic of critical art practice at the dawn of Web 2.0. Drawing from Marcel Duchamp and the Situationists, in Postproduction: Culture as Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World, Bourriaud addressed new forms of citation, recycling and détournement, which he saw as influenced by digital computing, the service economies and other forms of immaterial social relations that, throughout the 1990s, transformed art from a subcultural activity to a key signifier and instrument of global capitalism.Because “word processing” was “indexed to the formal protocol of the service industry, and the image-system of the home computer […] informed and colonized from the start by the world of work” (78), Bourriaud claimed that artists at the start of the twenty-first century were responding to the semiotic networks that blur daily and professional life. Postproduction art looked like it was “issued from a script that the artist projects onto culture, considered the framework of a narrative that in turn projects new possible scripts, endlessly” (19). However, whereas the artists in Bourriaud’s publication, such as Plamen Dejanov and Philippe Parreno, made art in order to create “more suitable [social] arrangements” (76), Trecartin is distinctive not only because of his bombastic style but also his apparent resistance to socio-political amelioration.Bourriaud’s call for the elegant intertextual “scriptor” as prosumer (88)—who creatively produces and consumes, arranges and responds—was essentially answered by Trecartin with a parade of hyper-affective and needy Internet characters whose aims are not to negotiate new social terrain so much as to perform themselves crazy, competing with masses of online information, opinions and jostling identities. Against Bourriaud’s strategic prosumerism, Trecartin, in his own words, chases “a kind of natural prosumerism synonymous with existence” (471). Although his work can be read as a response to neoliberal values, unlike Bourriaud, he refuses to treat postproduction methods as tools to conciliate this situation. Instead, his scripted videos present postproduction as the lingua franca of daily life. In aiming for a “natural prosumerism,” his work rhetorically asks, in paraphrase of Berlant: “What does it mean to have a life, is it always to add up to something?” (Prosser 181). Figure 3: Ryan Trecartin, A Family Finds Entertainment (2004), digital video stillPluralist CampTrecartin’s scripts direct his performers but they are also transformed by them, his words acquiring their individualistic tics, traits and nuances. As such, his self-presentations are a long way from Frederic Jameson’s account of pastiche as a neutral practice of imitation—“a blank parody” (125) that manifests as an addiction rather than a critical judgement. Instead of being uncritically blank, we could say that Trecartin’s characters have too much content and too many affects, particularly those of the Internet variety. In Ready (Re’Search Wait’S) (2009-2010), Trecartin (playing a character named J.J. Check, who wants to re-write the U.S constitution) states at one point: “Someone just flashed an image of me; I am so sure of it. I am such as free download.” Here, pastiche turns into a performed glitch, hinting at how authentic speech can be composed of an amalgam of inauthentic sources—a scrambling of literary forms, movie one-liners, intrusive online advertising and social media jargon. His characters constantly waver between vernacular clichés and accretions of data: “My mother accused me of being accumulation posing as independent free will,” says a character from Item Falls (2013)What makes Trecartin’s video work so fascinating is that he frames what once would have been called “pastiche” and fills it with meaning, as if sincerely attuned to the paradoxes of “anti-normative” posturing contained in the term “mass individualism.” Even when addressing issues of representational politics, his dialogue registers as both authentic and insipid, as when, in CENTER JENNY (2013), a conversation about sexism being “the coolest style” ends with a woman in a bikini asking: “tolerance is inevitable, right?” Although there are laugh-out-loud elements in all of his work—often from an exaggeration of superficiality—there is a more persistent sense of the artist searching for something deeper, perhaps sympathetically so. His characters are eager to self-project yet what they actually project comes off as too much—their performances are too knowing, too individualistic and too caught up in the Internet, or other surrounding technologies.When Susan Sontag wrote in 1964 of the aesthetic of “camp” she was largely motivated by the success of Pop art, particularly that of her friend Andy Warhol. Warhol’s work looked kitsch yet Sontag saw in it a genuine love that kitsch lacks—a sentiment akin to doting on something ugly or malformed. Summoning the dandy, she claimed that whereas “the dandy would be continually offended or bored, the connoisseur of Camp is continually amused, delighted. The dandy held a perfumed handkerchief to his nostrils and was liable to swoon; the connoisseur of Camp sniffs the stink and prides himself on his strong nerves” (292).As an artistic device, camp essentially wallows in all the bad fetishisms that Frankfurt School theorists lamented of capitalism. The camp appropriator, does, however, convey himself as existing both inside and outside this low culture, communicating the “stink” of low culture in affecting ways. Sontag viewed camp, in other words, as at once deconstructive and reconstructive. In playing appearances off against essences, camp denies the self as essence only to celebrate it as performance.In line with accounts of identity in automediality and automedia theory, camp can be understood as performing within a dialectical tension between self and its representation. The camp aesthetic shows the self as discursively mediated and embedded in subjective formations that are “heterogeneous, conflictual, and intersectional” (Smith and Watson 71). Affiliated with the covert expression of homosexual and queer identity, the camp artist typically foregrounds art as taste, and taste as mere fashion, while at the same time he/she suggests how this approach is shaped by socio-political marginalization. For Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, the criticality of camp is “additive and accretive” rather than oppositional; it is a surplus form that manifests as “the ‘over’-attachment to fragmentary, marginal, waste or leftover products” (149).Trecartin, who identifies as gay, parodies the excesses of digital identity while at the same time, from camp and queer perspectives, he asks us to take these identifications seriously—straight, gay, transsexual, bisexual, inter-sexual, racial, post-racial, mainstream, alternative, capitalist or anarchist. This pluralist agenda manifests in characters who speak as though everything is in quotation marks, suggesting that everything is possible. Dialogue such as “I’m finally just an ‘as if’”, “I want an idea landfill”, and “It reminds me of the future” project feelings of too much and not enough, transforming Warhol’s cool, image-oriented version of camp (transfixed by TV and supermarket capitalism) into a hyper-affective Internet camp—a camp that feeds on new life narratives, identity postures and personalities, as stimuli.In emphasising technology as intrinsic to camp self-presentation, Trecartin treats intersectionality and intermediality as if corresponding concepts. His characters, caught between youthhood and adulthood, are inbetweeners. Yet, despite being nebulous, they float free of normative ideals only in the sense that they believe everybody not only has the right to live how they want to, but to also be condemned for it—the right to intolerance going hand-in-hand with their belief in plurality. This suggests the paradoxical condition of pluralist, intersectional selfhood in the digital age, where one can position one’s identity as if between social categories while at the same time weaponizing it, in the form of identity politics. In K-Corea INC. K (Section A) (2009), Global Korea asks: “Who the fuck is that baby shit-talker? That’s not one of my condiments,” which is delivered with characteristic confidence, defensiveness and with gleeful disregard for normative speech. Figure 4: Ryan Trecartin, CENTER JENNY (2013), digital video stillThe Zaniness of the Neoliberal SelfIf, as Koestenbaum claims, Trecartin’s host of characters are actually “evolving mutations of a single worldview” (275), then the worldview they represent is what Sianne Ngai calls the “hypercommodified, information saturated, performance driven conditions of late capitalism” (1). Self-presentation in this context is not to be understood so much as experienced through prisms of technological inflection, marketing spiel and pluralist interpretative schemas. Ngai has described the rise of “zaniness” as an aesthetic category that perfectly encapsulates this capitalist condition. Zany hyperactivity is at once “lighthearted” and “vehement,” and as such it is highly suited to the contemporary volatility of affective labour; its tireless overlapping of work and play, and the networking rhetoric of global interconnectedness (Ngai, 7). This is what Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello have termed the “connexionist” spirit of capitalism, where a successful career is measured by one’s capacity to be “always pursuing some sort of activity, never to be without a project, without ideas, to be always looking forward to, and preparing for, something along with other persons, whose encounter is the result of being always driven by the drive for activity” (Chiapello and Fairclough 192).For Ngai, the zany—epitomized by Jim Carrey’s character in Cable Guy (1996) or Wile E. Coyote from the Looney Tunes cartoons—performs first and asks questions later. As such, their playfulness is always performed in a way that could spin out of control, as when Trecartin’s humour can, in the next moment, appear psychotic. Ngai continues:What is essential to zaniness is its way of evoking a situation with the potential to cause harm or injury […]. For all their playfulness and commitment to fun, the zany’s characters give the impression of needing to labor excessively hard to produce our laughter, straining themselves to the point of endangering not just themselves but also those around them. (10)Using sinister music scores, anxiety-inducing editing and lighting that references iconic DIY horror films such as the Blair Witch Project (1999), Trecartin comically frames the anxieties and over-produced individualism of the global neoliberalist project, but in ways that one is unsure what to do with it. “Don’t look at me—look at your mother, and globalize at her,” commands Global Korea. Set in temporary (read precarious) locations that often resemble both domestic and business environments, his world is one in which young adults are incessantly producing themselves as content, as if unstable market testers run riot, on whose tastes our future global economic growth depends.Michel Foucault defined this neoliberal condition as “the application of the economic grid to social phenomena” (239). As early as 1979 he claimed that workers in a neoliberal context begin to regard the self as an “abilities-machine” (229) where they are less partners in the processes of economic exchange than independent producers of human capital. As Jodi Dean puts it, with the totalization of economic production, neoliberal processes “simultaneously promote the individual as the primary unit of capitalism and unravel the institutions of solidaristic support on which this unit depends” (32). As entrepreneurs of the self, people under neoliberalism become producers for whom socialization is no longer a byproduct of capitalist production but can be the very means through which capital is produced. With this in mind, Trecartin’s portrayal of the straight-to-camera format is less a video diary than a means for staging social auditions. His performers (or contestants), although foregrounding their individualism, always have their eyes on group power, suggesting a competitive individualism rather than the countering of normativity. Forever at work and at play, these comic-tragics are ur-figures of neoliberalism—over-connected and over-emotional self-presenters who are unable to stop, in fear they will be nothing if not performing.ConclusionPortraying a seemingly endless parade of neoliberal selves, Trecartin’s work yields a zany vision that always threatens to spin out of control. As a form of Internet-era camp, he reproduces automedial conceptions of the self as constituted and expanded by media technologies—as performative conduits between the formal and the socio-political which go both ways. This process has been described by Berlant in terms of life writing, but it applies equally to Trecartin, who, through a “performance of fantasmatic intersubjectivity,” facilitates “a performance of being” for the viewer “made possible by the proximity of the object” (Berlant 25). Inflating for both comic and tragic effect a profoundly nebulous yet weaponized conception of identity, Trecartin’s characters show the relation between offline and online life to be impossible to essentialize, laden with a mix of conflicting feelings and personas. As identity avatars, his characters do their best to be present and responsive to whatever precarious situations they find themselves in, which, due to the nature of his scripts, seem at times to have been automatically generated by the Internet itself.ReferencesBourriaud, Nicolas. Postproduction: Culture as a Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World. New York: Lucas & Stenberg, 2001.Chiapello, E., and N. Fairclough. “Understanding the New Management Ideology: A Transdisciplinary Contribution from Critical Discourse Analysis and New Sociology of Capitalism.” Discourse and Society 13.2 (2002): 185–208.Dean, Jodi. Crowds and Party. London & New York: Verso, 2016.Droitcour, Brian. “Making Word: Ryan Trecartin as Poet.” Rhizome 27 July 2001. 18 Apr. 2015 <http://rhizome.org/editorial/2011/jul/27/making-word-ryan-trecartin-poet/>.Dünne, Jörg, and Christian Moser. Automedialität: Subjektkonstitution in Schrift, Bild und neuen Medien [Automediality: Subject Constitution in Print, Image, and New Media]. Munich: Fink, 2008.Foucault, Michel. The Birth of Biopolitics. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991.Kosofsky Sedgwick, Eve. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003.McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964.Ngai, Sianne. Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute Interesting. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015.Prosser, Jay. “Life Writing and Intimate Publics: A Conversation with Lauren Berlant.” Biography 34.1 (Winter 2012): 180- 87.Rak, Julie. “Life Writing versus Automedia: The Sims 3 Game as a Life Lab.” Biography 38.2 (Spring 2015): 155-180.Schjeldahl, Peter. “Party On.” New Yorker, 27 June 2011: 84-85.Smith, Sidonie. “Virtually Me: A Toolbox about Online Self-Presentation.” Identity Technologies: Constructing the Self Online. Eds. Anna Poletti and Julie Rak. Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 2014.———, and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota P, 2010———, and Julia Watson. Life Writing in the Long Run: Smith & Watson Autobiography Studies Reader. Ann Arbor: Michigan Publishing, 2016.Sontag, Susan. “Notes on Camp.” Against Interpretation and Other Essays. New York: Picador, 2001.Trecartin, Ryan. “Ryan Trecartin.” Artforum (Sep. 2012): 471.Wayne Koestenbaum. “Situation Hacker.” Artforum 47.10 (Summer 2009): 274-279.Winthrop-Young, Geoffrey. “Hardware/Software/Wetware.” Critical Terms for Media Studies. Eds. W.J.T. Mitchell and M. Hansen. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010.

Introduction“Chav” is a social phenomenon that gained significant popular media coverage and attention in the United Kingdom in the early 2000s. Chavs are often characterised, by others, as young people from a background of low socioeconomic status, usually clothed in branded sportswear. All definitions of Chav position them as culturally anomalous, as Other.This article maps out a multidisciplinary definition of the Chav, synthesised from 21 published academic publications: three recurrent themes in scholarly discussion emerge. First, this research presents whiteness as an assumed and essential facet of Chav identity. When marginalising Chavs because of their “incorrect whiteness”, these works assign them a problematic and complex relationship with ethnicity and race. Second, Chav discourse has previously been discussed as a form of intense class-based abhorrence. Chavs, it would seem, are perceived as anomalous by their own class and those who deem themselves of a higher socioeconomic status. Finally, Chavs’ consumption choices are explored as amplifying such negative constructions of class and white ethnic identities, which are deemed as forming an undesirable aesthetic. This piece is not intended to debate whether or not Chav is a subculture, clubculture or neotribe. Although Greg Martin’s discussion around the similarities between historical subcultures and Chavs remains pertinent and convincing, this article discusses how young people labelled as Chavs are excluded on a variety of fronts. It draws a cross-disciplinary mapping of the Chav, providing the beginnings of a definition of a derogatory label, applied to young people marking them anomalous in British society.What Is a Chav?The word Chav became officially included in the English language in the UK in 2003, when it was inducted into the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). The current OED entry offers many points for further discussion, all centred upon a discriminatory positioning of Chav:chav, n. Etymology: Probably either < Romani čhavo unmarried Romani male, male Romani child (see chavvy n.), or shortened < either chavvy n. or its etymon Angloromani chavvy. Brit. slang (derogatory). In the United Kingdom (originally the south of England): a young person of a type characterized by brash and loutish behaviour and the wearing of designer-style clothes (esp. sportswear); usually with connotations of a low social status.Chav was adopted by British national media as a catch-all term encompassing regional variants. Many discussions have likened Chav to groups such as “Bogans” in Australia and “Trailer Trash” in the US. Websites such as UrbanDictionary and Chavscum have often, informally, defined Chav through a series of derogatory “backcronyms” such as Council Housed And Violent or Council House Associated Vermin, positioning it as a derogatory social label synonymous with notions of perceived criminality, poverty, poor taste, danger, fear, class, and whiteness.Chav came to real prominence in the early 2000s in mainstream British media, gaining visibility through television shows such as Shameless (2004-2013), Little Britain (2003-2006), and The Catherine Tate Show (2004-2009). The term exploded across the tabloid press, as noted by Antoinette Renouf in 2005. Extensive tabloid press coverage drove the phenomenon to front-page coverage in TIME magazine in 2008. Chavs were observed as often wearing Burberry check-patterned clothing. For the first time since its founding in 1856, and due to the extent of Chav’s negative media coverage, Burberry decided to largely remove its trademark check pattern between 2001 and 2014 from sale. Chavs in AcademiaThe rubric of the Chav did not emerge in academia with the same vigour as it did in popular media, failing to gain the visibility of previous youth social formations such as Punks, Mods, et al. Rather, there has been a modest but consistent number of academic publications discussing this subject: 1-3 publications per year, published between 2006-2015. Of the 22 academic texts explicitly addressing and discussing Chavs, none were published prior to 2006. Extensive searches on databases such as EBSCO, JSTOR and ProQuest, yielded no further academic publications on this subject since Joanne Heeney’s 2015 discussion of Chav and its relationship to contested conceptualisations of disability.From a review of the available literature, the following key thematic groupings run through the publications: Chavs’ embodiment of a "wrong" type of white identity; their embodiment of a "wrong" type of working-class identity; and finally, their depiction as flawed consumers. I will now discuss these groupings, and their implications for future research, in order to chart a multidisciplinary conceptualisation of the Chav. Ultimately, my discussion will evidence how "out of place" Chavs appear to be in terms of race and ethnicity, class, and consumption choices. Chavs as “Wrong” WhitesThe dividing practices (Foucault) evident in UK popular media and websites such as Urbandictionary in the early 2000s distinctly separated “hypervisible ‘filthy whites’” (Tyler) from the “respectable whiteness” of the British middle-class. As Imogen Tyler puts it, “the cumulative effect of this disgust is the blocking of the disenfranchised white poor from view; they are rendered invisible and incomprehensible”, a perspective revisited in relation to the "celebrity chav" by Tyler and Joe Bennett. In a wider discussion of ethnicity, segregation and discrimination, Colin Webster discusses Chav and “white trash”, within the context of discourses that criminalise certain forms of whiteness. The conspicuous absence of whiteness in debates regarding fair representation of ethnicity and exclusion is highlighted here, as is the difficulty that social sciences often encounter in conceptualising whiteness in terms exceeding privilege, superiority, power, and normality. Bennett discusses Chavspeak, as a language conceived as enacting combinations of well-known sociolinguistic stereotypes. Chavspeak derives from an amalgamation of Black English vernaculars, potentially identifying its speakers as "race traitors". Bennett's exploration of Chavs as turncoats towards their own whiteness places them in an anomalous position of exclusion, as “Other” white working-class people. A Google image search for Chav conducted on 8th July 2020 yielded, in 198 of the first 200 images, the pictures of white youth. In popular culture, Chavs are invariably white, as seen in shows such as Little Britain, The Catherine Tate Show and, arguably, also in Paul Abbott’s Shameless. There is no question, however, that whiteness is an assumed and essential facet of Chav identity. Explorations of class and consumption may help to clarify this muddy conceptualisation of ethnicity and Chavs. Chavs as “Wrong” Working ClassChav discourse has been discussed as addressing intense class-based abhorrence (Hayward and Yar; Tyler). Indeed, while focussing more upon the nexus between chavs, class, and masculinity, Anoop Nayak’s ethnographic approach identifies a clear distinction between “Charver kids” (a slang term for Chav found in the North-East of England) and “Real Geordies” (Geordie is a regional term identifying inhabitants from that same area, most specifically from Newcastle-upon-Tyne). Nayak identified Chavs as rough, violent and impoverished, against the respectable, skilled and upwardly mobile working-class embodied by the “Real Geordies” (825). Similar distinctions between different types of working classes appear in the work of Sumi Hollingworth and Katya Williams. In a study of white, middle-class students from English urban state comprehensive schools in Riverside and Norton, the authors found that “Chav comes to represent everything about whiteness that the middle-classes are not” (479). Here, Chav is discussed as a label that school-age children reserve for “others”, namely working-class peers who stand out because of their clothing, their behaviour, and their educational aspirations. Alterity is a concept reinforced by Bennett’s discussion of Chavspeak, as he remarks that “Chavs are other people, and Chavspeak is how other people talk” (8). The same position is echoed in Sarah Spencer, Judy Clegg, and Joy Stackhouse’s study of the interplay between language, social class, and education in younger generations. Chavspotting is the focus of Bennett’s exploration of lived class experiences. Here, the evocation of the Chav is seen as a way to reinforce and reproduce dominant rhetoric against the poor. Bennett discusses the ways in which websites such as Chavscum.com used towns, cities and shopping centres as ideal locations to practice Chav-spotting. What is evident, however, is that behind Chavspotting lies the need for recontextualisation of normalising social practices which involve identification of determinate social groups in social spaces. This finding is supported by the interviews conducted by Ken McCullock et al (548) who found the Chav label, along with its regional variant of Charva, to be an extension of these social practices of identification, as it was applied to people of lower socioeconomic status as a marker of difference: “Chav/Charva … it’s what more posh people use to try and describe thugs and that” (McCulloch et al., 552).The semi-structured interview data gathered by Spencer, Clegg, and Stackhouse reveals how the label of Chav trickled down from stereotypes in popular culture to the real-life experiences of school-aged children. Here, Chavs are likened by school children to animals, “the boys are like monkeys, and the girls are like squeaky squirrels who like to slap people if they even look at you” (136) and their language is defined as lacking complexity. It bears relevance that, in these interviews, children in middle-class areas are once again “othering” the Chav, applying the label to children from working-class areas. Heeney’s discussion of the Chav pivots around questions of class and race. This is particularly evident as she addresses the media contention surrounding glamour model Katie Price, and her receipt of disability welfare benefits for her son. Ethnicity and class are key in academic discussion of the Chav, and in this context they prove to be interwoven and inexorably slippery. Just as previous academic discussions surrounding ethnicity challenge assumptions around whiteness, privilege and discrimination, an equally labyrinthine picture is drawn on the relationship between class and the Chavs, and on the practices of exclusion and symbolic to which they are subject. Chavs as “Wrong” ConsumersKeith Hayward and Majid Yar’s much-cited work points to a rethinking of the underclass concept (Murray) through debates of social marginality and consumption practices. Unlike previous socio-cultural formations (subcultures), Chavs should not be viewed as the result of society choosing to “reject or invert mainstream aspirations or desires” but simply as “flawed” consumers (Hayward and Yar, 18). The authors remarked that the negative social construction and vilification of Chav can be attributed to “a set of narrow and seemingly irrational and un-aesthetic consumer choices” (18). Chavs are discussed as lacking in taste and/or educational/intelligence (cultural capital), and not in economic capital (Bourdieu): it is the former and not the latter that makes them the object of ridicule and scorn. Chav consumption choices are often regarded, and reported, as the wrong use of economic capital. Matthew Adams and Jayne Rainsborough also discuss the ways in which cultural sites of representation--newspapers, websites, television--achieve a level of uniformity in their portrayal of Chavs as out of place and continually framed as “wrong consumers", just as Nayak did. In their argument, they also note how Chavs have been intertextually represented as sites of bodily indiscretion in relation to behaviours, lifestyles and consumption choices. It is these flawed consumption choices that Paul Johnson discusses in relation to the complex ways in which the Chav stereotype, and their consumption choices, are both eroticised and subjected to a form of symbolic violence. Within this context, “Council chic” has been marketed and packaged towards gay men through themed club events, merchandise, sex lines and escort services. The signifiers of flawed consumption (branded sportswear, jewellery, etc), upon which much of the Chav-based subjugation is centred thus become a hook to promote and sell sexual services. As such, this process subjects Chavs to a form of symbolic violence, as their worth is fetishised, commodified, and further diminished in gay culture. The importance of consumption choices and, more specifically, of choices which are considered to be "wrong" adds one final piece to this map of the Chav (Mason and Wigley). What was already noted as discrimination towards Chavs centred upon notions of class, socioeconomic status, and, ethnicity, is amplified by emphasis on consumption choices deemed to be aesthetically undesirable. This all comes together through the “Othering” of a pattern of consumerist choices that encompasses branded clothes, sportswear and other garments typically labelled as "chavvy". Chav: Not Always a LabelIn spite of its rare occurrence in academic discourse on Chavs, it is worth noting here that not all scholarly discussions focus on the notion of Chav as assigned identity, as the work of Kehily, Nayak and Young clearly demonstrates.Kehily and Nayak’s performative approach to Chav adopts an urban ethnography approach to remark that, although these socio-economic-racial labels are felt as pejorative, they can be negotiated within immediate contexts to become less discriminatory and gain positive connotations of respectability in given situations. Indeed, such labels can be enacted as a transitional identity to be used and adopted intermittently. Chav remains an applied label, but a flexible label which can be negotiated and adapted. Robert Young challenges many established conceptualisations of Chav culture, paying particular attention to notions of class and self-identification. His study found that approximately 15% of his 3,000 fifteen-year old respondents, all based in the Glasgow area, self-identified as Chav or "Ned" (a Scottish variant of Chav). The cultural criminological approach taken by Young does not clearly specify what options were given to participants when selecting "Neds or popular" as self-identification. Young’s work is of real value in the discussion of Chav, since it constitutes the only example of self-identification as Chav (Ned); future work reasserting these findings is required for the debate to be continued in this direction. Conclusion: Marginalised on All Fronts?Have Chavs been ostracised for being the wrong type of white person? Much has been discussed around the problematic role of ethnicity in Chav culture. Indeed, many scholars have discussed how Chav adopted the language, dress and style of ethnic minority groups. This assimilation of non-white identities leaves the Chav stranded on two fronts: (1) they are marked as Other by predominantly white social groups and vilified as race/ethnicity traitors (Bennett, Chavspeak); (2) they stand apart from ethnic minority identities through a series of exaggerated and denigrated consumption choices – adopting a bricolage identity that defines them against other groups surrounding them. Are Chavs the wrong type of white, working-class consumer? We know from the seminal works of Dick Hebdige and Stuart Hall that subcultural styles can often convey a range of semiotic messages to the outside world. If one were to bear in mind the potentially isolated nature of those considered Chavs, one could see in their dress a consumption of "status" (McCulloch et al., 554). The adoption of a style predominantly consisting of expensive-looking branded clothes, highly-visible jewellery associated with an exaggerated sporting lifestyle, stands as a symbol of disposable income and physical prowess, a way of ‘fronting up’ to labels of poverty, criminality and lack of social and cultural capital.As my charting process comes to a conclusion, with the exclusion of the studies conducted by Young, Kehily and Nayak, Chav is solely discussed as an “Othering” label, vastly different from the self-determined identities of other youth subcultures. As a matter of fact, a number of studies portray the angry reactions to such labelling (Hollingworth and Williams; Bennett; Mason and Wigley). So are Chavs vilified because of their whiteness, their class, or their consumption choices? More likely, they are vilified because of a combination of all of the above. Therefore, we would not be mistaken in identifying Chavs as completely lacking in identity capital. 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