Journal articles on the topic 'Dragon Spirit: The New Legend'

<p><em>In the legend of Noah's Ark, God punished one whole generation of Noah who were wicked and defying God by sending a natural disaster in the form of the Great Flood, destroying the nature. Noah was commanded to build an ark (medium) to save himself, his family, and his followers, also all kind of animals in pairs; to save a generation of life that later will create a new civilization and culture in a new area or location. The legend of Noah's Ark can be found in almost every holy book of divine religions where the story conveys the message of a life-cycle and how we learn about the meaning of life.</em></p><p><em>Associating the story with our current lives, Noah's Ark has two concepts of interpretation; in the context of salvation and at the same time as a mediation space of the birth of a new culture. How human save themselves from their worldly problems, and at the same time a mediation space, a shifting space from the old culture into the new culture. These two concepts of Noah's Ark are the background and the base this creation for the writer.</em></p><p><em> </em></p><p><strong><em>Keywords :</em></strong><strong> <em>Spirit of Noah, graphic art, hermeneutika</em>.</strong></p>

Many Chinese restaurants use place mats that depict the Chinese zodiac—a twelveyear cycle of years named after animals. Legend has it that long ago, one Chinese New Year, the Buddha invited all the animals in his kingdom to come before him. Unfortunately, only twelve turned up. The first to arrive was the rat, followed by the ox, tiger, rabbit, dragon, snake, horse, sheep, monkey, rooster, dog, and finally the boar. In gratitude, the Buddha decided to name a year after each of the animals. The mats usually describe the traits and talents of each animal, list the animals that are compatible with it, and indicate its opposite. People enjoy passing the time while waiting for a meal by finding the year of their birth on the mat and reading about themselves. The reader soon begins to notice some patterns in those animals that are compatible and those that are not.

The object of the study is the texts about Tan-varp-ekva, «the tendon twistress», recorded during the 20th c. The majority of the full-text tales has been recorded from the northern Mansi (Lyapin River Basin, Upper Lozva), some folklore stories have been published for various groups of Khanty (Yugan, Middle Ob, Berezovo, Kazym, Upper Purov, Shurishkar); the Nenets legend about the old woman-Sihirtia stands out. The tales mostly split into two plots: the first one is associated with the prohibition to spin veins at night, the second — with changeling and kidnapping of children. The analysis of the key points of the legends has been carried out, the position of the Ob-Ugorsk forest spirit among similar images of the Komi and Russians has been determined. The authors suggest that the village of Lombovozh (Lyapin Mansi) became the place of creation of the folklore storyline, linking it to the presence of a large archaeological site, a medieval settlement. The spread of the legend of Tan-varp-ekva among other Mansi and Khanty groups was the result of migrations. The main plot of the story refers to the introduction of regulations by the Ob Ugrians on inclusion of a daughter-in-law, young women into the foreign cult community. The story with a silver cup explains the rules of entry of a newly manufactured or brought from the outside object into the sphere of worship in the Ob Ugrians. Tan-varp-ekva in the role of a female deity could act as the patro-ness of needlework, as, for the Ob Ugrians, twisting of deer tendon threads was a traditional female work. The stories about Tan-varp-ekva are similar to those of many Russian fairy tales, ballades about mythical spin-stresses, as well as bans on needlework during the night and transition time. Her image has a lot in common with Baba Yaga and with the character of Yoma — her double in Komi (forest spirits, creatures of the lower world, kidnappers of children, cannibals, treasure keepers, treasure givers, «spinning» deities). The motifs of killing and eating of daughter-in-law by the spinstress of tendons can be an allusion of the rite of transition to a new family, when the girl «died» for her former family and left the protection of the spirits-keepers of her family. The popular-Christian layer of views of the Russians and Komi provides material for comparative analysis of mythological con-cepts of Slavic and Finn-Ugric peoples, who for a long period experienced mutual influence on ethnocultural tradi-tions. The function of Tan-varp-ekva as a «twister of tendons» can be secondary, borrowed from neighboring populations, for example, from the Komi, who, together with Orthodoxy, accepted and adapted the popular-Christian beliefs of the Russians.

Twenty-one cultivars of poinsettia [Euphorbia pulcherrima Willd. Ex Klotzsch] were evaluated by respondents who voluntarily completed a paper survey (n=293) at TSU. Rooted cuttings from five major U.S. suppliers were potted and grown during the preceding 4 months according to standard industry practices. Cultivars were displayed without their names for the survey, and respondents were asked to rate each cultivar on a Likert-type scale, where 1=strongly dislike and 5=strongly like. The top eight rated cultivars (mean > 3.9) were all traditional red forms, which included the new cultivar `Red Dragon', followed in descending preference by `Christmas Spirit', `Freedom Red', `Cortez Electric Fire', `Prestige Red', `Premium Red', `Novia Red', and `Candlelight'. For each cultivar, the price respondents indicated they would be willing to pay was highly correlated with the Likert-type scale score. When asked about purchases in the prior year, 89% of respondents bought at least one red poinsettia. Retail outlets and prices paid varied among respondents. Color was by far the most popular criterion respondents used to determine whether they like or dislike a cultivar, followed by foliage and price. Consistent with recent trends for value-added products, consumers indicated that they would be willing to pay significantly more for a purple-painted plant with glitter than for a white-flowered plant that was otherwise of comparable quality. These results suggest that, while red poinsettias continue to dominate the poinsettia market, niche markets exist for unique flower and foliage traits created through breeding and through enhancements such as paint and glitter.

In the article, the author examines one of the most outstanding andproblematic periods in the art history of Tallinn as a Hanseatic city,which originated, on the one hand, in the Hanseatic tradition andthe medieval approach to Gothic transcendental realism, and onthe other, in the approach typical of the new art cities of Flanders,i.e. to see a reflection of the new illusory reality in the pictures. Acloser examination is made of two works of art imported to Tallinnin the late 15th century, i.e. the high altar in the Church of the HolySpirit by Bernt Notke and the altarpiece of Holy Mary, whichwas originally commissioned by the Brotherhood of Blackheadsfor the Dominican Monastery and is now in St Nicholas’ Church.Despite the differences in the iconography and style of the twoworks, their links to tradition and artistic geography, which in thisarticle are conditionally defined as the Hanse canon, are apparentin both of them.The methods and rules for classifying the transition from theMiddle Ages to the Modern Era were not critical nor exclusive.Rather they included a wide range of phenomena on the outskirtsof the major art centres starting from the clients and ending with the semantic significance of the picture, and the attributes that wereemployed to the individual experiences of the different masters,who were working together in the large workshops of Lübeck, andsomewhat later, in Bruges and Brussels.When ‘reading’ the Blackheads’ altar, a question arises of threedifferent styles, all of them were united by tradition and the waythat altars were produced in the large workshops for the extensiveart market that stretched from one end of the continent to the other,and even further from Lima to Narva. Under the supervision ofthe leading master and entrepreneur (Hans Memling?) two othermasters were working side by side in Bruges – Michel Sittow, whowas born in Tallinn, and the Master of the Legend of Saint Lucywere responsible for executing the task.In this article, the author has highlighted new points of reference,which on the one hand explain the complex issues of attributionof the Tallinn Blackheads’ altar, and on the other hand, placethe greatest opus in the Baltics in a broader context, where, inaddition to aesthetic ambitions, both the client and the workshopthat completed the order, played an extensive role. In this way,identifying a specific artist from among the others would usuallyremain a matter of discussion. Tallinn was a port and a wealthycommercial city at the foregates of the East where it took decadesfor the spirit of the Renaissance to penetrate and be assimilated.Instead of an unobstructed view we are offered uncertain andoften mixed values based on what we perceive through the veil ofsemantic research.

In the article the impact of regular taijiquan practice on the health level of people of different ages is considered. The practical experience of teachers of martial arts school „Peresvit‟ and scientific researches with the use of east sports and health technologies are analyzed and generalized. They will allow effectively and purposefully to improve physical, mental and spiritual health of human, applying various forms and methods of physical education, which will contribute to the formation of sustainable motivation for a healthy lifestyle. The pedagogical research was conducted from September, 14 to November 20, 2020 on the basis of the „All-Ukrainian Federation of Free Fight and Contact Martial Arts in Mixed Martial Arts‟. Except of physical education and involvement in the sports culture, people find new friends, gain knowledge about healthy lifestyles, the peculiarities of relationships between people, the life values, that help in solving problems outside the gym, and, as a result, improve health level, strengthen confidence in their own abilities and become healthy and successful people. Every year the federation conducts sports and health activities for school students in various picturesque places of Ukraine and the world, where everyone can demonstrate their results. And the best students have the opportunity to visit the legend, wrapped by the legends, the abode of the spirit of Martial Arts - the Shaolin Temple. A woman (n = 10) aged 30-35 years took part in the pedagogical experiment. The control measurement took place simultaneously for all participants. According to the internship program, a training program was developed, which included classes for two months on a schedule of Monday, Wednesday and Saturday for 1 hour and 30 minutes. The work plan is as follows: study and practice of basic exercises and basic movements of taijiquan; breathing and meditation in taijuan and tea ceremonies; performance of previously developed and studied movements in the complex; watching the movie "The Grandmaster". This technique and its application is aimed at the formation of basic physical and mental qualities, the impact on certain functional systems of the body, the activation of their backup capabilities and aims to expand knowledge on the construction of training sessions with different groups of the population, regardless of their knowledge in the field of physical education and sports and the ability to form a training load by means of taijiquan. After the training course, a pedagogical study was conducted in the direction of: anthropometric data (weight, height, age); risk assessment of cardiovascular diseases, authors Zapisochny A.Z, Dushanin S.A. 1980 (physical activity, ideal weight, blood pressure, etc.); assessment of physical performance by Ruffier test.

Education in Oceania continues to reflect the embedded implicit and explicit colonial practices and processes from the past. This paper conceptualises a cultural approach to education and leadership appropriate and relevant to the Republic of the Marshall Islands. As elementary school leaders, we highlight Kanne Lobal, a traditional Marshallese navigation practice based on indigenous language, values and practices. We conceptualise and develop Kanne Lobal in this paper as a framework for understanding the usefulness of our indigenous knowledge in leadership and educational practices within formal education. Through bwebwenato, a method of talk story, our key learnings and reflexivities were captured. We argue that realising the value of Marshallese indigenous knowledge and practices for school leaders requires purposeful training of the ways in which our knowledge can be made useful in our professional educational responsibilities. Drawing from our Marshallese knowledge is an intentional effort to inspire, empower and express what education and leadership partnership means for Marshallese people, as articulated by Marshallese themselves. Introduction As noted in the call for papers within the Waikato Journal of Education (WJE) for this special issue, bodies of knowledge and histories in Oceania have long sustained generations across geographic boundaries to ensure cultural survival. For Marshallese people, we cannot really know ourselves “until we know how we came to be where we are today” (Walsh, Heine, Bigler & Stege, 2012). Jitdam Kapeel is a popular Marshallese concept and ideal associated with inquiring into relationships within the family and community. In a similar way, the practice of relating is about connecting the present and future to the past. Education and leadership partnerships are linked and we look back to the past, our history, to make sense and feel inspired to transform practices that will benefit our people. In this paper and in light of our next generation, we reconnect with our navigation stories to inspire and empower education and leadership. Kanne lobal is part of our navigation stories, a conceptual framework centred on cultural practices, values, and concepts that embrace collective partnerships. Our link to this talanoa vā with others in the special issue is to attempt to make sense of connections given the global COVID-19 context by providing a Marshallese approach to address the physical and relational “distance” between education and leadership partnerships in Oceania. Like the majority of developing small island nations in Oceania, the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI) has had its share of educational challenges through colonial legacies of the past which continues to drive education systems in the region (Heine, 2002). The historical administration and education in the RMI is one of colonisation. Successive administrations by the Spanish, German, Japanese, and now the US, has resulted in education and learning that privileges western knowledge and forms of learning. This paper foregrounds understandings of education and learning as told by the voices of elementary school leaders from the RMI. The move to re-think education and leadership from Marshallese perspectives is an act of shifting the focus of bwebwenato or conversations that centres on Marshallese language and worldviews. The concept of jelalokjen was conceptualised as traditional education framed mainly within the community context. In the past, jelalokjen was practiced and transmitted to the younger generation for cultural continuity. During the arrival of colonial administrations into the RMI, jelalokjen was likened to the western notions of education and schooling (Kupferman, 2004). Today, the primary function of jelalokjen, as traditional and formal education, it is for “survival in a hostile [and challenging] environment” (Kupferman, 2004, p. 43). Because western approaches to learning in the RMI have not always resulted in positive outcomes for those engaged within the education system, as school leaders who value our cultural knowledge and practices, and aspire to maintain our language with the next generation, we turn to Kanne Lobal, a practice embedded in our navigation stories, collective aspirations, and leadership. The significance in the development of Kanne Lobal, as an appropriate framework for education and leadership, resulted in us coming together and working together. Not only were we able to share our leadership concerns, however, the engagement strengthened our connections with each other as school leaders, our communities, and the Public Schooling System (PSS). Prior to that, many of us were in competition for resources. Educational Leadership: IQBE and GCSL Leadership is a valued practice in the RMI. Before the IQBE programme started in 2018, the majority of the school leaders on the main island of Majuro had not engaged in collaborative partnerships with each other before. Our main educational purpose was to achieve accreditation from the Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC), an accreditation commission for schools in the United States. The WASC accreditation dictated our work and relationships and many school leaders on Majuro felt the pressure of competition against each other. We, the authors in this paper, share our collective bwebwenato, highlighting our school leadership experiences and how we gained strength from our own ancestral knowledge to empower “us”, to collaborate with each other, our teachers, communities, as well as with PSS; a collaborative partnership we had not realised in the past. The paucity of literature that captures Kajin Majol (Marshallese language) and education in general in the RMI is what we intend to fill by sharing our reflections and experiences. To move our educational practices forward we highlight Kanne Lobal, a cultural approach that focuses on our strengths, collective social responsibilities and wellbeing. For a long time, there was no formal training in place for elementary school leaders. School principals and vice principals were appointed primarily on their academic merit through having an undergraduate qualification. As part of the first cohort of fifteen school leaders, we engaged in the professional training programme, the Graduate Certificate in School Leadership (GCSL), refitted to our context after its initial development in the Solomon Islands. GCSL was coordinated by the Institute of Education (IOE) at the University of the South Pacific (USP). GCSL was seen as a relevant and appropriate training programme for school leaders in the RMI as part of an Asia Development Bank (ADB) funded programme which aimed at “Improving Quality Basic Education” (IQBE) in parts of the northern Pacific. GCSL was managed on Majuro, RMI’s main island, by the director at the time Dr Irene Taafaki, coordinator Yolanda McKay, and administrators at the University of the South Pacific’s (USP) RMI campus. Through the provision of GCSL, as school leaders we were encouraged to re-think and draw-from our own cultural repository and connect to our ancestral knowledge that have always provided strength for us. This kind of thinking and practice was encouraged by our educational leaders (Heine, 2002). We argue that a culturally-affirming and culturally-contextual framework that reflects the lived experiences of Marshallese people is much needed and enables the disruption of inherent colonial processes left behind by Western and Eastern administrations which have influenced our education system in the RMI (Heine, 2002). Kanne Lobal, an approach utilising a traditional navigation has warranted its need to provide solutions for today’s educational challenges for us in the RMI. Education in the Pacific Education in the Pacific cannot be understood without contextualising it in its history and culture. It is the same for us in the RMI (Heine, 2002; Walsh et al., 2012). The RMI is located in the Pacific Ocean and is part of Micronesia. It was named after a British captain, John Marshall in the 1700s. The atolls in the RMI were explored by the Spanish in the 16th century. Germany unsuccessfully attempted to colonize the islands in 1885. Japan took control in 1914, but after several battles during World War II, the US seized the RMI from them. In 1947, the United Nations made the island group, along with the Mariana and Caroline archipelagos, a U.S. trust territory (Walsh et al, 2012). Education in the RMI reflects the colonial administrations of Germany, Japan, and now the US. Before the turn of the century, formal education in the Pacific reflected western values, practices, and standards. Prior to that, education was informal and not binded to formal learning institutions (Thaman, 1997) and oral traditions was used as the medium for transmitting learning about customs and practices living with parents, grandparents, great grandparents. As alluded to by Jiba B. Kabua (2004), any “discussion about education is necessarily a discussion of culture, and any policy on education is also a policy of culture” (p. 181). It is impossible to promote one without the other, and it is not logical to understand one without the other. Re-thinking how education should look like, the pedagogical strategies that are relevant in our classrooms, the ways to engage with our parents and communities - such re-thinking sits within our cultural approaches and frameworks. Our collective attempts to provide a cultural framework that is relevant and appropriate for education in our context, sits within the political endeavour to decolonize. This means that what we are providing will not only be useful, but it can be used as a tool to question and identify whether things in place restrict and prevent our culture or whether they promote and foreground cultural ideas and concepts, a significant discussion of culture linked to education (Kabua, 2004). Donor funded development aid programmes were provided to support the challenges within education systems. Concerned with the persistent low educational outcomes of Pacific students, despite the prevalence of aid programmes in the region, in 2000 Pacific educators and leaders with support from New Zealand Aid (NZ Aid) decided to intervene (Heine, 2002; Taufe’ulungaki, 2014). In April 2001, a group of Pacific educators and leaders across the region were invited to a colloquium funded by the New Zealand Overseas Development Agency held in Suva Fiji at the University of the South Pacific. The main purpose of the colloquium was to enable “Pacific educators to re-think the values, assumptions and beliefs underlying [formal] schooling in Oceania” (Benson, 2002). Leadership, in general, is a valued practice in the RMI (Heine, 2002). Despite education leadership being identified as a significant factor in school improvement (Sanga & Chu, 2009), the limited formal training opportunities of school principals in the region was a persistent concern. As part of an Asia Development Bank (ADB) funded project, the Improve Quality Basic Education (IQBE) intervention was developed and implemented in the RMI in 2017. Mentoring is a process associated with the continuity and sustainability of leadership knowledge and practices (Sanga & Chu, 2009). It is a key aspect of building capacity and capabilities within human resources in education (ibid). Indigenous knowledges and education research According to Hilda Heine, the relationship between education and leadership is about understanding Marshallese history and culture (cited in Walsh et al., 2012). It is about sharing indigenous knowledge and histories that “details for future generations a story of survival and resilience and the pride we possess as a people” (Heine, cited in Walsh et al., 2012, p. v). This paper is fuelled by postcolonial aspirations yet is grounded in Pacific indigenous research. This means that our intentions are driven by postcolonial pursuits and discourses linked to challenging the colonial systems and schooling in the Pacific region that privileges western knowledge and learning and marginalises the education practices and processes of local people (Thiong’o, 1986). A point of difference and orientation from postcolonialism is a desire to foreground indigenous Pacific language, specifically Majin Majol, through Marshallese concepts. Our collective bwebwenato and conversation honours and values kautiej (respect), jouj eo mour eo (reciprocity), and jouj (kindness) (Taafaki & Fowler, 2019). Pacific leaders developed the Rethinking Pacific Education Initiative for and by Pacific People (RPEIPP) in 2002 to take control of the ways in which education research was conducted by donor funded organisations (Taufe’ulungaki, 2014). Our former president, Dr Hilda Heine was part of the group of leaders who sought to counter the ways in which our educational and leadership stories were controlled and told by non-Marshallese (Heine, 2002). As a former minister of education in the RMI, Hilda Heine continues to inspire and encourage the next generation of educators, school leaders, and researchers to re-think and de-construct the way learning and education is conceptualised for Marshallese people. The conceptualisation of Kanne Lobal acknowledges its origin, grounded in Marshallese navigation knowledge and practice. Our decision to unpack and deconstruct Kanne Lobal within the context of formal education and leadership responds to the need to not only draw from indigenous Marshallese ideas and practice but to consider that the next generation will continue to be educated using western processes and initiatives particularly from the US where we get a lot of our funding from. According to indigenous researchers Dawn Bessarab and Bridget Ng’andu (2010), doing research that considers “culturally appropriate processes to engage with indigenous groups and individuals is particularly pertinent in today’s research environment” (p. 37). Pacific indigenous educators and researchers have turned to their own ancestral knowledge and practices for inspiration and empowerment. Within western research contexts, the often stringent ideals and processes are not always encouraging of indigenous methods and practices. However, many were able to ground and articulate their use of indigenous methods as being relevant and appropriate to capturing the realities of their communities (Nabobo-Baba, 2008; Sualii-Sauni & Fulu-Aiolupotea, 2014; Thaman, 1997). At the same time, utilising Pacific indigenous methods and approaches enabled research engagement with their communities that honoured and respected them and their communities. For example, Tongan, Samoan, and Fijian researchers used the talanoa method as a way to capture the stories, lived realities, and worldviews of their communities within education in the diaspora (Fa’avae, Jones, & Manu’atu, 2016; Nabobo-Baba, 2008; Sualii-Sauni & Aiolupotea, 2014; Vaioleti, 2005). Tok stori was used by Solomon Islander educators and school leaders to highlight the unique circles of conversational practice and storytelling that leads to more positive engagement with their community members, capturing rich and meaningful narratives as a result (Sanga & Houma, 2004). The Indigenous Aborigine in Australia utilise yarning as a “relaxed discussion through which both the researcher and participant journey together visiting places and topics of interest relevant” (Bessarab & Ng’andu, 2010, p. 38). Despite the diverse forms of discussions and storytelling by indigenous peoples, of significance are the cultural protocols, ethics, and language for conducting and guiding the engagement (Bessarab & Ng’andu, 2010; Nabobo-Baba, 2008; Sualii-Sauni & Aiolupotea, 2014). Through the ethics, values, protocols, and language, these are what makes indigenous methods or frameworks unique compared to western methods like in-depth interviews or semi-structured interviews. This is why it is important for us as Marshallese educators to frame, ground, and articulate how our own methods and frameworks of learning could be realised in western education (Heine, 2002; Jetnil-Kijiner, 2014). In this paper, we utilise bwebwenato as an appropriate method linked to “talk story”, capturing our collective stories and experiences during GCSL and how we sought to build partnerships and collaboration with each other, our communities, and the PSS. Bwebwenato and drawing from Kajin Majel Legends and stories that reflect Marshallese society and its cultural values have survived through our oral traditions. The practice of weaving also holds knowledge about our “valuable and earliest sources of knowledge” (Taafaki & Fowler, 2019, p. 2). The skilful navigation of Marshallese wayfarers on the walap (large canoes) in the ocean is testament of their leadership and the value they place on ensuring the survival and continuity of Marshallese people (Taafaki & Fowler, 2019; Walsh et al., 2012). During her graduate study in 2014, Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner conceptualised bwebwenato as being the most “well-known form of Marshallese orality” (p. 38). The Marshallese-English dictionary defined bwebwenato as talk, conversation, story, history, article, episode, lore, myth, or tale (cited in Jetnil Kijiner, 2014). Three years later in 2017, bwebwenato was utilised in a doctoral project by Natalie Nimmer as a research method to gather “talk stories” about the experiences of 10 Marshallese experts in knowledge and skills ranging from sewing to linguistics, canoe-making and business. Our collective bwebwenato in this paper centres on Marshallese ideas and language. The philosophy of Marshallese knowledge is rooted in our “Kajin Majel”, or Marshallese language and is shared and transmitted through our oral traditions. For instance, through our historical stories and myths. Marshallese philosophy, that is, the knowledge systems inherent in our beliefs, values, customs, and practices are shared. They are inherently relational, meaning that knowledge systems and philosophies within our world are connected, in mind, body, and spirit (Jetnil-Kijiner, 2014; Nimmer, 2017). Although some Marshallese believe that our knowledge is disappearing as more and more elders pass away, it is therefore important work together, and learn from each other about the knowledges shared not only by the living but through their lamentations and stories of those who are no longer with us (Jetnil-Kijiner, 2014). As a Marshallese practice, weaving has been passed-down from generation to generation. Although the art of weaving is no longer as common as it used to be, the artefacts such as the “jaki-ed” (clothing mats) continue to embody significant Marshallese values and traditions. For our weavers, the jouj (check spelling) is the centre of the mat and it is where the weaving starts. When the jouj is correct and weaved well, the remainder and every other part of the mat will be right. The jouj is symbolic of the “heart” and if the heart is prepared well, trained well, then life or all other parts of the body will be well (Taafaki & Fowler, 2019). In that light, we have applied the same to this paper. Conceptualising and drawing from cultural practices that are close and dear to our hearts embodies a significant ontological attempt to prioritize our own knowledge and language, a sense of endearment to who we are and what we believe education to be like for us and the next generation. The application of the phrase “Majolizing '' was used by the Ministry of Education when Hilda Heine was minister, to weave cultural ideas and language into the way that teachers understand the curriculum, develop lesson plans and execute them in the classroom. Despite this, there were still concerns with the embedded colonized practices where teachers defaulted to eurocentric methods of doing things, like the strategies provided in the textbooks given to us. In some ways, our education was slow to adjust to the “Majolizing '' intention by our former minister. In this paper, we provide Kanne Lobal as a way to contribute to the “Majolizing intention” and perhaps speed up yet still be collectively responsible to all involved in education. Kajin Wa and Kanne Lobal “Wa” is the Marshallese concept for canoe. Kajin wa, as in canoe language, has a lot of symbolic meaning linked to deeply-held Marshallese values and practices. The canoe was the foundational practice that supported the livelihood of harsh atoll island living which reflects the Marshallese social world. The experts of Kajin wa often refer to “wa” as being the vessel of life, a means and source of sustaining life (Kelen, 2009, cited in Miller, 2010). “Jouj” means kindness and is the lower part of the main hull of the canoe. It is often referred to by some canoe builders in the RMI as the heart of the canoe and is linked to love. The jouj is one of the first parts of the canoe that is built and is “used to do all other measurements, and then the rest of the canoe is built on top of it” (Miller, 2010, p. 67). The significance of the jouj is that when the canoe is in the water, the jouj is the part of the hull that is underwater and ensures that all the cargo and passengers are safe. For Marshallese, jouj or kindness is what living is about and is associated with selflessly carrying the responsibility of keeping the family and community safe. The parts of the canoe reflect Marshallese culture, legend, family, lineage, and kinship. They embody social responsibilities that guide, direct, and sustain Marshallese families’ wellbeing, from atoll to atoll. For example, the rojak (boom), rojak maan (upper boom), rojak kōrā (lower boom), and they support the edges of the ujelā/ujele (sail) (see figure 1). The literal meaning of rojak maan is male boom and rojak kōrā means female boom which together strengthens the sail and ensures the canoe propels forward in a strong yet safe way. Figuratively, the rojak maan and rojak kōrā symbolise the mother and father relationship which when strong, through the jouj (kindness and love), it can strengthen families and sustain them into the future. Figure 1. Parts of the canoe Source: https://www.canoesmarshallislands.com/2014/09/names-of-canoe-parts/ From a socio-cultural, communal, and leadership view, the canoe (wa) provides understanding of the relationships required to inspire and sustain Marshallese peoples’ education and learning. We draw from Kajin wa because they provide cultural ideas and practices that enable understanding of education and leadership necessary for sustaining Marshallese people and realities in Oceania. When building a canoe, the women are tasked with the weaving of the ujelā/ujele (sail) and to ensure that it is strong enough to withstand long journeys and the fierce winds and waters of the ocean. The Kanne Lobal relates to the front part of the ujelā/ujele (sail) where the rojak maan and rojak kōrā meet and connect (see the red lines in figure 1). Kanne Lobal is linked to the strategic use of the ujelā/ujele by navigators, when there is no wind north wind to propel them forward, to find ways to capture the winds so that their journey can continue. As a proverbial saying, Kanne Lobal is used to ignite thinking and inspire and transform practice particularly when the journey is rough and tough. In this paper we draw from Kanne Lobal to ignite, inspire, and transform our educational and leadership practices, a move to explore what has always been meaningful to Marshallese people when we are faced with challenges. The Kanne Lobal utilises our language, and cultural practices and values by sourcing from the concepts of jouj (kindness, love), kautiej (respect), and jouj eo mour eo (reciprocity). A key Marshallese proverb, “Enra bwe jen lale rara”, is the cultural practice where families enact compassion through the sharing of food in all occurrences. The term “enra” is a small basket weaved from the coconut leaves, and often used by Marshallese as a plate to share and distribute food amongst each other. Bwe-jen-lale-rara is about noticing and providing for the needs of others, and “enra” the basket will help support and provide for all that are in need. “Enra-bwe-jen-lale-rara” is symbolic of cultural exchange and reciprocity and the cultural values associated with building and maintaining relationships, and constantly honouring each other. As a Marshallese practice, in this article we share our understanding and knowledge about the challenges as well as possible solutions for education concerns in our nation. In addition, we highlight another proverb, “wa kuk wa jimor”, which relates to having one canoe, and despite its capacity to feed and provide for the individual, but within the canoe all people can benefit from what it can provide. In the same way, we provide in this paper a cultural framework that will enable all educators to benefit from. It is a framework that is far-reaching and relevant to the lived realities of Marshallese people today. Kumit relates to people united to build strength, all co-operating and working together, living in peace, harmony, and good health. Kanne Lobal: conceptual framework for education and leadership An education framework is a conceptual structure that can be used to capture ideas and thinking related to aspects of learning. Kanne Lobal is conceptualised and framed in this paper as an educational framework. Kanne Lobal highlights the significance of education as a collective partnership whereby leadership is an important aspect. Kanne Lobal draws-from indigenous Marshallese concepts like kautiej (respect), jouj eo mour eo (reciprocity), and jouj (kindness, heart). The role of a leader, including an education leader, is to prioritise collective learning and partnerships that benefits Marshallese people and the continuity and survival of the next generation (Heine, 2002; Thaman, 1995). As described by Ejnar Aerōk, an expert canoe builder in the RMI, he stated: “jerbal ippān doon bwe en maron maan wa e” (cited in Miller, 2010, p. 69). His description emphasises the significance of partnerships and working together when navigating and journeying together in order to move the canoe forward. The kubaak, the outrigger of the wa (canoe) is about “partnerships”. For us as elementary school leaders on Majuro, kubaak encourages us to value collaborative partnerships with each other as well as our communities, PSS, and other stakeholders. Partnerships is an important part of the Kanne Lobal education and leadership framework. It requires ongoing bwebwenato – the inspiring as well as confronting and challenging conversations that should be mediated and negotiated if we and our education stakeholders are to journey together to ensure that the educational services we provide benefits our next generation of young people in the RMI. Navigating ahead the partnerships, mediation, and negotiation are the core values of jouj (kindness, love), kautiej (respect), and jouj eo mour eo (reciprocity). As an organic conceptual framework grounded in indigenous values, inspired through our lived experiences, Kanne Lobal provides ideas and concepts for re-thinking education and leadership practices that are conducive to learning and teaching in the schooling context in the RMI. By no means does it provide the solution to the education ills in our nation. However, we argue that Kanne Lobal is a more relevant approach which is much needed for the negatively stigmatised system as a consequence of the various colonial administrations that have and continue to shape and reframe our ideas about what education should be like for us in the RMI. Moreover, Kannel Lobal is our attempt to decolonize the framing of education and leadership, moving our bwebwenato to re-framing conversations of teaching and learning so that our cultural knowledge and values are foregrounded, appreciated, and realised within our education system. Bwebwenato: sharing our stories In this section, we use bwebwenato as a method of gathering and capturing our stories as data. Below we capture our stories and ongoing conversations about the richness in Marshallese cultural knowledge in the outer islands and on Majuro and the potentialities in Kanne Lobal. Danny Jim When I was in third grade (9-10 years of age), during my grandfather’s speech in Arno, an atoll near Majuro, during a time when a wa (canoe) was being blessed and ready to put the canoe into the ocean. My grandfather told me the canoe was a blessing for the family. “Without a canoe, a family cannot provide for them”, he said. The canoe allows for travelling between places to gather food and other sources to provide for the family. My grandfather’s stories about people’s roles within the canoe reminded me that everyone within the family has a responsibility to each other. Our women, mothers and daughters too have a significant responsibility in the journey, in fact, they hold us, care for us, and given strength to their husbands, brothers, and sons. The wise man or elder sits in the middle of the canoe, directing the young man who help to steer. The young man, he does all the work, directed by the older man. They take advice and seek the wisdom of the elder. In front of the canoe, a young boy is placed there and because of his strong and youthful vision, he is able to help the elder as well as the young man on the canoe. The story can be linked to the roles that school leaders, teachers, and students have in schooling. Without each person knowing intricately their role and responsibility, the sight and vision ahead for the collective aspirations of the school and the community is difficult to comprehend. For me, the canoe is symbolic of our educational journey within our education system. As the school leader, a central, trusted, and respected figure in the school, they provide support for teachers who are at the helm, pedagogically striving to provide for their students. For without strong direction from the school leaders and teachers at the helm, the students, like the young boy, cannot foresee their futures, or envisage how education can benefit them. This is why Kanne Lobal is a significant framework for us in the Marshall Islands because within the practice we are able to take heed and empower each other so that all benefit from the process. Kanne Lobal is linked to our culture, an essential part of who we are. We must rely on our own local approaches, rather than relying on others that are not relevant to what we know and how we live in today’s society. One of the things I can tell is that in Majuro, compared to the outer islands, it’s different. In the outer islands, parents bring children together and tell them legends and stories. The elders tell them about the legends and stories – the bwebwenato. Children from outer islands know a lot more about Marshallese legends compared to children from the Majuro atoll. They usually stay close to their parents, observe how to prepare food and all types of Marshallese skills. Loretta Joseph Case There is little Western influence in the outer islands. They grow up learning their own culture with their parents, not having tv. They are closely knit, making their own food, learning to weave. They use fire for cooking food. They are more connected because there are few of them, doing their own culture. For example, if they’re building a house, the ladies will come together and make food to take to the males that are building the house, encouraging them to keep on working - “jemjem maal” (sharpening tools i.e. axe, like encouraging workers to empower them). It’s when they bring food and entertainment. Rubon Rubon Togetherness, work together, sharing of food, these are important practices as a school leader. Jemjem maal – the whole village works together, men working and the women encourage them with food and entertainment. All the young children are involved in all of the cultural practices, cultural transmission is consistently part of their everyday life. These are stronger in the outer islands. Kanne Lobal has the potential to provide solutions using our own knowledge and practices. Connie Joel When new teachers become a teacher, they learn more about their culture in teaching. Teaching raises the question, who are we? A popular saying amongst our people, “Aelon kein ad ej aelon in manit”, means that “Our islands are cultural islands”. Therefore, when we are teaching, and managing the school, we must do this culturally. When we live and breathe, we must do this culturally. There is more socialising with family and extended family. Respect the elderly. When they’re doing things the ladies all get together, in groups and do it. Cut the breadfruit, and preserve the breadfruit and pandanus. They come together and do it. Same as fishing, building houses, building canoes. They use and speak the language often spoken by the older people. There are words that people in the outer islands use and understand language regularly applied by the elderly. Respect elderly and leaders more i.e., chiefs (iroj), commoners (alap), and the workers on the land (ri-jerbal) (social layer under the commoners). All the kids, they gather with their families, and go and visit the chiefs and alap, and take gifts from their land, first produce/food from the plantation (eojōk). Tommy Almet The people are more connected to the culture in the outer islands because they help one another. They don’t have to always buy things by themselves, everyone contributes to the occasion. For instance, for birthdays, boys go fishing, others contribute and all share with everyone. Kanne Lobal is a practice that can bring people together – leaders, teachers, stakeholders. We want our colleagues to keep strong and work together to fix problems like students and teachers’ absenteeism which is a big problem for us in schools. Demetria Malachi The culture in the outer islands are more accessible and exposed to children. In Majuro, there is a mixedness of cultures and knowledges, influenced by Western thinking and practices. Kanne Lobal is an idea that can enhance quality educational purposes for the RMI. We, the school leaders who did GCSL, we want to merge and use this idea because it will help benefit students’ learning and teachers’ teaching. Kanne Lobal will help students to learn and teachers to teach though traditional skills and knowledge. We want to revitalize our ways of life through teaching because it is slowly fading away. Also, we want to have our own Marshallese learning process because it is in our own language making it easier to use and understand. Essentially, we want to proudly use our own ways of teaching from our ancestors showing the appreciation and blessings given to us. Way Forward To think of ways forward is about reflecting on the past and current learnings. Instead of a traditional discussion within a research publication, we have opted to continue our bwebwenato by sharing what we have learnt through the Graduate Certificate in School Leadership (GCSL) programme. Our bwebwenato does not end in this article and this opportunity to collaborate and partner together in this piece of writing has been a meaningful experience to conceptualise and unpack the Kanne Lobal framework. Our collaborative bwebwenato has enabled us to dig deep into our own wise knowledges for guidance through mediating and negotiating the challenges in education and leadership (Sanga & Houma, 2004). For example, bwe-jen-lale-rara reminds us to inquire, pay attention, and focus on supporting the needs of others. Through enra-bwe-jen-lale-rara, it reminds us to value cultural exchange and reciprocity which will strengthen the development and maintaining of relationships based on ways we continue to honour each other (Nimmer, 2017). We not only continue to support each other, but also help mentor the next generation of school leaders within our education system (Heine, 2002). Education and leadership are all about collaborative partnerships (Sanga & Chu, 2009; Thaman, 1997). Developing partnerships through the GCSL was useful learning for us. It encouraged us to work together, share knowledge, respect each other, and be kind. The values of jouj (kindness, love), kautiej (respect), and jouj eo mour eo (reciprocity) are meaningful in being and becoming and educational leader in the RMI (Jetnil-Kijiner, 2014; Miller, 2010; Nimmer, 2017). These values are meaningful for us practice particularly given the drive by PSS for schools to become accredited. The workshops and meetings delivered during the GCSL in the RMI from 2018 to 2019 about Kanne Lobal has given us strength to share our stories and experiences from the meeting with the stakeholders. But before we met with the stakeholders, we were encouraged to share and speak in our language within our courses: EDP05 (Professional Development and Learning), EDP06 (School Leadership), EDP07 (School Management), EDP08 (Teaching and Learning), and EDP09 (Community Partnerships). In groups, we shared our presentations with our peers, the 15 school leaders in the GCSL programme. We also invited USP RMI staff. They liked the way we presented Kannel Lobal. They provided us with feedback, for example: how the use of the sail on the canoe, the parts and their functions can be conceptualised in education and how they are related to the way that we teach our own young people. Engaging stakeholders in the conceptualisation and design stages of Kanne Lobal strengthened our understanding of leadership and collaborative partnerships. Based on various meetings with the RMI Pacific Resources for Education and Learning (PREL) team, PSS general assembly, teachers from the outer islands, and the PSS executive committee, we were able to share and receive feedback on the Kanne Lobal framework. The coordinators of the PREL programme in the RMI were excited by the possibilities around using Kanne Lobal, as a way to teach culture in an inspirational way to Marshallese students. Our Marshallese knowledge, particularly through the proverbial meaning of Kanne Lobal provided so much inspiration and insight for the groups during the presentation which gave us hope and confidence to develop the framework. Kanne Lobal is an organic and indigenous approach, grounded in Marshallese ways of doing things (Heine, 2002; Taafaki & Fowler, 2019). Given the persistent presence of colonial processes within the education system and the constant reference to practices and initiatives from the US, Kanne Lobal for us provides a refreshing yet fulfilling experience and makes us feel warm inside because it is something that belongs to all Marshallese people. Conclusion Marshallese indigenous knowledge and practices provide meaningful educational and leadership understanding and learnings. They ignite, inspire, and transform thinking and practice. The Kanne Lobal conceptual framework emphasises key concepts and values necessary for collaborative partnerships within education and leadership practices in the RMI. The bwebwenato or talk stories have been insightful and have highlighted the strengths and benefits that our Marshallese ideas and practices possess when looking for appropriate and relevant ways to understand education and leadership. Acknowledgements We want to acknowledge our GCSL cohort of school leaders who have supported us in the development of Kanne Lobal as a conceptual framework. A huge kommol tata to our friends: Joana, Rosana, Loretta, Jellan, Alvin, Ellice, Rolando, Stephen, and Alan. References Benson, C. (2002). Preface. In F. Pene, A. M. Taufe’ulungaki, & C. Benson (Eds.), Tree of Opportunity: re-thinking Pacific Education (p. iv). Suva, Fiji: University of the South Pacific, Institute of Education. Bessarab, D., Ng’andu, B. (2010). Yarning about yarning as a legitimate method in indigenous research. International Journal of Critical Indigenous Studies, 3(1), 37-50. Fa’avae, D., Jones, A., & Manu’atu, L. (2016). Talanoa’i ‘a e talanoa - talking about talanoa: Some dilemmas of a novice researcher. AlterNative: An Indigenous Journal of Indigenous Peoples,12(2),138-150. Heine, H. C. (2002). A Marshall Islands perspective. In F. Pene, A. M. Taufe’ulungaki, & C. Benson (Eds.), Tree of Opportunity: re-thinking Pacific Education (pp. 84 – 90). Suva, Fiji: University of the South Pacific, Institute of Education. Infoplease Staff (2017, February 28). Marshall Islands, retrieved from https://www.infoplease.com/world/countries/marshall-islands Jetnil-Kijiner, K. (2014). Iep Jaltok: A history of Marshallese literature. (Unpublished masters’ thesis). Honolulu, HW: University of Hawaii. Kabua, J. B. (2004). We are the land, the land is us: The moral responsibility of our education and sustainability. In A.L. Loeak, V.C. Kiluwe and L. Crowl (Eds.), Life in the Republic of the Marshall Islands, pp. 180 – 191. Suva, Fiji: University of the South Pacific. Kupferman, D. (2004). Jelalokjen in flux: Pitfalls and prospects of contextualising teacher training programmes in the Marshall Islands. Directions: Journal of Educational Studies, 26(1), 42 – 54. http://directions.usp.ac.fj/collect/direct/index/assoc/D1175062.dir/doc.pdf Miller, R. L. (2010). 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Decolonising Pacific research, building Pacific research communities, and developing Pacific research tools: The case of the talanoa and the faafaletui in Samoa. Asia Pacific Viewpoint, 55(3), 331-344. Taafaki, I., & Fowler, M. K. (2019). Clothing mats of the Marshall Islands: The history, the culture, and the weavers. US: Kindle Direct. Taufe’ulungaki, A. M. (2014). Look back to look forward: A reflective Pacific journey. In M. ‘Otunuku, U. Nabobo-Baba, S. Johansson Fua (Eds.), Of Waves, Winds, and Wonderful Things: A Decade of Rethinking Pacific Education (pp. 1-15). Fiji: USP Press. Thaman, K. H. (1995). Concepts of learning, knowledge and wisdom in Tonga, and their relevance to modern education. Prospects, 25(4), 723-733. Thaman, K. H. (1997). Reclaiming a place: Towards a Pacific concept of education for cultural development. The Journal of the Polynesian Society, 106(2), 119-130. Thiong’o, N. W. (1986). Decolonising the mind: The politics of language in African literature. 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Purpose The aim of this paper is to demonstrate how a historical event packaged as an iconic heritage cultural brand can be marketized and modified over time to ensure brand longevity and continued emotional commitment and loyalty through the leverage of stories and associations more closely aligned with modern-day audiences. The authors do this through examining the marketization of the New Zealand World War 1 (WWI) nurse to today’s audiences. The periods of study are WWI (1914–1918) and then the modern day. The New Zealand Army Nursing Service (NZANS) during WWI has previously had little attention as a key actor in the Australia and New Zealand Army Corp (ANZAC), Today ANZAC is held as pivotal in the birth of New Zealand’s perception of nationhood and as an iconic heritage cultural brand. The history and legend of the ANZAC plays an important role in New Zealand culture and is fundamental to the “Anzac Spirit”, a signifier of what it means to be a New Zealander. Design/methodology/approach A historical case study method is used. The primary source of data is 1914–1918, and includes contemporaneous articles, and personal writings: diaries, letters and published memoirs. More contemporary works form the basis for discussion of marketization as it relates to the NZANS. The article first presents conceptual framing, then the development of the Anzac brand and the history of the NZANS and its role in WWI before turning to discussion on the marketization of this nursing service to today’s audiences and as part of the ANZAC/Anzac brand. Findings Today the story of the WWI NZANS nurse, previously seldom heard, has been co-opted and is becoming increasingly merged as an integral part of the Anzac story. The history of the NZANS during WWI has a great deal of agency today as part of that story, serving many functions within it and providing a valuable lever for marketization. Originality/value To date, there is a scarcity of marketing analysis that examines the marketization of history. By focusing on New Zealand WWI nursing as a contributor to the Anzac story, the authors contribute to the understanding of how marketers package and contemporize history for appeal to audiences through both sustaining and reworking cultural branding.

March 2020 marks the coming of bad news to this country. COVID-19 pandemic began to strike and its domino impacts have affected almost all aspects of life, including academic and scientific writing on journal. In the midst of the spirit of working and researching from home, the International Review of Humanities Studies Journal is back to publish for July 2020 edition. The issues discussed are increasingly diverse, marked by the diverse expertises of the respective authors. Domestic contributions can be seen from the articles of the researchers from Universitas Indonesia, particularly from the Faculty of Humanities and the School of Strategic and Global Studies which are interconnected with the scholars from the Indonesian Police College and Al Azhar University.Since this journal is intended to be available internationally, it is also necessary to pay attention to the contributions of foreign authors. Researchers from the University of Uyo, the University of Ilorin, the University of Benin, the University of Lagos, and Delta State University provide interesting views on the issues of humanities in Nigeria. Five articles from various universities in Nigeria are interconnected with independent researchers from the People's Republic of China, who without links to universities or colleges have sent their own independent research articles.This edition begins with Darmoko's writing that discusses the moral complexities of Javanese in the Asmara Djibrat Ludira novel. Darmoko's research emphasises the spiritual role of knight figures who defended their territory and romance. The second article is from Letmiros who also discusses Java. Letmiros saw a mosque in Jogjakarta, namely the Jogokariyan Mosque, as an agent of change as well as a legend. Letmiros argued that by having activities – whether it is spiritual, economic, cultural, or politics – that are conducted in the mosque, mosque can be ordained as an agent of change and branded as legendary, especially in the city of Jogjakarta.The third article is a research carried out during the COVID-19 pandemic. Fera Belinda saw how a new normality, in a tourist village in the Badung-Bali area, is interconnected with local wisdom and health protocols. Fera Belinda's study shows that health science on pandemic like COVID-19 can be analysed together using the humanities approach. Then in the fourth article, we are invited to take a walk to explore Nigerian drama. Inegbe and Rebecca see that a theatre, titled Cemetary Road, has a significant impact on Nigerian society; to the extent that it can be considered a radical impact. Inegbe and Rebecca's research provides new treasure of knowledge, especially for readers in the regions outside Nigeria.In the fifth article, we are invited to see how online studies, especially the use of video technology, are utilised by teachers. Silalahi and Halimi see how the use of two methods, namely the use of video teaching and the use of textual textbook teaching, are compared between the experimental class and the control class. In conclusion, they find that video-based teaching provides better results in the learning process. The next article, by Soekarba and Rosyidah, invites us to see the contribution of the Hadrami group to a community in the Tegal area, Central Java.The impact of the Hadrami (Al Irsyad) group movement was mostly felt in the social and educational fields in the area.The seventh article invites us to get to know Nigeria. Okpevra's research discusses pre-colonial aspects in the Delta State, Nigeria. This research concludes that intergroup relations in the region are influenced by factors of origin, equality of geographical conditions, and similarity of cultural practices. The eighth article invites us to get acquainted with humanities research that is associated with psychological studies of the police. Mayastinasari and Suseno discussed how strengthening the current role of the police influences the public satisfaction, especially in North Sumatra where this research took place.The ninth article is an issue that has been discussed lately. Nwosu discusses the issue of homosexuality in the Catholic group in Nigeria which is interconnected with its society. Although the discussed issues are quite sensitive, the scientific explanation could vividly answers the questions regarding these issues. Next, the tenth article from Akpan and Edem discusses how a film, in this case Frozen, is examined from the perspective of digital technology and digital costumes which is a new contribution in analysing a child-friendly content. The eleventh article of Ademakinwa and Smith discusses a film adapted from a well-known Nigerian novelist in the United States, Chimamanda Adichie. Ademakinwa and Smith's findings state that collective memory, reconstructed through film, can have a more significant impact than that of novels. It can even create a crisis within society if not properly controlled.The twelfth article from Filia and Nurfitri invites us to explore the expression of confessions of love in Japanese. Data on love expressions from these researchers were collected via video interviews. It is interesting to find that the expression of love turns out to depend on the cultural context associated with togetherness and sustainability. The next article, the thirteenth, is a contribution of an independent Chinese researcher named Zhang Guanan. He analysed Chinese folklore, Pi Ying, with wayang kulit – leather puppet – stories. It is interesting to follow how Guanan managed to find the uniqueness of both in his research.The fourteenth article by Sugiharto and Puspitasari discusses the online stalking activities of urban millennial. It is their second research which found that cyber stalking is a natural thing for millennial generation living in urban areas, including following colleagues, friends, spouses, even ex-spouses and friends who have not been associated for a long time. The fifteenth paper from Guanah Akbanu and Obi discusses the practice of online journalism in Nigeria, using artificial intelligence. The case study they chose was how journalists in Edo, Nigeria, perceived the use of AI in their journalistic methods. It was found that the use of AI turned out to be more positive for journalism in the area.The sixteenth article by Sonya Suganda discusses how a commemorative object, stolperschwelle, is useful as an object for narrative of the death. The object that was initially used to commemorate Nazi victims has developed to be the object to commemorate those who are marginalized, including homosexuals, gypsies, and those who are exiled because of political differences. The next contribution, the seventeenth, comes from Zaqiatul, Al Azhar University who discusses how the functioning of suffixes and verbs is interconnected in the realm of Arabic conjugation. The eighteenth article by Hutapea discusses a quite sensitive issue, namely the conflict between the native people of Jogja and the Papuans living in Jogjakarta. This conflict was examined from the perspective of the police, especially how they controlled it. The nineteenth article from Arif Budiman discusses the strategy used by the French interpreter in the film Marlina Murder in Four Acts. The last article by Basuni discusses the problem of the Arabic-Indonesian translation, in the context of the increasingly contextual scripture.Hopefully, this current edition along with the entire articles can enlighten the readers and contribute significantly to the knowledge of humanities studies.

The Big Pineapple, Big Banana, the Big Potato , Australia positively groans under the weight of big things littered along the highway like jokes awaiting their punch-lines. These commercial road-side enterprises are a constant source of bemusement among Australians and this paper seeks to explore the attraction of the gargantuan and why Australians consider big things to be so funny. Discovering that big things not only give form to national icons but also celebrate the nation's tendency to larrikinism and the associated sardonic, ironic and anti-establishment humour, we are left to consider the role big things may play in the Australian national psyche and how their function as low art turns their collectivity into some strange, impulsive attempt at establishing a system of totems that comes to terms with this big land and its contested ownership. Historically big things like the Colossus of Rhodes, the Pyramids or the Great Wall of China have been physical manifestations of empire and dominion. No laughing matter. But in the United States from the 1920s, particularly in Southern California, we begin to see a profusion of "roadside vernacular architecture" including a big coffee percolator, a big pig, a big corn ear, a big teapot, a big Spanish dancer, a big duck, a big fish and many big hot dogs and big chilli bowls (Heimann and Georges). "Imaginana" is another way to conceptualise these strange forms of cultural production that replicate familiar, safe everyday items (Amdur 12). Early big things, particularly in the United States, had a clearly pragmatic function: to lure car-bound consumers off the highways and into local commercial enterprises with simple, one-to-one signification bringing function to form and high art to low purposes (Gebhard 14). The aim of these big things was to shock, startle and amuse the passing motorist and they took on a humourous edge due to the incongruity of scale and the surreal surprise of reality warping out of all proportion. While big things have a commercial purpose they achieve that purpose because they can be read playfully, always reminding us of the paradox they entail: they act dualistically as both the media and the message, both the referent and the real (Barcan 38). Reading big things as jokes in Freudian terms, we see how they may be eruptions of the unconscious into the mundane (Krahn 158). The first big thing in Australia was the Big Banana, built in Coffs Harbour by an American entomologist, John Landi (Negus). From that time on Australia has had a quirky relationship with big things. The banana is innately funny. The bent phallus, the unique shape, the skin as the standard slapstick cue to pratfall; everything about the banana is an invitation to laugh. Soon the banana was emulated by other funny produce such as the pineapple, the prawn and the lobster and within a decade monstrous agricultural products proliferated beside Australian highways regardless of their innate humour. They were joined by a variety of iconic figures, usually with an obvious connection such as the Big Penguin at the town of Penguin. Big things reinforce notions of national and regional identity: on the national level Australia is portrayed as a land of plenty, a fact emphasized by the sheer vastness of these creations; regionally, these totems function as identity markers and place makers (Barcan 31). Many big things were constructed by migrants and thus can be interpreted as optimistic acts of home making in the vast emptiness of the continent (Barcan 36). There is concern that big things obscure, or even obliterate, the history of regions and the whole continent: the incarcerations, land-grabbing, labour conflicts, corruption and failure. Instead it could be argued that big thing function to both signpost white history and subvert it at the same time: the Big Ned Kelly calling for revolution, the big goldminer looking ever expectant and ever disappointed, the Big Captain Cook in Cairns giving what appears to be a Nazi salute, all point to a larrikin refusal to take the brief and minor white history too seriously. The Australian larrikin sense of humour is mischievous, depreciatory and anti-authoritarian. This sense of humour arises from certain characteristics of the Australian "legend" identified by Ward such as scepticism, egalitarianism and derision towards affectation that are evident in larrikins' confrontations with authority, elaborate practical jokes on each other and the community at large and a "propensity for vulgarising the arts" (Reekie 97). This larrikinism is evident in the way dangerous nuisances (the big crocodile, the big red back spider) and mundane objects (the big jam tin, the big stubby holder, the big mower) are given the same treatment as national icons. There is also the variability of effort and attention to detail, where Aussie "ingenuity" and bush carpentry have been used to turn a good idea into reality in the shortest possible time to produce a very impressionist big koala or just the blob of concrete that is the big strawberry. Ignatius Jones explains: "get your local surfboard maker to cast you a giant prawn in fibreglass and you end up with the cicada that ate Yamba" (Negus). The early documentation of Australian big things was also carried out in a larrikin spirit (Amdur) including the claim that big things are part of an alien conspiracy to make us feel small (Stockwell). Every big thing requires a visionary, a postmodern artist with the passion and the obsession to realise their vision. It is a form of low art, a form of trash culture. But to many who do not frequent galleries and museums, low art is their available form of art and thus becomes their actual art. City planners and the upper middle class tend to denigrate these structures so at odds with their images of beautiful cities, so blatantly bastions of commercialism and so big that they run the risk of obscuring and obliterating real art (Gerbhard 25). Big things are criticised as ugly, kitsch, tacky and giving a wrong impression of a town. There are further concerns that big things allow the tourist to learn without knowing by presenting only one side of the story (Cross 51) and that they make observers minuscule in their presence, dominating the landscape and the attention of tourists (Krahn 165). But looking beyond the aesthetics of the individual instance it becomes apparent that big things also function as a network (Barcan 32), inviting the tourist along the highway of "the arrested fairground (in the) oxymoron of movement" (Krahn 157), offering the hyperreal adventure of collecting the experience, and small mementos, of more big things (Eco 1986). Big things are carnival, inverting social rules, promising some weird utopia (Krahn 171). As a collectivity, the larger psycho-political and metaphysical roles of big things become apparent. For Australia, the crucial question big things raise is the nature of our relationship with the land. Most of white Australia, huddled in cities on the seaboard, has a fear of the empty space at the heart of the continent. Big things are an attempt to assert that the settlers can match the dimensions of the land as, community by community, we write ourselves upon the land. The problem that big things highlight rather than obscure, the problem that can never be sublimated, that constantly erupts from the collective unconscious is that the ownership of the land remains contested, sometimes in the courts, sometimes in the streets, but most importantly in the hearts and dreams of the whole Australian people. All this land once had its own indigenous stories and big things may be seen as a pathetic attempt to replace, re-define and retell those stories by the interlopers now living on the land. "...Big things work allegorically, effacing, most notably, Aboriginal definitions of regional, tribal, spiritual, linguistic or other space" (Barcan 37). There is a sense in which big things are white trash barely obscuring black deaths (Nyoongah 12-14). But like a student's job-work over an old master's self portrait, big things invite us to peek through to the real totems of this land, totems enshrined in the creation myths of the indigenous dreaming. This is big things' contribution to the reconciliation process, to remind us of the fragile hold of white Australia on the land and to demand respect for the stories big things seek to displace. And that is the real big thing for white Australia in the reconciliation process, to accept these stories as our own so the land owns us. This is a much bigger leap than just saying sorry but in some strange way it has already commenced in the massive, mega-fauna that even now are rising from the land like the harbingers of a new dreamtime. A number of authors complain that, intentionally or otherwise, big things exclude indigenous flora and fauna and suggest that this points to a denial of history (Amdur 13, Barcan 36). But in recent years there has been a flood of big indigenous icons, many owned by indigenous corporations: big koalas, big kangaroos, big crocodiles, big bunyips and big barramundi. There is still the potential for indigenous artists to turn the joke around by creating big ancestral beings including rainbow serpents and the like. As Krahn (163) says: "I fear there must have been a Big Aboriginal Elder somewhere, gazing wistfully from the edge of town. But why a chicken?" Works Cited Amdur, Mark. It Really Is A Big Country . Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1981. Barcan, Ruth. "Big Things: Consumer Totemism and Serial Monumentality." Linq 23.2 (1996): 31-39. Cane Toad Collective. "Big Things." Cane Toad Times 1 1983: 18-23. Eco, Umberto. Travels in Hyperreality. San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1986. Gebhard, David. "Introduction." California Crazy: Roadside Vernacular Architecture . Eds. Jim Heimann and Rip Georges. San Francisco: Chronicle, 1985. 11-25. Heimann, Jim and Rip Georges. California Crazy: Roadside Vernacular Architecture . San Francisco: Chronicle, 1985. Krahn, Uli "The Arrested Fairground, or, Big Things as Oxymoron of Movement." Antithesis 13 (2002): 157-176. Negus, George, "Big Things", New Dimensions (In Time) . 21 July 2003. 26 September 2003 < http://www.abc.net.au/dimensions/dimensions_in_time/Transcripts/2003_default.htm >. Nyoongah, Janine Little. "'Unsinkable' Big Things: Spectacle, Race, and Class through Elvis, Titanic, O.J. and Sumo." Overland 148 (1997): 12-15. Reekie, Gail. "Nineteenth-Century Urbanization." Australian Studies: A Survey. Ed. James Walter. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1989. Stockwell, Stephen. "Cairns Collossi." Cane Toad Times 2 1984: 21. Ward, Russel. The Australian Legend . Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1989. Links http://members.ozemail.com.au/~arundell/bigthing.htm http://www.alphalink.com.au/~richardb/page4.htm http://www.general.uwa.edu.au/u/rpinna/big/big_things_intro.html http://www.bigthings.com.au/ http://www.alphalink.com.au/~richardb/page4.htm Citation reference for this article MLA Style Stockwell, Stephen & Carlisle, Bethany. "Big Things" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0311/6-stockwell-carlisle-big-things.php>. APA Style Stockwell, S. & Carlisle, B. (2003, Nov 10). Big Things. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 6, <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0311/6-stockwell-carlisle-big-things.php>

“A bunch of faggots for watching men hug each other in tights.”For the past five Marches, World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) has produced an awards show which honours its aged former performers, such as Jimmy “Superfly” Snuka and Ricky “The Dragon” Steamboat, as pro-wrestling Legends. This awards show, according to WWE, is ‘an elegant, emotional, star-studded event that recognizes the in-ring achievements of the inductees and offers historical insights into this century-old sports-entertainment attraction’ (WWE.com, n.p.). In an episodic storyline leading up to the 2009 awards, however, the real-life personal shortcomings of these Legends have been brought to light, and subsequently mocked in one-on-one interview segments with WWE’s Superstar of the Year 2008, the dastardly Chris Jericho. Jericho caps off these tirades by physically assaulting the Legends with handy stage props. Significantly, the performances of Jericho and his victims have garnered positive attention not only from mass audiences unaware of backstage happenings in WWE, but also from the informed community of pro-wrestling fans over at the nihilistic humour website SomethingAwful. During Jericho’s assault on the Legend Jimmy “Superfly” Snuka at the March 02 WWE Raw event, a WWE-themed forum thread on SomethingAwful logged over sixty posts all reiterating variations of ‘gently caress me Jericho is amazing’ (Jerusalem, n.p.). This is despite the community’s passive-aggressive and ironically jaded official line that they indeed are ‘a bunch of faggots for watching men hug each other in tights. Thank you for not telling us this several times’ (HulkaMatt, n.p.). Why were these normally cynical fans of WWE enthusiastically expressing their love for the Jericho-Legends feud? In order to answer this question, this paper argues that the feud articulates not only the ideal of the “giving wrestler”, but also Roland Barthes’s version of jouissance. Consuming and commenting on WWE texts within the SomethingAwful community is further argued to be a performative ritual in which informed wrestling fans distance themselves from audiences they perceive as uncritical and ill-informed cultural dupes. The feud, then, allows the SomethingAwful fans to perform enthusiasm on two interconnected levels: they are not only able to ironically cheer on Jericho’s morally reprehensible actions, but also to genuinely appreciate the present-day in-ring efforts of the Legends. The Passion of the SuperflyTo properly contextualise this paper, though, the fact that “pro wrestling is fake” needs to be reiterated. Each match is a choreographed sequence of moves. Victory does not result from landing more damaging bodyslams than one's opponent, but is instead predetermined by scriptwriters—among whom wrestlers are typically not numbered—backstage. In the 1950s, Roland Barthes thus commented that pro wrestling ‘is not a sport, it is a spectacle’ (Mythologies 13). Yet, pro wrestling remains popular because this theatricality allows for the display of spectacular excesses of passion—here Barthes not only means “an intensity of emotion”, but refers to the physically tortured heroes of medieval passion plays as well—giving it an advantage over the legitimate sport of amateur wrestling. ‘It is obvious that at such a pitch, it no longer matters whether the passion is genuine or not. What the public wants is the image of passion, not passion itself’ (Mythologies 16). This observation still holds true in today’s WWE. On one hand, the SomethingAwful fans go ‘gently caress Jericho, [Superfly] will MURDER you’ (Jerusalem, n.p.) in disapproval of Jericho’s on-screen actions. In the same thread, though, they simultaneously fret over him being slightly injured from an off-screen real life accident. ‘Jericho looks busted up on his forehead. Dang’ (Carney, n.p.).However, Barthes’s observations, while seminal, are not the be-all and end-all of pro wrestling scholarship. The industry has undergone a significant number of changes since the 1950s. Speeches and interview segments are now seen as essential tools for furthering storylines. Correspondingly, they are given ample TV time. At over ten minutes, the Jericho-“Superfly” confrontation from the March 02 Raw is longer than both the matches following it, and a fifteen minute conversation between two top wrestlers capstones these two matches. Henry Jenkins has thus argued that pro wrestling is a male-targeted melodrama. Its ‘writers emphasize many traits that [legitimate sports such as] football share with melodrama-the clear opposition between characters, the sharp alignment of audience identification, abrupt shifts in fortune, and an emotionally satisfying resolution’ (Jenkins, “Never Trust a Snake” 81). Unlike football, though, the predetermined nature of pro wrestling means that its events can be ‘staged to ensure maximum emotional impact and a satisfying climax’ (Jenkins, “Never Trust a Snake” 81). Further, Jenkins notes that shouting is preferred over tears as an outlet for male affect. It ‘embodies externalised emotion; it is aggressive and noisy. Women cry from a position of emotional (and often social) vulnerability; men shout from a position of physical and social strength (however illusory)’ (Jenkins, “Never Trust a Snake” 80). Pro wrestling is seen to encourage this outlet for affect by offering its viewers spectacles of male physical prowess to either castigate or cheer. Jericho’s assault of the Legends, coupled with his half-screaming, half-shouting taunts of “‘Hall of Famer’? ‘Hall of Famer’ of what? You’re a has-been! Just like all the rest!” could be read to fit within this paradigm as well. Smarts vs. MarksWWE has repeatedly highlighted its scripted nature in recent years. During a 2007 CNN interview, for instance, WWE Chairman Vince McMahon constantly refers to his product as “entertainment” and laughingly agrees that “it’s all story” when discussing his on-screen interactions with his long-lost midget “son” (Griffin, n.p.). These overt acknowledgments that WWE is a highly choreographed melodrama have boosted the growth of a fan demographic referred to the "smart" in pro-wrestling argot. This “smart” fan is a figure for whom the fabricated nature of pro-wrestling necessitates an engagement with the WWE spectacle at a different level from mass audiences. The “smart” not only ‘follow[s] the WWE not just to see the shows, but to keep track of what “the Fed[eration]” is doing’ (McBride and Bird 170) with regards to off-camera events, but also 'has knowledge of the inner-workings of the wrestling business’ (PWTorch, n.p.). One of the few “GOLD”-rated threads on the SomethingAwful smart forums, accordingly, is titled “WWE News and Other Top Stories, The Insider Thread”, and has nearly 400 000 views and over 1000 posts. As a result, the smarts are in a subject position of relative insider-ness. They consume the WWE spectacle at a deeper level—one which functions roughly like an apparatus of capture for the critical/cynical affect mobilised around the binary of ‘real’ and ‘fake’—yet ultimately remain captured by the spectacle through their autodidact enthusiasm for knowledge which uncovers its inner workings.By contrast, there is the category of the “mark” fan. These “marks” are individuals who remain credulous in their reception of WWE programming. As cuteygrl08 writes regarding a recent WWE storyline involving brotherly envy:I LOVE JEFF HARDY!!!! i cried when i heard his brother say all the crap about him!! kinda weird but i love him and this video is soooo good!! JEFF hardy loves his fans and his fans love him no matter what he does i'll always love JEFF HARDY!!!!!!!!!!! (n.p.)This unstinting faith in the on-screen spectacle is understandable insofar as WWE programming trades upon powerful visual markers of authenticity—nearly-bare bodies, sweat, pained facial expressions­—and complements them with the adrenaline-producing beats of thrash metal and hard rock. Yet, smarts look down upon marks like cuteygrl08, seeing them as Frankfurt School-era hypnotised sots for whom the WWE spectacle is ‘the common ground of the deceived gaze and of false consciousness’ (Debord 117), and additionally as victims of a larger media industry which specialises in mass deception (Horkheimer and Adorno 41). As Lawrence McBride and Elizabeth Bird observe:Marks appear to believe in the authenticity of the competition—Smarts see them as the stereotypical dupes imagined by wrestling critics. Smarts approach the genre of wrestling as would-be insiders, while Marks root unreflexively for the most popular faces. Smart fans possess truly incredible amounts of knowledge about the history of wrestling, including wrestler’s real names and career histories, how various promotions began and folded, who won every Wrestlemania ever. Smart fan informants defined a Mark specifically as someone who responds to wrestling in the way intended by the people who write the storylines (the bookers), describing Marks with statements such as “Kids are Marks.” or “We were all Marks when we were kids.” Smarts view Marks with scorn. (169)Perhaps feeding on the antagonistic binaries drawn by WWE programming, there exists an “us vs them” binary in smart fan communities. Previous research has shown that fan communities often rigidly police the boundaries of “good taste”, and use negatively constructed differences as a means of identity construction (Fiske 448; Jenkins, “Get a Life!” 432; Theodoropoulou 321). This ritual Othering is especially important when supporting the WWE. Smarts are aware that they are fans of a product denigrated by non-fans as ‘trash TV’ (McKinley, n.p.). As Matt Hills finds, fandom is a mode of performative consumption. It is ‘an identity which is (dis)claimed, and which performs cultural work’ (Hills xi). Belonging to the SomethingAwful smart community, thus, exerts its own pressures on the individual smart. There, the smart must perform ‘audiencehood, knowing that other fans will act as a readership for speculation, observation, and commentaries’ (Hills 177). Wrestling, then, is not just to be watched passively. It must be analysed, and critically dissected with reference to the encyclopaedic knowledge treasured by the smart community. Mark commentary has to be pilloried, for despite all the ironic disaffection characterising their posts, the smarts display mark-like behaviour by watching and purchasing WWE programming under their own volition. A near-existential dread is hence articulated when smarts become aware of points where the boundaries between smart and mark overlap, that ‘the creatures that lurk the internet ...carry some of the same interests that we do’ (rottingtrashcan, n.p.). Any commonalities between smarts and marks must thus be disavowed as a surface resemblance: afterall, creatures are simply unthinking appetites, not smart epicures. We’re better than those plebs; in fact, we’re nothing like them any more. Yet, in one of the few forms of direct address in the glossary of smart newsletter PWTorch, to “mark out” is ‘to enthusiastically be into [a storyline] or match as if you [emphasis added] were “a mark”; to suspend one's disbelief for the sake of enjoying to a greater extent a match or [a storyline]’ (PWTorch, n.p.). The existence of the term “marking out” in a smart glossary points to an enjoyably liminal privileged position between that of defensively ironic critic and that of credulous dupe, one where smarts can stop their performance of cooler-than-thou fatigue and enthusiastically believe that there is nothing more to WWE than spontaneous alarms and excursions. The bodily reactions of the Legends in response to Jericho's physical assault helps foster this willing naiveté. These reactions are a distressing break from the generic visual conventions set forth by preceding decades of professional wrestling. As Barthes argues, wrestling is as much concerned with images of spectacular suffering as with narratives of amazing triumphs:the wrestler who suffers in a hold which is reputedly cruel (an arm- lock, a twisted leg) offers an excessive portrayal of Suffering; like a primitive Pieta, he exhibits for all to see his face, exaggeratedly contorted by an intolerable affliction. It is obvious, of course, that in wrestling reserve would be out of place, since it is opposed to the voluntary ostentation of the spectacle, to this Exhibition of Suffering which is the very aim of the fight. (17)Barthes was writing of the primitively filmed wrestling matches of the 1950s notable for their static camera shots. However, WWE wrestlers yet follow this theatrical aesthetic. In the match immediately following Jericho’s bullying of Superfly, Kane considerately jumps the last two feet into a ringside turnbuckle after Mike Knox pushes him into its general vicinity. Kane grunts at the impact while the camera cuts to a low-angled shot of his back—all the better to magnify the visual of the 150 kg Knox now using his bulk to squash Kane. Whenever Jericho himself traps his opponent in his “Walls of Jericho” submission manoeuvre, both their faces are rictuses of passion. His opponent clutches for the safety of the ring ropes, shaking his head in heroic determination. Audiences see Jericho tighten his grip, his own head shaking in villainous purpose. But the Legends do not gyrate around the set when hit. Instead, they invariably slump to the ground, motionless except for weakly spasming to the rhythm of Jericho’s subsequent attacks. This atypical reaction forces audiences—smart and mark alike—to re-evaluate any assumptions that the event constitutes a typical WWE beatdown. Overblown theatricality gives way to a scene which seems more related to everyday experiences with pain: Here's an old man being beaten and whipped by a strong, young man. He's not moving. Not like other wrestlers do. I wonder... The battered bodies of these Legends are then framed in high angle camera shots, making them look ever so much more vulnerable than they were prior to Jericho’s assault. Hence the smart statements gushing that ‘gently caress me Jericho is amazing’ (Jerusalem, n.p.) and that Jericho’s actions have garnered a ‘rear end in a top hat chant [from the crowd]. It has been FOREVER since I heard one of those. I love Chris Jericho’ (Burrito, n.p.).Jouissance and “Marking Out”This uninhibited “marking out” by normally cynical smarts brings to mind Barthes's observation that texts are able to provoke two different kinds of enjoyment in their readers. On one hand, there is the text which provides pleasure born from familiarity. It ‘contents, fills, grants euphoria; [it is] the text that comes from culture and does not break with it, is linked to a comfortable practice of reading’ (Barthes, Image-Music-Text 14). The Knox-Kane match engendered such a been-there-done-that-it's-ok-I-guess overall reaction from smarts. For every ‘Mike Knox throwing Mysterio at Kane was fantastic’ (Burrito, n.p.), there is an ‘Ahahaha jesus Knox [sic] that was the shittiest Hurracanrana sell ever’ (Axisillian, n.p.), and a ‘Hit the beard [sic] it is Knox's weakpoint’ (Eurotrash, n.p.). The pleasant genericity of the match enables and necessitates that these smarts maintain their tactic of ironic posturing. They are able to armchair critique Knox for making his opponent's spinning Hurracanrana throw look painless. Yet they are also allowed to reiterate their camp affection for Knox's large and bushy beard, which remains grotesque even when divorced from a WWE universe that celebrates sculpted physiques.By contrast, Barthes praises the text of rapturous jouissance. It is one where an orgasmic intensity of pleasure is born from the unravelling of its audience’s assumptions, moving them away from their comfort zone. It is a text which ‘imposes a stage of loss, [a] text that discomforts (perhaps to the point of boredom), unsettles the reader's historical, cultural, psychological assumptions, the consistency of his tastes, values, memories, brings to crisis his relation with language’ (Barthes, Image-Music-Text 14). In addition to the atypical physical reactions of the Legends, WWE cynically positions the Jericho-Legends segments during Raw events which also feature slick video montages highlighting the accomplishments of individual Legends. These montages—complete with an erudite and enthusiastic Voice-of-God narrator— introduce the long-retired Legends to marks unfamiliar with WWE's narrative continuity: “Ladies and gentlemen! Rrriiiicky “The Draaagon” Steeeeamboat!”. At the same time, they serve as a visually and aurally impressive highlight-reel-cum-nostalgic-celebration of each Legend's career accomplishments. Their authoritative narration is spliced to clips of past matches, and informs audiences that, for instance, Steamboat was ‘one of the first Superstars to combine technical skills with astounding aerial agility ... in a match widely regarded as one of the best in history, he captured the Intercontinental title from Randy Savage in front of a record-breaking 93 173 fans’ (“Raw #636”, WWE). Following the unassailably authentic video footage of past matches, other retired wrestlers speak candidly in non-WWE stages such as outdoor parks and their own homes about the Legend's strengths and contributions to the industry.The interesting thing about these didactic montages is not so much what they show —Legends mythologised into triumphant Titans — but rather, what they elide. While the Steamboat-centred package does reflect the smart consensus that his Intercontinental bout ‘was a technical classic, and to this day, is still considered one of the greatest matches of all-time’ (NPP, n.p.), it does not mention how Steamboat was treated poorly in the WWE. Despite coming to it as the widely-known World Champion of [the NWA] rival promotion, WWE producers ‘dressed Steamboat up as a dragon and even made him blow fire. ...To boot, he was never acknowledged as a World Champion and [kept losing] to the stars’ (NPP, n.p.). The montages, overtly endorsed by the gigantic WWE logo as they are, are ultimately pleasant illusions which rewrite inconvenient truths while glamorising pleasant memories.Jericho’s speeches, however, sharply break from this celebratory mode. He references Steamboat’s previous success in the NWA, ‘an organisation that according to this company never even existed’(“Raw #636”, WWE). He then castigates Steamboat for being a real-life sellout and alludes to Steamboat having personal problems unmentioned in the montage:It wasn't until you came to the WWE that you sold your soul to all of these parasites [everyone watching] that you became “The Dragon”. A glorified Karate Kid selling headbands and making poses. Feeding into stereotypes. And then you eventually came to the ring with a Komodo Dragon. Literally spitting fire like the circus freak you'd become. It was pathetic. But hey, it's all right as long as you're making a paycheck, right Steamboat? And then when you decided to retire, you ended up like all the rest. Down and out. Broken. Beaten down. Dysfunctional family ...You applied for a job working for the WWE, you got one working backstage, and now here you are. You see, Steamboat, you are a life-long sellout. And now, with the Hall of Fame induction, the loyal dog gets his bone. (WWE)Here, Jericho demonstrates an apparent unwillingness to follow the company line by not only acknowledging the NWA, but also by disrespecting a current WWE backstage authority. Yet, wrestlers having onscreen tangles with their bosses is the norm for WWE. The most famous storyline of the 1990s had “Stone Cold” Steve Austin and the WWE Chairman brutalising each other for months on end, and the fifteen minute verbal exchange mentioned earlier concerns one wrestler previously attacking the Raw General Manager. Rather, it is Jericho’s reinterpretation of Steamboat’s career trajectory which gives the storyline the intensely pleasurable uncertainty of jouissance. His confrontational speeches rupture the celebratory nostalgia of the montages, forcing smarts to apply extra-textual knowledge to them. This is especially relevant in Steamboat’s case. His montage was shown just prior to his meeting with Jericho, ensuring that his iconic status was fresh in the audience’s memory. Vera Dika’s findings on the conflict between memory and history in revisionist nostalgia films are important to remember here. The tension ‘that comes from the juxtaposition of the coded material against the historical context of the film itself ...encourages a new set of meanings to arise’ (Dika 91). Jericho cynically views the seemingly virtuous and heroic Steamboat as a corporate sycophant preying on fan goodwill to enrich his own selfish ends. This viewpoint, troublingly enough for smarts, is supported by their non-WWE-produced extra-textual knowledge, allowing for a meta-level melodrama to be played out. The speeches thus speak directly to smarts, simultaneously confounding and exceeding their expectations. The comfortingly pleasant memories of Steamboat’s “amazing aerial prowess” are de-emphasised, and he is further linked to the stereotypical juvenilia of the once-popular The Karate Kid. They articulate and capitalise upon whatever misgivings smarts may have regarding Steamboat’s real-life actions. Thus, to paraphrase Dika, ‘seen in this clash, [the Jericho-Legends feud] has the structure of irony, producing a feeling of nostalgia, but also of pathos, and registering the historical events as the cause of an irretrievable loss [of a Legend’s dignity]’ (91). “C’mon Legend! Live in the past!” taunts Jericho as he stuffs Superfly’s mouth with bananas and beats him amidst the wreckage of the exactingly reproduced cheap wooden set in the same way that “Rowdy” Roddy Piper did years ago (“RAW #637”, WWE). This literal dismantling of cherished memories results from WWE producers second-guessing the smarts, and providing these fans with an enjoyably uncomfortable jouissance that cleverly confounds the performance of a smart disaffection. “Marking out” —or its performance at least—results.The Giving WrestlerLastly, the general physical passivity of the Legends also ties into the ethos of the “giving wrestler” when combined with the celebratory montages. In a business where performed passion is integral to fan enjoyment, the “giving wrestler” is an important figure who, when hit by a high-risk move, will make his co-worker’s offense look convincing (McBride and Bird 173). He ‘will give his all in a performance to ensure a dual outcome: the match will be spectacular, benefiting the fans, and each wrestler will make his “opponent” look good, helping him “get over with the fans” (McBride and Bird 172). Unsurprisingly, this figure is appreciated by smarts, who ‘often form strong emotional attachments to those wrestlers who go to the greatest lengths to bear the burden of the performance’ (McBride and Bird 173). As described earlier, the understated reactions of the Legends make Jericho’s attacks paradoxically look as though they cause extreme pain. Yet, when this pathetic image of the Legends is combined with the hypermasculine images of them in their heyday, a tragedy with real-life referents is played out on-stage. In one of Jenkins’s ‘abrupt shifts of fortune’ (“Never Trust a Snake” 81), age has grounded these Legends. They can now believably be assaulted with impunity by someone that Steamboat dismisses as ‘a snotty brat wrestler of a kid[sic] ...a hypocrite’ (“Raw #636”, WWE), and even in this, they apparently give their all to make Jericho look viciously “good”, thus exceeding the high expectations of smarts. As an appreciative thread title on SomethingAwful states, ‘WWE Discussion is the RICKY STEAMBOAT OWN [wins] ZONE for 02/23/09’ (HulkaMatt, n.p.) ConclusionThe Jericho-Legends feud culminated the day after the Hall of Fame ceremony, at the WWE’s flagship Wrestlemania event. Actor Mickey Rourke humiliated Jericho for the honour of the Legends, flattening the cocky braggart with a single punch. The maximum degree of moral order possible was thus temporarily restored to an episodic narrative centred around unprovoked acts of violence. Ultimately though, it is important to note the three strategies that WWE used The Legends were scripted to respond feebly to Jericho’s physical assault, slick recap montages were copiously deployed, and Jericho himself was allowed candid metatextual references to incidents that WWE producers normally like to pretend have “never even existed”. All these strategies were impressive in their own right, and they eventually served to reinforce each other. 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HulkaMatt. “Wrestlehut 2000 Rules and FAQ - Last Update: 2/13/2009 - FRANK MIR FEARS BROCK LESNAR.” SomethingAwful 5 Aug. 2008. 5 Mar. 2009 < http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=2922167 >.HulkaMatt. “WWE Discussion is the RICKY STEAMBOAT OWN ZONE for 02/23/09.” SomethingAwful 24 Feb. 2009. 5 Mar. 2009 < http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3085277 >.Jenkins, Henry. “'Get a Life!': Fans, Poachers, Nomads.” The Cult Film Reader. Eds. Ernest Mathijs and Xavier Mendik. England: Open UP, 2008. 430-43.Jenkins, Henry. “Never Trust a Snake: WWF Wrestling as Masculine Melodrama.” The Wow Climax. New York: New York UP 2007. 75-101.Jerusalem. “WWE RAW is IN SOVIET RUSSIA, HEART BREAKS YOU for 3/2/09.” SomethingAwful 3 Mar. 2009. 5 Mar. 2009 < http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3089910&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=6 >.McBride, Lawrence B., and S. Elizabeth Bird. “From Smart Fan to Backyard Wrestler: Performance, Context, and Aesthetic Violence.” Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World. Eds. Jonathan Gray, Cornel Sandvoss, and C. Lee Harrington. New York: New York UP. 165-76.McKinley, Shane. “THE ABSURDITY OF IT ALL - ECW & IMPACT & SMACKDOWN: Sarah Palin vs. Rod Blagojevich at TNA PPV, Worst Catchphrase Feud, WWE Fake News Report 101.” PWTorch 13 Dec. 2008. 7 Mar. 2009 < http://pwtorch.com/artman2/publish/The_Specialists_34/article_28554.shtml >.nyratk1. “WWE RAW is IN SOVIET RUSSIA, HEART BREAKS YOU for 3/2/09.” SomethingAwful 3 Mar. 2009. 5 Mar. 2009 < http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3089910&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=43 >.RAW #636. WWE 23 Feb. 2009. 7 Mar. 2009 < http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Dyq9nKr8KI&feature=related >.RAW #637. 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Landing in the Midwest after a lifetime in Los Angeles, I was shocked to learn how “famous” that great city really is. It used to seem perfectly reasonable that the freeways on CHiPs looked just like the ones I rode to school. When I was five, I remember being secretly bummed that my mom never took us to the disco-classical mural from Xanadu, which I was convinced had to be hidden somewhere in Venice Beach. In high school, it never seemed strange that the Peach Pit on Beverly Hills 90210 was the same as the Rose City Diner. From the L.A. River to the Griffith Park Observatory, from the Hollywood Sign to Venice Beach, the places I had been in, through, and around were inscribed with meanings in ways that I could never fully grasp. Even marginalized localities like Inglewood, Compton, and East L.A., which especially during the 1980s and early 1990s were being ravaged by urban warfare, got to be the stars of movies, songs, and many music videos. And on April 29, 1992, the corner of Florence and Normandie “blew up” into a full blown riot, sparked by the acquittal of the four white officers who beat black motorist, Rodney King. I could watch the city burn on T.V. or from the hill behind my house. All my life, I lived with a foot in each L.A., the one that’s outside my living room and the one that’s inside my living room, oblivious to the fact that I lived in a famous city. It was only after I moved away from L.A. that I realized my homesickness could often be softened by a click of the remote. I could look for a familiar stretch of road, a bit of the skyline, or a clean but otherwise familiar segment of sidewalk, and it didn’t even matter who, what, where, or why was taking place in the story on screen. It was as though fragments of my life had been archived for me in media space. Some memories were real and some just recollections of other representations – like seeing the observatory in Bowfinger and wondering if I was remembering Rebel Without a Cause or a second grade field trip. But when I arrived here, the question that greeted me most often at parties was, “Why are you in Bowling Green!?!” And the second was, “Did you meet any famous people?” And so I tell them about how I went to driver’s education class with Mayim Byalik, the star of Blossom. Or that I met Annette Funicello one New Year’s Eve at my Uncle Phil’s house. Aside from the occasional queer chuckle about my brush with Blossom, this record is unimpressive. People are hoping for something a little bit more like, “I spent the night in jail with Poison,” “I was an extra on Baywatch,” or “I was at the Viper Room the night River Phoenix passed away.” In spite of my lackluster record of interactions with the rich and the famous, I would still get introduced as being “from California.” I had become the recipient of a second-rate, secondhand fame, noted for being from a place where, if I were more ambitious, I could have really rubbed shoulders with famous people. To young people, many of whom were itching to travel to a place like LA or New York, I was a special kind of failure. But if you aren’t famous, if you are a loser like me, life in L.A. isn’t about the a-list at all. It is about living in a city that captures the imagination, even as you walk down the street. So earning notoriety in a city that speaks in spectacle is an exercise in creativity. It seems like everybody, even the most down-to-earth people, are invested in developing a character, an image, a persona that can bubble up and be noticed in spite of the overwhelming glow of Hollywood. Even at my suburban high school, during the late 1980s and early 1990s, I knew upper-middleclass boys who got nose jobs and manicures. I knew girls who would go trolling for rich men to buy them pretty things that their parents couldn’t afford. There were kids whose parents helped them cheat their way into college. There were wannabe junkies who drove their moms’ minivans into the ghetto to score. I saw people panic, pout, and scream over cars and allowances and shoes. I know that consumer culture is growing stronger just about everywhere, but back home it happened a lot sooner and a lot stronger. Because of our proximity to Hollywood, the crest of the cultural tidal wave looks much higher and its force is much stronger. And I guess I was just too fat to be in California, so I left. However, every once in a while, somebody does manage to make a scene in L.A. A little loser, or whatever you want to call one of the peasants who tend to the vast fiefdoms of L.A.’s elites, rises from banality to achieve celebrity, even if it is a minor celebrity, in the City of Angels. One such figure is the notorious Daniel Ramos, who in 1991 became a central figure in the city’s struggle over its own image. Daniel Ramos was not a star, a politician, or a leader of industry – but before he even appeared in the news, he had trafficked illegally in making a name for himself. A teenager from the projects, Ramos was more widely known as “Chaka,” a graffiti writer credited with over 10,000 tags from San Diego to San Francisco. I had seen Chaka’s tags just about everywhere, and had determined that he might be superhuman. His name, taken after a hairy little missing link from the popular fantasy show, The Land of the Lost, made me smirk as it conjured up images of a sub-humanoid with broken dialect creeping out from the darkness with cans of paint, marking the walls with his sign, calling out to the rest of us half-humans stranded in the land of the lost. Meanwhile, L.A.’s rich and famous whizzed by, casting resentful glances at Chaka’s do-it-yourself media blitz. I knew that Chaka was “bad,” but my imagination loved him. And when he allegedly left his mark in the courthouse elevator on the day of his release from a five-month stretch in prison (Costello), I couldn’t help but feel glad to know that Chaka was still alive, that legends don’t die (his name even made it, through the hand of Dave Grohl, into Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit Video” in 1991). For me, and I imagine for many others, it was the beginning of a political awakening. I wondered what was so bad about graffiti, even though I had been taught all my life that it was wrong. More than ten years later, as I sit by the railroad tracks in my small, Midwestern town, eagerly waiting for messages from California painted on the sides of boxcars, I find myself asking a related question – what is good about advertising? I’m not the first to make the welcomed association between graffiti and advertising. In an interview with the vastly capable scholar, Joe Austin, New York graffiti legend IZ THE WIZ explained it thusly: OK, now you’re on a poorer economic level and what do you have? Years ago, and even today, a boxer makes a name for himself in the boxing ring. So when this art form starts developing, why would it be any different? It’s all in the name. When you’re poor, that’s all you got. (40) Austin elaborates on this insight, explaining: The proliferation of posters, advertisements, and signs bearing the images and names of products and proprietors in twentieth-century cities is one obvious place to begin. These are the directly visible extensions of individual/corporate identities into the new shared urban public spaces of the streets, a quantitatively and qualitatively new site in human history where hundreds of thousands of often spectacularly displayed names abound, each catching the eyes of potential consumers and imprinting itself on their memories. (39) So, on one level, the story of Chaka is the story of a poor man who went toe to toe with big media, in a town run by big media, and held his own. It is the story of someone who has managed to say in no insignificant way, “I am here.” Or has Ramos himself yelled as he was being shackled by police, “I am the famous ‘Chaka’” (Walker A4). In spite of everything else, Ramos had a name that was widely recognized, respected by some, reviled by others. Nancy Macdonald, in her important study the culture of writing, shifts the focus away from the more solidly class-based argument employed by Austin in his study of the origins of New York graffiti art to one which lends itself more readily to understanding the culture of writing in the 1990s, after hip hop had become more accessible to middleclass enthusiasts. Macdonald explains, “Writers use the respect and recognition of their peers to validate their masculine identities” (124). While I am reluctant to downplay the class struggle that certainly seems to have implicitly informed Chaka’s quest for recognition, his outlaw appeal lends itself such an interpretation. In a city like Los Angeles, where middle class agency and upward mobility for the service class are not simply functions of wealth, but also of scrupulously maintained images, feelings of powerlessness associated with the lack of a compelling image are to be expected. It is the engine that drives the exuberant extravagance of consumer culture, lifestyle choices, and ultimately biopolitics. In a society where culture and capital are the dual poles which determine one’s social standing, the pursuit of notoriety is not simply a measure of masculinity – hijacking images is a way to assert one’s agency in spite of the diminished value of unskilled labor and the collective fear of underclass masculinities. In her book Wallbangin’: Graffiti and Gangs in L.A., Susan A. Philips provides discussion of Chaka’s contribution to L.A. graffiti. Notably, Chaka was seen by those in the graffiti community as an everyman, who was responsible for two significant cultural achievements: he “open[ed] up the style of the New York-based tags and creat[ed] the phenomenon of the individual tagger” (Phillips 320). He also, as Phillips notes, “wrote tags that you could read…in blockish gang-type lettering” (320). Unlike his New York graffiti-writing peers, which are best known for their beautiful “wildstyle,” Chaka did not typically traffic in multicolor murals and displays of painterly virtuosity. His chief accomplishment was his cunning pervasiveness and daring criminality. As such, his body of work should be seen as incompatible with High Art attempts to bring collectible graffiti into gallery spaces through the 1980s and ‘90s. Chaka’s medium, in a sense, has less to do with paint, than it has to do with the city and its rules. For the majority of the public, Chaka was seen as an individual face for the graffiti pandemic that was strategically linked in the public mind with specter of gang violence. However, to those familiar with the writing scene in L.A., Chaka is more than a lone individual: THE OG’Z OF THE LEGION OF DOOM WERE THE ONE RESPONSIBLE FOR BRINGING THE EARLY LOS ANGELES GRAFFITI SCENE TO IT’S KNEES! AND GAVE US MOST OF THE LEGENDS WE KNOW TODAY! I REMEMBER I TIME WHEN EVERY LOS ANGELES INTERSTATE HEAVEN ROCKED BY EITHER LEST-CAB-STANS-SUB OR THE CHAKA!!! (god i miss those days!) remember the CAB undercover story on the news where he did those loks on dope throwies on the 110 pasadena? I think it was chuck henry channel 7 ??? does anyone still have that on vhs? i had it on vhs along with the CHAKA PUBLIC SERVICE ANOUNCEMENT (that was great!). (Poncho1DEcrew) Instead of being an individual tagger, Chaka is recognized as a member of a crew (LOD), who managed to get up in legendary ways. In reclaiming freeway overpasses (the “Heavens”), walls, trains, road signs, and just about everything else for his crew, vicariously for the many other people who respect his name, and also for himself, Chaka is more than simply selfish, as is often suggested by his detractors. In the heavens is the right place to begin. High up in the sky, over the freeways, for all to see, the writing in the heavens is visible, mysterious, and ultimately risky. The problem of climbing along the girders underneath the bridges, escaping detection, but leaving something bold points to what distinguishes writing from an ad-campaign. Sure, some of what the tagger does is about simply being a recognized image all over the place. But the other part is about finding the place, working within environmental constraints, battling against time, stretching one’s limits, and doing it with style. While the image may be everywhere, the act of writing itself is a singularity, shrouded by secrecy, and defined by the moment of its doing. The aftereffect is a puzzle. And in the case of Chaka, the question is, “How the hell did this guy get up over 10,000 times?” While I can’t see how he did it and I don’t know where, exactly, he got all that paint, I do know one thing: Chaka went everywhere. He mapped the city out as a series of landmarks, he put his name to the space, and he claimed Los Angeles for people other than the ones who claim to own the rights to beam their generalized and monolithic messages into our living rooms. Instead of archiving the city in the banalities of mass media, he has created an archive of an alternative L.A., filled with singularities, and famous in the way that only one’s hometown can be. Instead of being a celebrity, renowned by virtue of a moderately unique character, his ability to generate money, and an elite image, Chaka represents an alternative fame. As a modern day “everyman” and folk hero, he brings a message that the city belongs to all people. Far from the naïve and mean-spirited equations between graffiti writing and canine scent-marking as a primitive drive to mark territorial boundaries with undesirable substances (writers:paint::dogs:piss), Chaka’s all-city message is not so much a practice of creating exclusionary spaces as it is an assertion of one’s identity in a particular space. A postmodern pilgrim, Chaka has marked his progress through the city leaving a perceptible record of his everyday experience, and opening up that possibility for others. This is not to say that it is necessary for all people to paint in order to break loose from the semiotic order of the city, it is only to say that is hopeful to realize that this order is not fixed and that is not even necessarily our own. Reflecting back on my own experience as one who has grown up very much in love in the produced spaces of the scripted and archived fame of Los Angeles, the realization that such an overwhelming place is open even to my own inscriptions is an important one. This realization, which has been many years in the making, was set into place by the curious fame of Chaka. For a writer and scholar disturbed by the “death of the author,” it comes as a relief to see writing resurrected in the anti-authoritarian practice of a teenage boy from the projects. References Austin, Joe. Taking the Train: How Graffiti Art Became an Urban Crisis in New York City. New York: Columbia UP, 2001. Costello, D. “Writing Was on the Wall.” Courier-Mail 9 May 1991. Macdonald, Nancy. The Graffiti Subculture: Youth, Masculinity and Identity in London and New York. Hampshire: Palgrave, 2001. Phillips, Susan A. Wallbangin’: Graffiti and Gangs in L.A. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999. Poncho1DEcrew. 50mm Los Angeles Forum. 18 June 2004. 11 July 2004 http://www.50mmlosangeles.com/>. Walker, Jill. “Letter from the Streets; Handwriting on the Wall: 10,000 Chakas.” Washington Post 4 May 1991: A4. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Heckman, Davin. "Being in the Shadow of Hollywood: Celebrity, Banality, and the Infamous Chaka." M/C Journal 7.5 (2004). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0411/12-heckman.php>. APA Style Heckman, D. (Nov. 2004) "Being in the Shadow of Hollywood: Celebrity, Banality, and the Infamous Chaka," M/C Journal, 7(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0411/12-heckman.php>.

As the distinction between disclosure-fuelled celebrity and lasting fame becomes difficult to discern, the “based on a true story” label has gained a particular traction among readers and viewers. This is despite much public approbation and private angst sometimes resulting from such disclosure as “little in the law or in society protects people from the consequences of others’ revelations about them” (Smith 537). Even fiction writers can stray into difficult ethical and artistic territory when they disclose the private facts of real lives—that is, recognisably biographical information—in their work, with autoethnographic fiction where authors base their fiction on their own lives (Davis and Ellis) not immune as this often discloses others’ stories (Ellis) as well. F. Scott Fitzgerald famously counselled writers to take their subjects from life and, moreover, to look to the singular, specific life, although this then had to be abstracted: “Begin with an individual, and before you know it, you find that you have created a type; begin with a type, and you find that you have created—nothing” (139). One of the problems when assessing fiction through this lens, however, is that, although many writers are inspired in their work by an actual life, event or historical period, the resulting work is usually ultimately guided by literary concerns—what writers often term the quest for aesthetic truth—rather than historical accuracy (Owen et al. 2008). In contrast, a biography is, and continues to be, by definition, an accurate account of a real persons’ life. Despite postmodern assertions regarding the relativity of truth and decades of investigation into the incorporation of fiction into biography, other non-fiction texts and research narratives (see, for instance: Wyatt), many biographers attest to still feeling irrevocably tied to the factual evidence in a way that novelists and the scriptors of biographically-based fictional television drama, movies and theatrical pieces do not (Wolpert; Murphy; Inglis). To cite a recent example, Louis Nowra’s Ice takes the life of nineteenth-century self-made entrepreneur and politician Malcolm McEacharn as its base, but never aspires to be classified as creative nonfiction, history or biography. The history in a historical novel is thus often, and legitimately, skewed or sidelined in order to achieve the most satisfying work of art, although some have argued that fiction may uniquely represent the real, as it is able to “play […] in the gap between the narratives of history and the actualities of the past” (Nelson n.p.). Fiction and non-fictional forms are, moreover, increasingly intermingling and intertwining in content and intent. The ugly word “faction” was an attempt to suggest that the two could simply be elided but, acknowledging wide-ranging debates about whether literature can represent the complexities of life with any accuracy and post-structuralist assertions that the idea of any absolute truth is outmoded, contemporary authors play with, and across, these boundaries, creating hybrid texts that consciously slide between invention and disclosure, but which publishers, critics and readers continue to define firmly as either fiction or biography. This dancing between forms is not particularly new. A striking example was Marion Halligan’s 2001 novel The Fog Garden which opens with a personal essay about the then recent death of her own much-loved husband. This had been previously published as an autobiographical memoir, “Cathedral of Love,” and again in an essay collection as “Lapping.” The protagonist of the novel is a recently widowed writer named Clare, but the inclusion of Halligan’s essay, together with the book’s marketing campaign which made much of the author’s own sadness, encourages readers to read the novel as a disclosure of the author’s own personal experience. This is despite Halligan’s attempt to keep the two separate: “Clare isn’t me. She’s like me. Some of her experience, terrors, have been mine. Some haven’t” (Fog Garden 9). In such acts of disclosure and denial, fiction and non-fiction can interrogate, test and even create each other, however quite vicious criticism can result when readers feel the boundaries demarking the two are breached. This is most common when authors admit to some dishonesty in terms of self-disclosure as can be seen, for instance, in the furore surrounding highly inflated and even wholly fabricated memoirs such as James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces, Margaret B. Jones’s Love and Consequences and Misha Defonseca’s A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years. Related problems and anxieties arise when authors move beyond incorporating and disclosing the facts of their own lives in memoir or (autobiographical) fiction, to using the lives of others in this way. Daphne Patai sums up the difference: “A person telling her life story is, in a sense, offering up her self for her own and her listener’s scrutiny […] Whether we should appropriate another’s life in this way becomes a legitimate question” (24–5). While this is difficult but seemingly manageable for non-fiction writers because of their foundational reliance on evidence, this anxiety escalates for fiction writers. This seems particularly extreme in relation to how audience expectations and prior knowledge of actual events can shape perceptions and interpretations of the resulting work, even when those events are changed and the work is declared to be one of fiction. I have discussed elsewhere, for instance, the difficult terrain of crafting fiction from well-known criminal cases (Brien, “Based on a True Story”). The reception of such work shows how difficult it is to dissociate creative product from its source material once the public and media has made this connection, no matter how distant that finished product may be from the original facts.As the field of biography continues to evolve for writers, critics and theorists, a study of one key text at a moment in that evolution—Jill Shearer’s play Georgia and its reliance on disclosing the life of artist Georgia O’Keeffe for its content and dramatic power—reveals not only some of the challenges and opportunities this close relationship offers to the writers and readers of life stories, but also the pitfalls of attempting to dissemble regarding artistic intention. This award-winning play has been staged a number of times in the past decade but has attracted little critical attention. Yet, when I attended a performance of Georgia at La Boite Theatre in Brisbane in 1999, I was moved by the production and admiring of Shearer’s writing which was, I told anyone who would listen, a powerfully dramatic interpretation of O’Keeffe’s life, one of my favourite artists. A full decade on, aspects of the work and its performance still resonate through my thinking. Author of more than twenty plays performed throughout Australia and New Zealand as well as on Broadway, Shearer was then (and is) one of Australia’s leading playwrights, and I judged Georgia to be a major, mature work: clear, challenging and confident. Reading the Currency Press script a year or so after seeing the play reinforced for me how distinctive and successful a piece of theatre Shearer had created utilising a literary technique which has been described elsewhere as fictionalised biography—biography which utilises fictional forms in its presentation but stays as close to the historical record as conventional biography (Brien, The Case of Mary Dean).The published version of the script indeed acknowledges on its title page that Georgia is “inspired by the later life of the American artist Georgia O’Keeffe” (Shearer). The back cover blurb begins with a quote attributed to O’Keeffe and then describes the content of the play entirely in terms of biographical detail: The great American artist Georgia O’Keeffe is physically, emotionally and artistically debilitated by her failing eyesight. Living amidst the Navajo spiritual landscape in her desert home in New Mexico, she becomes prey to the ghosts of her past. Her solitude is broken by Juan, a young potter, whose curious influence on her life remains until her death at 98 (Georgia back cover). This short text ends by unequivocally reinforcing the relation between the play and the artist’s life: “Georgia is a passionate play that explores with sensitivity and wry humour the contradictions and the paradoxes of the life of Georgia O’Keeffe” (Georgia back cover). These few lines of plot synopsis actually contain a surprisingly large number of facts regarding O’Keeffe’s later life. After the death of her husband (the photographer and modern art impresario Alfred Steiglitz whose ghost is a central character in the play), O’Keeffe did indeed relocate permanently to Abiquiú in New Mexico. In 1971, aged 84, she was suffering from an irreversible degenerative disease, had lost her central vision and stopped painting. One autumn day in 1973, Juan Hamilton, a young potter, appeared at her adobe house looking for work. She hired him and he became her lover, closest confidante and business manager until her death at 98. These facts form not only the background story but also much of the riveting content for Georgia which, as the published script’s introduction states, takes as its central themes: “the dilemma of the artist as a an older woman; her yearning to create against the fear of failing artistic powers; her mental strength and vulnerability; her sexuality in the face of physical deterioration; her need for companionship and the paradoxical love of solitude” (Rider vii). These issues are not only those which art historians identify as animating the O’Keeffe’s later life and painting, but ones which are discussed at length in many of the biographies of the artist published from 1980 to 2007 (see, for instance: Arrowsmith and West; Berry; Calloway and Bry; Castro; Drohojowska-Philp; Eisler; Eldredge; Harris; Hogrefe; Lisle; Peters; Reily; Robinson).Despite this clear focus on disclosing aspects of O’Keeffe’s life, both the director’s and playwright’s notes prefacing the published script declare firmly that Georgia is fiction, not biography. While accepting that these statements may be related to copyright and privacy concerns, the stridency of the denials of the biography label with its implied intention of disclosing the facts of a life, are worthy of analysis. Although noting that Georgia is “about the American artist Georgia O’Keeffe”, director of the La Boite production Sue Rider asserts that not only that the play moves “beyond the biographical” (vii) but, a few pages later, that it is “thankfully not biography” (xii). This is despite Rider’s own underscoring of the connection to O’Keeffe by setting up an exhibition of the artist’s work adjacent to the theatre. Shearer, whose research acknowledgments include a number of works about O’Keeffe, is even more overtly strident in her denial of any biographical links stating that her characters, “this Juan, Anna Marie and Dorothy Norman are a work of dramatic fiction, as is the play, and should be taken as such” (xiii).Yet, set against a reading of the biographies of the artist, including those written in the intervening decade, Georgia clearly and remarkably accurately discloses the tensions and contradictions of O’Keeffe’s life. It also draws on a significant amount of documented biographical data to enhance the dramatic power of what is disclosed by the play for audiences with this knowledge. The play does work as a coherent narrative for a viewer without any prior knowledge of O’Keeffe’s life, but the meaning of the dramatic action is enhanced by any biographical knowledge the audience possesses. In this way, the play’s act of disclosure is reinforced by this externally held knowledge. Although O’Keeffe’s oeuvre is less well known and much anecdotal detail about her life is not as familiar for Australian viewers as for those in the artist’s homeland, Shearer writes for an international as well as an Australian audience, and the program and adjacent exhibition for the Brisbane performance included biographical information. It is also worth noting that large slabs of biographical detail are also omitted from the play. These omissions to disclosure include O’Keeffe’s early life from her birth in 1887 in Wisconsin to her studies in Chicago and New York from 1904 to 1908, as well as her work as a commercial artist and art teacher in Texas and other Southern American states from 1912 to 1916. It is from this moment in 1916, however, that the play (although opening in 1946) constructs O’Keeffe’s life right through to her death in 1986 by utilising such literary devices as flashbacks, dream sequences and verbal and visual references.An indication of the level of accuracy of the play as biographical disclosure can be ascertained by unpacking the few lines of opening stage directions, “The Steiglitz’s suite in the old mid-range Shelton Hotel, New York, 1946 ... Georgia, 59, in black, enters, dragging a coffin” (1). In 1946, when O’Keeffe was indeed aged 59, Steiglitz died. The couple had lived part of every year at the Shelton Towers Hotel at 525 Lexington Avenue (now the New York Marriott East Side), a moderately priced hotel made famous by its depiction in O’Keeffe’s paintings and Steiglitz’s photographs. When Stieglitz suffered a cerebral thrombosis, O’Keeffe was spending the summer in New Mexico, but she returned to New York where her husband died on 13 July. This level of biographical accuracy continues throughout Georgia. Halfway through the first page “Anita, 52” enters. This character represents Anita Pollitzer, artist, critic and O’Keeffe’s lifelong friend. The publication of her biography of O’Keeffe, A Woman on Paper, and Georgia’s disapproval of this, is discussed in the play, as are their letters, which were collected and published in 1990 as Lovingly, Georgia (Gibiore). Anita’s first lines in the play after greeting her friend refer to this substantial correspondence: “You write beautifully. I always tell people: “I have a friend who writes the most beautiful letters” (1). In the play, as in life, it is Anita who introduces O’Keeffe’s work to Stieglitz who is, in turn, accurately described as: “Gallery owner. Two Nine One, Fifth Avenue. Leader of the New York avant-garde, the first to bring in the European moderns” (6). The play also chronicles how (unknown to O’Keeffe) Steiglitz exhibited the drawings Pollitzer gave him under the incorrect name, a scene which continues with Steiglitz persuading Georgia to allow her drawings to remain in his gallery (as he did in life) and ends with a reference to his famous photographs of her hands and nude form. Although the action of a substantial amount of real time is collapsed into a few dramatic minutes and, without doubt, the dialogue is invented, this invention achieves the level of aesthetic truth aimed for by many contemporary biographers (Jones)—as can be assessed when referring back to the accepted biographical account. What actually appears to have happened was that, in the autumn 1915, while teaching art in South Carolina, O’Keeffe was working on a series of abstract charcoal drawings that are now recognised as among the most innovative in American art of that time. She mailed some of these drawings to Pollitzer, who showed them Steiglitz, who exhibited ten of them in April 1916, O’Keeffe only learning of this through an acquaintance. O’Keeffe, who had first visited 291 in 1908 but never spoken to Stieglitz, held his critical opinion in high regard, and although confronting him over not seeking her permission and citing her name incorrectly, eventually agreed to let her drawings hang (Harris). Despite Shearer’s denial, the other characters in Georgia are also largely biographical sketches. Her “Anna Marie”, who never appears in the play but is spoken of, is Juan’s wife (in real life Anna Marie Hamilton), and “Dorothy Norman” is the character who has an affair with Steiglitz—the discovery of which leads to Georgia’s nervous breakdown in the play. In life, while O’Keeffe was in New Mexico, Stieglitz became involved with the much younger Norman who was, he claimed, only his gallery assistant. When O’Keeffe discovered Norman posing nude for her husband (this is vividly imagined in Georgia), O’Keeffe moved out of the Shelton and suffered from the depression that led to her nervous breakdown. “ Juan,” who ages from 26 to 39 in the play, represents the potter Juan Hamilton who encouraged the nearly blind O’Keeffe to paint again. In the biographical record there is much conjecture about Hamilton’s motives, and Shearer sensitively portrays her interpretation of this liaison and the difficult territory of sexual desire between a man and a much older woman, as she also too discloses the complex relationship between O’Keeffe and the much older Steiglitz.This complexity is described through the action of the play, but its disclosure is best appreciated if the biographical data is known. There are also a number of moments of biographical disclosure in the play that can only be fully understood with biographical knowledge in hand. For instance, Juan refers to Georgia’s paintings as “Beautiful, sexy flowers [... especially] the calla lilies” (24). All attending the play are aware (from the exhibition, program and technical aspects of the production) that, in life, O’Keeffe was famous for her flower paintings. However, knowing that these had brought her fame and fortune early in her career with, in 1928, a work titled Calla Lily selling for U.S. $25,000, then an enormous sum for any living American artist, adds to the meaning of this line in the play. Conversely, the significant level of biographical disclosure throughout Georgia does not diminish, in any way, the power or integrity of Shearer’s play as a literary work. Universal literary (and biographical) themes—love, desire and betrayal—animate Georgia; Steiglitz’s spirit haunts Georgia years after his death and much of the play’s dramatic energy is generated by her passion for both her dead husband and her younger lover, with some of her hopeless desire sublimated through her relationship with Juan. Nadia Wheatley reads such a relationship between invention and disclosure in terms of myth—relating how, in the process of writing her biography of Charmain Clift, she came to see Clift and her husband George Johnson take on a larger significance than their individual lives: “They were archetypes; ourselves writ large; experimenters who could test and try things for us; legendary figures through whom we could live vicariously” (5). In this, Wheatley finds that “while myth has no real beginning or end, it also does not bother itself with cause and effect. Nor does it worry about contradictions. Parallel tellings are vital to the fabric” (5). In contrast with both Rider and Shearer’s insistence that Georgia was “not biography”, it could be posited that (at least part of) Georgia’s power arises from the creation of such mythic value, and expressly through its nuanced disclosure of the relevant factual (biographical) elements in parallel to the development of its dramatic (invented) elements. Alongside this, accepting Georgia as such a form of biographical disclosure would mean that as well as a superbly inventive creative work, the highly original insights Shearer offers to the mass of O’Keeffe biography—something of an American industry—could be celebrated, rather than excused or denied. ReferencesArrowsmith, Alexandra, and Thomas West, eds. Georgia O’Keeffe & Alfred Stieglitz: Two Lives—A Conversation in Paintings and Photographs. Washington DC: HarperCollins and Calloway Editions, and The Phillips Collection, 1992.Berry, Michael. Georgia O’Keeffe. New York: Chelsea House, 1988.Brien, Donna Lee. 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New York: WW Norton, 2004.Ellis, Carolyn. “Telling Secrets, Revealing Lives: Relational Ethics in Research with Intimate Others.” Qualitative Inquiry 13.1 (2007): 3–29. Eisler, Benita. O’Keeffe and Stieglitz: An American Romance. New York: Doubleday, 1991.Eldredge, Charles C. Georgia O’Keeffe: American and Modern. New Haven: Yale UP, 1993.Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Diamond as Big as the Ritz and Other Stories. Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1962.Frey, James. A Million Little Pieces. New York: N.A. Talese/Doubleday, 2003.Gibiore, Clive, ed. Lovingly, Georgia. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990.Halligan, Marion. “Lapping.” In Peter Craven, ed. Best Australian Essays. Melbourne: Bookman P, 1999. 208–13.Halligan, Marion. The Fog Garden. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2001.Halligan, Marion. “The Cathedral of Love.” The Age 27 Nov. 1999: Saturday Extra 1.Harris, J. C. “Georgia O’Keeffe at 291”. Archives of General Psychiatry 64.2 (Feb. 2007): 135–37.Hogrefe, Jeffrey. O’Keeffe: The Life of an American Legend. New York: Bantam, 1994.Inglis, Ian. “Popular Music History on Screen: The Pop/Rock Biopic.” Popular Music History 2.1 (2007): 77–93.Jones, Kip. “A Biographic Researcher in Pursuit of an Aesthetic: The Use of Arts-Based (Re)presentations in “Performative” Dissemination of Life Stories”. Qualitative Sociology Review 2.1 (Apr. 2006): 66–85. Jones, Margaret B. Love and Consequences: A Memoir of Hope and Survival. New York: Riverhead Books, 2008.Lisle, Laurie. Portrait of an Artist: A Biography of Georgia O’Keeffe. New York: Seaview Books, 1980.Murphy, Mary. “Limited Lives: The Problem of the Literary Biopic”. Kinema 17 (Spr. 2002): 67–74. Nelson, Camilla. “Faking It: History and Creative Writing.” TEXT: Journal of Writing and Writing Courses 11.2 (Oct. 2007). 19 Oct. 2009 < http://www.textjournal.com.au/oct07/nelson.htm >.Nowra, Louis. Ice. Crows Nest: Allen and Unwin, 2008.Owen, Jillian A. Tullis, Chris McRae, Tony E. Adams, and Alisha Vitale. “Truth Troubles.” Qualitative Inquiry 15.1 (2008): 178–200.Patai, Daphne. “Ethical Problems of Personal Narratives, or, Who Should Eat the Last Piece of Cake.” International Journal of Oral History 8 (1987): 5–27.Peters, Sarah W. Becoming O’Keeffe. New York: Abbeville Press, 1991.Pollitzer, Anita. A Woman on Paper. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988.Reily, Nancy Hopkins. Georgia O’Keeffe. A Private Friendship, Part II. Santa Fe, NM: Sunstone Press, 2009.Rider, Sue. “Director’s Note.” Georgia [playscript]. Sydney: Currency Press, 2000. vii–xii.Robinson, Roxana. Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 1990. Shearer, Jill. Georgia [playscript]. Sydney: Currency Press, 2000.Smith, Thomas R. “How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves [review]”. Biography 23.3 (2000): 534–38.Wheatley, Nadia. The Life and Myth of Charmian Clift. Sydney: Flamingo, 2001.Wolpert, Stanley. “Biography as History: A Personal Reflection”. Journal of Interdisciplinary History 40.3 (2010): 399–412. Pub. online (Oct. 2009). 19 Oct. 2009 < http://www.mitpressjournals.org/toc/jinh/40/3 >.Wyatt, Jonathan. “Research, Narrative and Fiction: Conference Story”. The Qualitative Report 12.2 (Jun. 2007): 318–31.

The concept of transmedia storyworlds unfolding across complex serial narrative structures has become increasingly important to the study of modern media industries and audience communities. Yet, the precise connections between transmedia networks, serial structures, and narrative processes often remain underdeveloped. The dispersion of potential story elements across a diverse collection of media platforms and technologies prompts questions concerning the function of seriality in the absence of fixed instalments, the meaning of narrative when plot is largely a personal construction of each audience member, and the nature of storytelling in the absence of a unifying author, or when authorship itself takes on a serial character. This special issue opens a conversation on the intersection of these three concepts and their implications for a variety of disciplines, artistic practices, and philosophies. By re-thinking these concepts from fresh perspectives, the collection challenges scholars to consider how a wide range of academic, aesthetic, and social phenomena might be productively thought through using the overlapping lenses of transmedia, seriality, and narrativity. Thus, the collection gathers scholars from life-writing, sport, film studies, cultural anthropology, fine arts, media studies, and literature, all of whom find common ground at this fruitful crossroads. This breadth also challenges the narrow use of transmedia as a specialized term to describe current developments in corporate mass media products that seek to exploit the affordances of hybrid digital media environments. Many prominent scholars, including Marie-Laure Ryan and Henry Jenkins, acknowledge that a basic definition of transmedia as stories with extensions and reinterpretations in numerous media forms includes the oldest kinds of human expression, such as the ancient storyworlds of Arthurian legend and The Odyssey. Yet, what Jenkins terms “top-down” transmedia—that is, pre-planned and often corporate transmedia—has received a disproportionate share of scholarly attention, with modern franchises like The Matrix, the Marvel universe, and Lost serving as common exemplars (Flanagan, Livingstone, and McKenny; Hadas; Mittell; Scolari). Thus, many of the contributions to this issue push the boundaries of what has commonly been studied as transmedia as well as the limits of what may be considered a serial structure or even a story. For example, these papers imagine how an autobiography may also be a digital concept album unfolding in reverse, how participatory artistic performances may unfold in unpredictable instalments across physical and digital space, and how studying sports fandom as a long series of transmedia narrative elements encourages scholars to grapple with the unique structures assembled by audiences of non-fictional story worlds. Setting these experimental offerings into dialogue with entries that approach the study of transmedia in a more established manner provides the basis for building bridges between such recognized conversations in new media studies and potential collaborations with other disciplines and subfields of media studies.This issue builds upon papers collected from four years of the International Transmedia Serial Narration Seminar, which I co-organized with Dr. Claire Cornillon, Assistant Professor (Maîtresse de Conférences) of comparative literature at Université de Nîmes. The seminar held sessions in Paris, Le Havre, Rouen, Amsterdam, and Utrecht, with interdisciplinary speakers from the USA, Australia, France, Belgium, and the Netherlands. As a transnational, interdisciplinary project intended to cross both theoretical and physical boundaries, the seminar aimed to foster exchange between academic conversations that can become isolated not only within disciplines, but also within national and linguistic borders. The seminar thus sought to enhance academic mobility between both people and ideas, and the digital, open-access publication of the collected papers alongside additional scholarly interlocutors serves to broaden the seminar’s goals of creating a border-crossing conversation. After two special issues primarily collecting the French language papers in TV/Series (2014) and Revue Française des Sciences de l’Information et de la Communication (2017), this issue seeks to share the Transmedia Serial Narration project with a wider audience by publishing the remaining English-language papers, accompanied by several other contributions in dialogue with the seminar’s themes. It is our hope that this collection will invite a broad international audience to creatively question the meaning of transmedia, seriality, and narrativity both historically and in the modern, rapidly changing, global and digital media environment.Several articles in the issue illuminate existing debates and common case studies in transmedia scholarship by comparing theoretical models to the much more slippery reality of a media form in flux. Thus, Mélanie Bourdaa’s feature article, “From One Medium to the Next: How Comic Books Create Richer Storylines,” examines theories of narrative complexity and transmedia by scholars including Henry Jenkins, Derek Johnson, and Jason Mittell to then propose a new typology of extensions to accommodate the lived reality expressed by producers of transmedia. Because her interviews with artists and writers emphasize the co-constitutive nature of economic and narrative considerations in professionals’ decisions, Bourdaa’s typology can offer researchers a tool to clarify the marketing and narrative layers of transmedia extensions. As such, her classification system further illuminates what is particular about forms of corporate transmedia with a profit orientation, which may not be shared by non-profit, collective, and independently produced transmedia projects.Likewise, Radha O’Meara and Alex Bevan map existing scholarship on transmedia to point out the limitations of deriving theory only from certain forms of storytelling. In their article “Transmedia Theory’s Author Discourse and Its Limitations,” O’Meara and Bevan argue that scholars have preferred to focus on examples of transmedia with a strong central author-figure or that they may indeed help to rhetorically shore up the coherency of transmedia authorship through writing about transmedia creators as auteurs. Tying their critique to the established weaknesses of auteur theory associated with classic commentaries like Roland Barthes’ “Death of the Author” and Foucault’s “What is an Author?”, O’Meara and Bevan explain that this focus on transmedia creators as authority figures reinforces hierarchical, patriarchal understandings of the creative process and excludes from consideration all those unauthorized transmedia extensions through which audiences frequently engage and make meaning from transmedia networks. They also emphasize the importance of constructing academic theories of transmedia authorship that can accommodate collaborative forms of hybrid amateur and professional authorship, as well as tolerate the ambiguities of “authorless” storyworlds that lack clear narrative boundaries. O’Meara and Bevan argue that such theories will help to break down gendered power hierarchies in Hollywood, which have long allowed individual men to “claim credit for the stories and for all the work that many people do across various sectors and industries.”Dan Hassler-Forest likewise considers existing theory and a corporate case study in his examination of analogue echoes within a modern transmedia serial structure by mapping the storyworld of Twin Peaks (1990). His article, “‘Two Birds with One Stone’: Transmedia Serialisation in Twin Peaks,” demonstrates the push-and-pull between two contemporary TV production strategies: first, the use of transmedia elements that draw viewers away from the TV screen toward other platforms, and second, the deployment of strategies that draw viewers back to the TV by incentivizing broadcast-era appointment viewing. Twin Peaks offers a particularly interesting example of the manner in which these strategies intertwine partly because it already offered viewers an analogue transmedia experience in the 1990s by splitting story elements between TV episodes and books. Unlike O’Meara and Bevan, who elucidate the growing prominence of transmedia auteurs who lend rhetorical coherence to dispersed narrative elements, Hassler-Forest argues that this older analogue transmedia network capitalized upon the dilution of authorial authority, due to the distance between TV and book versions, to negotiate tensions between the producers’ competing visions. Hassler-Forest also notes that the addition of digital soundtrack albums further complicates the serial nature of the story by using the iTunes and TV distribution schedules to incentivize repeated sequential consumption of each element, thus drawing modern viewers to the TV screen, then the computer screen, and then back again.Two articles offer a concrete test of these theoretical perspectives by utilizing ethnographic participant-observation and interviewing to examine how audiences actually navigate diffuse, dispersed storyworlds. For example, Céline Masoni’s article, “From Seriality to Transmediality: A Socio-narrative Approach of a Skilful and Literate Audience,” documents fans’ highly strategic participatory practices. From her observations of and interviews with fans, Masoni theorizes the types of media literacy and social as well as technological competencies cultivated through transmedia fan practices. Olivier Servais and Sarah Sepulchre’s article similarly describes a long-term ethnography of fan transmedia activity, including interviews with fans and participant-observation of the MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game) Game of Thrones Ascent (2013). Servais and Sepulchre find that most people in their interviews are not “committed” fans, but rather casual readers and viewers who follow transmedia extensions sporadically. By focusing on this group, they widen the existing research which often focuses on or assumes a committed audience like the skilful and literate fans discussed by Masoni.Servais and Sepulchre’s results suggest that these viewers may be less likely to seek out all transmedia extensions but readily accept and adapt unexpected elements, such as the media appearances of actors, to add to their serial experiences of the storyworld. In a parallel research protocol observing the Game of Thrones Ascent MMORPG, Servais and Sepulchre report that the most highly-skilled players exhibit few behaviours associated with immersion in the storyworld, but the majority of less-skilled players use their gameplay choices to increase immersion by, for example, choosing a player name that evokes the narrative. As a result, Servais and Sepulchre shed light upon the activities of transmedia audiences who are not necessarily deeply committed to the entire transmedia network, and yet who nonetheless make deliberate choices to collect their preferred narrative elements and increase their own immersion.Two contributors elucidate forms of transmedia that upset the common emphasis on storyworlds with film or TV as the core property or “mothership” (Scott). In her article “Transmedia Storyworlds, Literary Theory, Games,” Joyce Goggin maps the history of intersections between experimental literature and ludology. As a result, she questions the continuing dichotomy between narratology and ludology in game studies to argue for a more broadly transmedia strategy, in which the same storyworld may be simultaneously narrative and ludic. Such a theory can incorporate a great deal of what might otherwise be unproblematically treated as literature, opening up the book to interrogation as an inherently transmedial medium.L.J. Maher similarly examines the serial narrative structures that may take shape in a transmedia storyworld centred on music rather than film or TV. In her article “You Got Spirit, Kid: Transmedial Life-Writing Across Time and Space,” Maher charts the music, graphic novels, and fan interactions that comprise the Coheed and Cambria band storyworld. In particular, Maher emphasizes the importance of autobiography for Coheed and Cambria, which bridges between fictional and non-fictional narrative elements. This interplay remains undertheorized within transmedia scholarship, although a few have begun to explicate the use of transmedia life-writing in an activist context (Cati and Piredda; Van Luyn and Klaebe; Riggs). As a result, Maher widens the scope of existing transmedia theory by more thoroughly connecting fictional and autobiographical elements in the same storyworld and considering how serial transmedia storytelling structures may differ when the core component is music.The final three articles take a more experimental approach that actively challenges the existing boundaries of transmedia scholarship. Catherine Lord’s article, “Serial Nuns: Michelle Williams Gamaker’s The Fruit Is There to Be Eaten as Serial and Trans-serial,” explores the unique storytelling structures of a cluster of independent films that traverse time, space, medium, and gender. Although not a traditional transmedia project, since the network includes a novel and film adaptations and extensions by different directors as well as real-world locations and histories, Lord challenges transmedia theorists to imagine storyworlds that include popular history, independent production, and spatial performances and practices. Lord argues that the main character’s trans identity provides an embodied and theoretical pivot within the storyworld, which invites audiences to accept a position of radical mobility where all fixed expectations about the separation between categories of flora and fauna, centre and periphery, the present and the past, as well as authorized and unauthorized extensions, dissolve.In his article “Non-Fiction Transmedia: Seriality and Forensics in Media Sport,” Markus Stauff extends the concept of serial transmedia storyworlds to sport, focusing on an audience-centred perspective. For the most part, transmedia has been theorized with fictional storyworlds as the prototypical examples. A growing number of scholars, including Arnau Gifreu-Castells and Siobhan O'Flynn, enrich our understanding of transmedia storytelling by exploring non-fiction examples, but these are commonly restricted to the documentary genre (Freeman; Gifreu-Castells, Misek, and Verbruggen; Karlsen; Kerrigan and Velikovsky). Very few scholars comment on the transmedia nature of sport coverage and fandom, and when they do so it is often within the framework of transmedia news coverage (Gambarato, Alzamora, and Tárcia; McClearen; Waysdorf). Stauff’s article thus provides a welcome addition to the existing scholarship in this field by theorizing how sport fans construct a user-centred serial transmedia storyworld by piecing together narrative elements across media sources, embodied experiences, and the serialized ritual of sport seasons. In doing so, he points toward ways in which non-fiction transmedia may significantly differ from fictional storyworlds, but he also enriches our understanding of an audience-centred perspective on the construction of transmedia serial narratives.In his artistic practice, Robert Lawrence may most profoundly stretch the existing parameters of transmedia theory. Lawrence’s article, “Locate, Combine, Contradict, Iterate: Serial Strategies for PostInternet Art,” details his decades-long interrogation of transmedia seriality through performative and participatory forms of art that bridge digital space, studio space, and public space. While theatre and fine arts have often been considered through the theoretical lens of intermediality (Bennett, Boenisch, Kattenbelt, Vandsoe), the nexus of transmedia, seriality, and narrative enables Lawrence to describe the complex, interconnected web of planned and unplanned extensions of his hybrid digital and physical installations, which often last for decades and incorporate a global scope. Lawrence thus takes the strategies of engagement that are perhaps more familiar to transmedia theorists from corporate viral marketing campaigns and turns them toward civic ends (Anyiwo, Bourdaa, Hardy, Hassler-Forest, Scolari, Sokolova, Stork). As such, Lawrence’s artistic practice challenges theorists of transmedia and intermedia to consider the kinds of social and political “interventions” that artists and citizens can stage through the networked possibilities of transmedia expression and how the impact of such projects can be amplified through serial repetition.Together, the whole collection opens new pathways for transmedia scholarship, more deeply explores how transmedia narration complicates understandings of seriality, and constructs an international, interdisciplinary dialogue that brings often isolated conversations into contact. In particular, this issue enriches the existing scholarship on independent, artistic, and non-fiction transmedia, while also proposing some important limitations, exceptions, and critiques to existing scholarship featuring corporate transmedia projects with a commercial, top-down structure and a strong auteur-like creator. These diverse case studies and perspectives enable us to understand more inclusively the structures and social functions of transmedia in the pre-digital age, to theorize more robustly how audiences experience transmedia in the current era of experimentation, and to imagine more broadly a complex future for transmedia seriality wherein professionals, artists, and amateurs all engage in an iterative, inclusive process of creative and civic storytelling, transcending artificial borders imposed by discipline, nationalism, capitalism, and medium.ReferencesAnyiwo, U. Melissa. "It’s Not Television, It’s Transmedia Storytelling: Marketing the ‘Real’World of True Blood." True Blood: Investigating Vampires and Southern Gothic. Ed. Brigid Cherry. New York: IB Tauris, 2012. 157-71.Barthes, Roland. "The Death of the Author." Image, Music, Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. Basingstoke: Macmillian, 1988. 142-48.Bennett, Jill. "Aesthetics of Intermediality." 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"My Football Fandoms, Performance, and Place." Transformative Works & Cultures 18 (2015).Vandsoe, Anette. "Listening to the World. Sound, Media and Intermediality in Contemporary Sound Art." SoundEffects – An Interdisciplinary Journal of Sound and Sound Experience 1.1 (2011): 67-81.

Don't be afraid - it's only a flesh wound. The organs are intact although there is a threat of amputation, which we all know can easily be tolerated if the remaining bones are plentiful and sound and they are held in place by a tough skin. Where there's a will there's a will not and the National Museum of Australia (NMA) will not lie down in the face of Australian Government attempts to cut off its funding blood and give its guts a good going over. Not yet. Not for eternity. The NMA opened in March 2001 in Canberra, Australia's national capital. The buildings were designed by ARM (Ashton Raggatt McDougall), an architectural firm based in Melbourne, with landscape design by Room 4.1.3. Like other galleries and museums constructed in the last 20 years such as the Gugenheim in Bilbao and Libeskind's Jewish Museum, the NMA buildings and landscape are as much an exhibit as that which they contain. In fact the Jewish Museum first opened without containing anything other than space; the proper concern of architecture, some say. The strong colours and shapes of the NMA stand out in the grey, Modernist-inspired, concrete environment that is Canberra - some say this place is a perversion of Walter and Marion Burley Griffin's original plans for a garden wonderland; others marvel that the spirit of the original plan has even partially survived. I say, good bones and plenty of them. Bernard Tschumi says that society expects architecture to reflect its ideals and domesticate its deeper fears(72). This is certainly the brand of architecture that the Australian government thought it was ordering when it allocated funds for the building of a national museum. Not that Aussies have fears which need domesticating. No fear. A few secrets, some dirty laundry, a scar or two. But it can be argued that ARM have excoriated fear; they have tattooed it across the national forehead and said “read me if you can and if you dare”. ARM have provided a building which appears to be mostly skin. Hide the national scars under a national symbol that is all surface. A skin, but one which encases an undifferentiated body; of work, of nationhood, of stuff. The skin of the NMA is a site for writing; giant Braille dots the surface of the building, a confusion between writing and reading. For most, the dots are impossible to read – too large and too high to touch with human fingers and indecipherable by most who visit even if the scale and location would allow them to be touched. How did they have the nerve ending to write a writing that only hands can read; only hands so big that they have lost the delicate sense of touch, thereby rendering the Braille unreadable. Make a ceiling so high that it takes twenty million to change a light-bulb. Make a statement so clever that no-one gets it. Along with the Braille, the word eternity winds under and over, across and through the guts of the NMA. Howard Raggatt of ARM writes that having designed the shapes of the building forms, they “laid them out like dressmaking patterns, to press upon them this single stencilled script” – using software they superimposed the forms over a graphic of Arthur Stace’s Eternity and wrapped the Museum in it (45). Arthur Stace claimed that he was divinely inspired to write the word in ephemeral chalk an estimated 500,000 times on the footpaths of Sydney over a thirty-year period. He summoned the citizens to acknowledge the power of God. Raggatt says that its use on the outside of the NMA “encourages our hope to read this land”. And the text thickens. Is the writing of eternity on the national skin of the NMA a tattoo or stigmata? Derrida talks of these – tattoo and stigmata - in Writing and Difference in discussing the relationship between critical discourse and clinical discourse and focuses on Antonin Artuad’s “theatre of cruelty” (Artaud also inspired Deleuze and Guattari’s metaphor of the body without organs). Derrida begins with an exploration of the tendency to associate the work of art with the mental state of the artist. However from his specific critique of structuralism, he moves into much broader territory. Artuad’s attempts to make a verbal, not a grammatical theatre, “a graphism which …[is] an incarnation of the letter and a bloody tattoo” are judged by Derrida (and Artaud himself) to have been wanting precisely because such a tattoo “paralyzes gesture and silences the voice … represses the shout and the chance for a still unorganised voice” (235). Where the text (or in Artaud’s terms, breath) is “spirited/stolen…in order to place it in an order” the text is tattoo and it cannot hope to overturn the effects of power because it is on the surface rather than in opposition to it. By contrast, stigmata is a wound that cuts beneath the surface, “substituted for the text” that “undertakes neither a renewal, nor a critique” but “intends the effective, active, and non-theoretical destruction of Western civilization and its religions” (227). Text as stigmata is spirited/inspired rather than spirited/stolen. Granted, this section of Writing and Difference speaks of Artaud’s work in the context of theatre, however the theatrical metaphor is appropriate for the NMA – stand in the middle of the Garden of Australian Dreams surrounded by viewing platforms, and you understand that you are in the middle of a performance. But what does eternity do in this arena, on and under this skin? I have already described the writing of eternity around the NMA’s structure. Within the museum (in its stomach, it seems, when one seeks it out) is the small exhibition space built around the theme of eternity. Of course, it is a permanent exhibition – how could it be anything else. This space speaks to the people aspect of the NMA’s land, nation, people themes through “emotions” of separation, mystery, hope, joy, loneliness, thrill, devotion, fear, chance, and passion. The exhibits here are the stories of individuals. The black dress of Baby Azaria Chamberlain (who is alleged to have been killed by a dingo, a wild Australian native dog) (mystery) and an elaborate costume from the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras (thrill) are examples of the representations of Australian individuals. The eternity theme was chosen after the individual stories were selected and the curator realized that the NMA collection included one of the few remaining examples of Stace’s handiwork – one preserved on the back of the door of an outdoor toilet (if only there were space in this article to explore the significance of this in terms of Derrida’s linking of God and shit!). Marion Stell, the exhibition curator, writes that she believed this provided a link between the emotions as well as representing a fascinating individual story in its own right. Interestingly, the recentre view of the NMA that recommends the de/recon-struction of the Garden ofAustralian Dreams , a teleological recasting of the Circa multimedia theatre(criticized for presenting too episodic a view of Australian history) and the Horizons gallery (allegedly too limited in its presentation of the stories of migrants), commends the Eternity gallery, despite its depictions of gays and lesbians, those who have taken on the courts and won and other transgressors. The private sphere of individual lives seems too unimportant to take on? And if so, is this a strength of eternity at NMA or a weakness? Eternity slips under the radar as only such a slippery word can. And the review makes no mention of the writing on the outside of the building. How could you miss a word so big, so utterly big? Did the review panel confuse BIG with BenIGn? This word eternity, this script eternity. Inside the museum in the eternity gallery it is the street tattoo, the written surface of the traditional museum which reflects, mirror-like, what the visitor wishes to feel. There, it is Aussie icon-become-cliché. Attached firmly to the maker of the original marks, Arthur Stace, footpath font designer and illiterate messenger of God, it carries the trace of the God on whose behalf he wrote. And who in the current world political climate would dare to take on God’s messenger, no matter whose God. In that gallery it is spirited/stolen and, tattoo-like, it represses the uninhibited shout of difference through imposition of an order; the somewhat transgressive stories of individuals such as Lindy Chamberlain (Azaria’s mother, who was first convicted of her murder and then pardoned) and indeed, Arthur Stace, are rendered “safer” by the direct reproduction of Stace’s script. Originally, in Walter Benjamin’s terms, Stace’s eternity assumed auratic qualities that ironically it acquired, rather than lost, through repetition and reproduction on Sydney’s footpaths. However it’s use more recently– remember it was emblazoned on both the Sydney Harbour Bridge for the Millenium celebrations and in the2000 Sydney Olympic opening ceremony for its ability to call up a trace of the sublime – have turned it into an Australian brand name, designed to re/produce thoughts of a grand and glorious Australia, an Australia which neither Lindy Chamberlain nor Arthur Stace might have experienced. (The City of Sydney has gone so far as to copyright the Stace eternity script). But outside, scarred into the skin, too big to read, too black to ignore, eternity operates paradoxically at a more subtle level. Appearing as if pure ornament, black squiggles on a blatantly referential structure, with this use of Stace’s eternity ARM have tackled the issue of timelessness and architecture through invoking time in its entirety. They have invoked the quasi-religious contemplative response that the Stace rendering of the word engenders when it takes us by surprise. Eternity written on the surface of the NMA is stigmata, Stace’s eternity spirited/inspired rather than spirited/stolen. It is a flow of meaning that invokes the evangelistic incantations of Stace at a size which multiplies the possible meanings through its appeal to illiteracy and illegibility, and with a resilience which refuses to be washed away by reviews and revisions of the Museum. Derrida says that “to overthrow the power of the literal work is not to erase the letter, but only to subordinate it to the incidence of illegibility or at least of illiteracy” (225). Eternity. Legend has it that for a while some larrikin followed in Stace's footsteps changing eternity to maternity. Perhaps in the fullness of eternity a Government-appointed review panel can retrospectively declare the stigmata a harmless word better suited to a bland Australia. Like tomato or cricket or captain cook. For the foreseeable past and future, it remains eternity. Works Cited Benjamin, Walter. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993.Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. New York: Viking, 1972Derrida, Jacques. Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. London:Routledge, 2001. Raggatt, Howard. "Rabbits, Dogs and Butterflies." National Museum of Australia: Tangled Destinies. Melbourne: Images, 2002. 44-47. Stell, Marion, ed. Eternity: Stories from the Emotional Heart of Australia. Canberra: National Museum of Australia,2001.Tschumi, Bernard. Architecture and Disjunction. Cambridge: MIT P,1994. Links http://www.a-r-m.com.au/ http://www.daniel-libeskind.com/projects/pro.html?ID=2 http://www.nma.gov.au/ http://www.nma.gov.au/aboutus/council_and_committees/review http://www.room413.com.au/Museum/Museum.html http://www.skewarch.com/architects/gerhy/gerhy-gug.htm Citation reference for this article MLA Style Williams, Jordan. "The Stigmata or the Tattoo" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0401/06-williams.php>. APA Style Williams, J. (2004, Jan 12). The Stigmata or the Tattoo. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 7, <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0401/06-williams.php>

‘Artists are replicants who have found the secret of their obsolescence.’ (Brian Massumi) The critical reception to British writer Iain Sinclair’s most recent novel Dining on Stones (or, the Middle Ground) frequently focused on the British writer’s predilection for intertextual quotation and allusion, and more specifically, on his proclivity for integrating material from his own backlist. A survey of Dining on Stones reveals the following textual duplication: an entire short story, “View from My Window”, which was published in 2003; excerpts from a 2002 collection of poetry and prose, White Goods; material from his 1999 collaboration with artist Rachel Lichtenstein, Rodinsky’s Room; a paragraph lifted from Dark Lanthorns: Rodinsky’s A to Z, also from 1999; and scenes from 1971’s The Kodak Mantra Diaries. Moreover, the name of the narrator, Andrew Norton, is copied from an earlier Sinclair work, Slow Chocolate Autopsy. Of the six aforementioned inter-texts, only Rodinsky’s Room has had wide commercial release. The remainder are small press publications, often limited edition, difficult to find and read, which leads to the charge that Sinclair is relying on the inaccessibility of earlier texts to obscure his acts of autoplagiarism in the mass market Dining on Stones. Whatever Sinclair’s motives, his textual methodology locates a point of departure for an interrogation of textual doubling within the context of late era capitalism. At first approximation, Dining on Stones appears to belong to a postmodern literature which treats a text’s confluence, or dissonance of innumerable signifiers and systems of signification as axiomatic and intra-textually draws attention to this circumstance. Thematically, the heteroglot narrative of Dining on Stones frequently returns to the duplication of textual material. The book’s primary narrator is haunted by doubles, not least because Andrew Norton periodically functions as a textual doppelganger for Sinclair. Norton’s biography constitutes a cut-up of episodes copied from Sinclair’s personal history and experience as it is presented in his non-fiction and quasi-autobiographical poetry and prose like Lights Out for the Territory and London Orbital. Like his creator, Norton is ontologically troubled by a fetch, or two, who may or may not be the products of his writer’s imagination. He claims that someone is ‘stealing my material. He impersonated me with a flair I couldn’t hope to equal, this thief. Trickster.’ (218) A ‘disturbing’ encounter with ‘Grays’, an uncannily familiar short story by another writer Marina Fountain, reveals a second textual poacher copying Norton’s work. She hadn’t written it without help, obviously. The tone was masculine, sure of itself, its pretensions; grammatically suspect, lexicologically challenged, topographically slapdash. A slash-and-burn stylist. But haunted: by missing fathers – Bram Stoker, S. Freud and Joseph Conrad. Clunky hints… about writing and stalking, literary bloodsucking, gender, disguise. … But it was the Conrad aspect that pricked me. Fountain had somehow got wind of my researched (incomplete, unpublished) essay on Conrad in Hackney. Her exaggerated prose, its shotgun sarcasm, jump-cuts, psychotic syntax, was an offensive parody of a manner of composition I’d left behind. (167) When ‘Grays’ is later reprinted in full in the novel (141-65), it is a renamed double of a previous Sinclair piece, ‘In Train for the Estuary’ (Sinclair, White Goods, 57-75). This doubling is replicated with another Sinclair story ‘View from My Window’ also being attributed to Fountain (313-341). Neither the style, nor the content of Sinclair’s previous works have been discarded: they have been reproduced and incorporated in Dining on Stones’ retrospective of Sinclair’s earlier work. Thus, Norton’s review of Fountain’s writing as ‘a manner of composition I’d left behind’ doubles as Sinclair’s self-conscious recognition of the text as an artefact produced from diverse inter-texts – including his own. In contrast to Sinclair’s dialogic doubling, Fountain’s double is of a monologic disposition. It is mechanical ‘echopraxis,’ a neologism coined in Dining on Stones which is defined as the ‘mindless repetition of another person’s moves and gestures.’ (192) Its mercenary dimension, enacted without regard for the integrity of the inter-text, is underscored with the epithet ‘slash-and-burn stylist.’ The monologic double possesses the text, drains it of its vitality. It entails necrosis, mortification. Fountain’s appropriation of Norton’s story is close to Fredric Jameson’s characterisation of pastiche which, he says, shuts down communication between texts (202). For Jameson, pastiche is the exemplary postmodern literary ‘style’. It is inert, static, a textual aporia. Jameson’s verdict is harsh: pastiche is cannibalism, text devouring text with an appetite that corresponds to the cupidity of consumer culture. Textual cannibalism vanquishes dialogism. It is the negation of the textual Other because cannibalism is only possible when the Other no longer exists. So how does Sinclair distinguish his doubling of his own text from Fountain’s monologic doubling as it is depicted in the novel’s narrative? A clue can be detected in one of the stories stolen by Fountain. ‘In Train for the Estuary’ is a re-writing of Dracula, and takes its cue from Karl Marx’s famous analogy between capitalism and vampirism: ‘capital is dead labour, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.’ (342) Sinclair’s vampire doubles as an academic (or is it the other way round?) who obsessively and compulsively stalks her quarry/object of study, Joseph Conrad. First, she had learnt Polish. Then she tracked down the letters and initiated the slow, painstaking, much-revised process of translation. She travelled. Validated herself. Being alone in an unknown city, visiting libraries, enduring and enjoying bureaucratic obfuscation, sitting in bars, going to the cinema, allowed her to try on a new identity. She initiated correspondence with people she never met. She lied. She stole from Conrad. (Sinclair, White Goods, 58) The woman’s identity is leeched from the work of Conrad. Sinclair describes unethical activity in appropriating text: lying, stealing, sucking the blood from the corpus of Conrad. A compulsive need to maintain the ‘validation’ of this poached identity emerges, manifesting itself as addiction. The addict is an extreme embodiment of the (ir)rationality of consumption: consumed by the need to consume. The woman’s lust for text is commensurate with the twin desires—blood and real estate—of her precursor, Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Sinclair’s narrative of addiction doubles as a meta-critique on the compulsive desire to reproduce text and image that characterizes postmodern textualities as well as the apparatuses that produce them. The textual doubling in Dining on Stones, which is published by the multinational Penguin, seems to enact a reterritorialisation of a deterritorialised minor literature. However, Sinclair’s allegorical rewriting of the vampire legend and its subsequent inclusion in the mainstream novel’s narrative, reveal that capitalism’s doubles are simulacra in the Aristotelian sense because they are copies for which there is no original. The ostensible ‘original’ is the product of different material conditions and thus cannot be duplicated by the machinery of capitalism. The capitalist reproduction of text produced within an alternative cultural economy is an uncanny double (with an infinite capacity to be doubled over and over again) whose existence, like that of Sinclair’s academic in White Goods, is parasitical. The capitalist simulacrum necessitates that the original be destroyed, or at the very least, theorised out of existence so that restrictions based on its own premise of individual property rights can be circumvented. Postmodernism’s attendant theory is an over-determined repetition of poststructuralist tenets such as the instability of texts, the polysemous signifier and the impossibility of self as empirical subject. Images and meaning are no longer anchored, and free to be reproduced. Paradoxically, this proliferation of signification has the effect of constricting the originary text, compressing it under the burden of competing meanings, so that it is almost undetectable. Writes Brian Massumi (doubling Jean Baudrillard), ‘postmodernism stutters. In the absence of any gravitational pull to ground them, images accelerate and tend to run together. They become interchangeable. Any term can be substituted for any other: utter indetermination.’ The postmodern project’s effacement of the centred subject and the self has as its consequence, according to Jameson, a ‘waning of affect’ which is superseded ‘by a peculiar kind of euphoria.’ (200) The euphoria to which Jameson refers is not that of the poststructuralist textasy. Instead, it is postmodernism’s return to the idealism of Hegelian dialects, a euphoria achieved from the fusion of contradictions. Postmodernism’s doubles are a utopian attempt to synthesize antinomy and unity in a simultaneity that assimilates the fragmentation of modernity and the modern subject, with the cohesion of the commodity and its closed system of cultural logic. As such, the postmodern double is a rejection of modernist engagements with technical reproducibility. Modernism’s literary assemblages are, in Victor Shlovsky’s words, the laying bare of the device, an exposition of the seams through techniques such as collage, bricolage and montage. These linguistic (and at times visual) conjunctures of disparate elements do not attempt to elide material and thematic disjuncture. As Walter Benjamin stresses, this type of textual methodology has the potential, through the disruption of spatial and temporal logic and the creation of anachrony, to rupture the linear representations and formations of order favoured by capitalist political economies (Benjamin, ‘On the concept of history’). Postmodernism, which doubles (following Jameson’s formulation) as the cultural logic of late capitalism, reiterates that texts can be undone, and then reassembled, rearticulated anew, rendered useful to a commodity culture over and over again. Consequently, postmodernism’s copies are analogous, at the level of cultural production, to capitalism’s ceaseless appropriation of discourse, practice, and production. This is the alchemical project of capitalism. It strives to transform everything that it has doubled into the gold of the commodity. The inherent dangers of unrestrained reproduction are for Jameson exemplified in the treatment of Van Gogh’s Pair of Shoes (1885): If this copiously reproduced image is not to sink to the level of sheer decoration, it requires us to reconstruct some initial situation out of which the finished work emerges. Unless that situation—which has vanished into the past—is somehow mentally restored, the painting will remain an inert object, a reified end-product, and be unable to be grasped as a symbolic act in its own right, as praxis and as production. (194) Jameson’s reading of Van Gogh’s shoes reminds us of the fate of Alberto Korda’s 1960 photograph of revolutionary Che Guevara. Appropriated by the media, inscribed on T-shirts, mugs, even door mats, Che’s portrait is an emblem of the degradation Jameson describes. Like Van Gogh’s painting, Korda’s photograph was once a ‘symbolic act in its own right, as praxis and as production,’ saturated with the potential and spirit of revolution. Over time, the iconic image has leaked meaning. The signifying chain that anchored it to its original significance is broken each time it is reproduced and decontextualised through the process of commodification, until Che’s image is unrecognisable, a mere ornament. Refuting Benjamin’s concerns in ‘The Work of Art in its Age of Technical Reproducibility’ postmodern theory argues that technologies enabling reproducibility have led to a democratisation of text and textual production, and by extension, have liberated the multitude from a hierarchy of value that privileges the singular. Mass reproduction and the accompanying pressure for texts to be accessible results in altered attitudes regarding the preservation of intellectual property rights and ‘fair use’. In an economy of signs where use-value has become synonymous with exchange-value, then the text which has no exchange value due to it being ‘freely’ available—‘free’ in its double sense, as something exempt from restriction, or cost—can be copied without economic or ethical restraint, without permission. The quotation marks can be scrapped. According to postmodern logic, the double is a transposition with a legitimacy equalling, even rivalling the original. Clearly, Jameson’s lament that postmodernism represents ‘the end of the distinctive individual brushstroke (as symbolized by the emergent primacy of mechanical reproduction)’ cannot escape an association with elitism because technical reproducibility indubitably enables greater access. However, the utility of technologies of reproduction to the capitalist empire of structures and signs cannot be underestimated. It enables the ceaseless reproduction of ideologemes inscribed with the logic of capitalism; in other words, it enables capitalism to reproduce itself relentlessly. Postmodern cultural production is self-aware; it acknowledges its role as commodity and reproduces the ideology of the commodity form in its material form. In this manner, it functions as an ideologeme. Sinclair’s doubles cannot be understood according to the schema of postmodernism because he subverts postmodernism’s political and aesthetic symbiosis with capitalism. Moreover, the double in Sinclair travels beyond rehearsing a self-conscious hyphology (Barthes, 39). He defies postmodernism’s occultation of the author through his reiteration of the author’s authority over their own work. In contrast to the reductive manner postmodern texts duplicate other texts, Sinclair’s texts propose a typology of the double which advocates a dialogic duplication. Sinclair’s doubling refuses postmodernism’s return to the idealism of Hegelian dialects, and its synthesis of contradictions in the service of its unified material and aesthetic program: the commodification of literature. Consequently, Dining on Stones’ textual doubling is a critique of the epistemic shift to the monologic double which Jameson claims typifies a large portion of contemporary textual duplication. References Barthes, Roland. “Theory of the Text.” Untying the Text: A Post-Structuralist Reader. Ed. Robert Young. Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981. Benjamin, Walter. “On the Concept of History.” Selected Writings: Volume 4, 1938-1940. Trans. by Edmund Jephcott. Eds. Michael W.Jennings & Howard Eiland. Cambridge, Mass. & London, England: Belknap Press, 2003. ––– . “The Work of Art in the Age of Technical Reproducibility.” Selected Writings: Volume 3, 1935-1938. Trans. by Edmund Jephcott. Eds. Michael W.Jennings & Howard Eiland. Cambridge, Mass. & London, England: Belknap Press, 2003. Jameson, Fredric. “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.” The Jameson Reader. Eds. Michael Hardt and Kathi Weeks. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000. Massumi, Brian. “Realer than Real: The Simulacrum According to Deleuze and Guattari.” 12 May 2005. http://www.anu.edu.au/HRC/first_and_last/works/realer.htm>. Marx, Karl. Capital, Volume 1. Trans. by Ben Fowkes. Vintage Books edition. New York: Random House, 1976. Sinclair, Iain. Dark Lanthorns: Rodinsky’s A-Z. ––– . Dining on Stones. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2004. ––– . Lights Out for the Territory. London: Granta 1997. ––– . London Orbital. London: Granta, 2002. ––– . Rodinsky’s Room. London: Granta, 1998. ––– . View from My Window. Tonbridge: Worple Press, 2003. ––– . White Goods. Uppingham: Goldmark, 2002. Sinclair, Iain, and Dave McKean. Slow Chocolate Autopsy. London: Phoenix, 1997. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Seale, Kirsten. "Doubling: Capitalism and Textual Duplication." M/C Journal 8.3 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0507/08-seale.php>. APA Style Seale, K. (Jul. 2005) "Doubling: Capitalism and Textual Duplication," M/C Journal, 8(3). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0507/08-seale.php>.

Introduction: Serial Space“It feels …like the edge of the world; far more remote than it actually is, perhaps because it looks at such immensity” (Godden “Black,” 38). This is the priest’s warning to Sister Clodagh in Rumer Godden’s 1939 novel Black Narcissus. The young, inexperienced Clodagh leads a group of British nuns through the Indian Himalayas and onto a remote mountain top above Mopu. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger adapted Godden’s novel into the celebrated feature film, Black Narcissus (1947). Following the novel, the film narrates the nuns’ mission to establish a convent, school, and hospital for the local population. Yet, immensity moves in mysterious ways. Sister Clodagh (Deborah Kerr) loses her managerial grip. Sister Philippa (Flora Robson) cultivates wild flowers instead of vegetables. Sister Ruth (Kathleen Byron) sheds nun’s attire for red lipstick and a Parisian dress. The young Indian woman Kanchi (Jean Simmons) becomes a force of libidinous disturbance. At the twilight of the British Empire, white, western nuns experience the psychical effects of colonialism at the precipice. Taking such cues from Pressburger and Powell’s film, Michelle Williams Gamaker, an artist, filmmaker, and scholar, responds to Black Narcissus, both film and novel. She does so through a radical interpretation of her own. Gamaker William’s 24-minute film, The Fruit Is There to Be Eaten (forthcoming, London 2018) is a longer “short,” which breaks the mould of what scholar Linda Hutcheon would term an “adaptation” (2006). For Hutcheon, there is a double “mode of engagement” between an original work and its adapted form (22). On the one hand, there is a “transcoding” (22). This involves “transporting” characters from a precedent work to its adapted form (11). On the other, there is an act of “creative interpretation” (22). The Fruit Is There to Be Eaten transports yet recreates the Indian “beggar girl” Kanchi, played by a “blacked up” white Hollywood actor Jean Simmons (Black Narcissus), into Williams Gamaker’s contemporary Kanchi, played by Krishna Istha. In this 2018 instalment, Kanchi is an Asian and transgender protagonist of political articulacy. Hence, Williams Gamaker’s film engages a double tactic of both transporting yet transforming Kanchi, as well as Sisters Clodagh and Philippa, from the feature film into The Fruit Is There to Be Eaten. To analyse Williams Gamaker’s film, I will make a theoretical jump off the precipice, stepping from Hutcheon’s malleable concept of adaptation into a space of “trans-serial” narrative.In what follows, I shall read The Fruit Is There to Be Eaten as an “episode” in a serial. The prior episodes, Williams Gamaker’s House of Women (London 2017, Berlin 2018) is a short, fictional, and surreal documentary about casting the role of Kanchi. It can be read as the next episode in Kanchi’s many incarnations. The relationship between Sister Clodagh (Kelly Hunter as voiceover) and Kanchi in House of Women develops from one of confrontation to a transgender kiss in the climatic beat of The Fruit Is There to Be Eaten. Williams Gamaker’s film can be read as one of a series which is itself inflected with the elements of a “trans-serial.” Henry Jenkins argues that “transmedia storytelling represents a process where integral elements of a fiction get dispersed systematically across multiple delivery channels” (emphasis in original, “Transmedia”). I use the word “trans” to define the gap between novelistic texts and film. Throughout Williams Gamaker’s series, she uses many textual citations from Godden’s novel, and dialogue from Pressburger and Powell’s film. In other words, verbal elements as well as filmic images are adapted in Hutcheon’s sense and transmediated in Jenkins’s sense. To build the “serial” concept for my analysis requires re-working concepts from television studies. Jason Mittell introduces “narrative complexity” as the “redefinition of episodic forms under serial narration” (“Narrative,” 32). In serial TV, characters and narratives develop over a sequence of episodes and seasons. In serial TV, missing one episode can thwart the viewer’s reception of later ones. Mittell’s examples reveal the plasticity of the narrative complexity concept. He mentions TV series that play games with the audience’s expectations. As Mittell points out, Seinfeld has reflexive qualities (“Narrative,” 35) and Twin Peaks mixes genres (“Narrative,” 33). I would add that Lynch’s creative liberties offered characters who could appear and disappear while leaving their arcs hanging intriguingly unresolved. The creative possibilities of reflexivity via seriality, of characters who appear and disappear or return in different guises, are strategies that underpin William’s Gamaker’s short film serial. The third in her trilogy, The Eternal Return (in post-production 2018) fictionalises the life of Sabu, the actor who played the General’s son in Black Narcissus. Once again, the protagonist, this time male, is played by Krishna Istha, a non-binary transgender actor who, by taking all the lead roles in William’s Gamaker’s trilogy, grows over the serial as a malleable ethnic and transgender subject. Importantly, The Eternal Return carries residues of the characters from The Fruit Is There to Be Eaten by casting the same team of actors again (Charlotte Gallagher and myself Catherine Lord), and switching their genders. Istha played Kanchi in the previous two episodes. The General’s son, played by Sabu, courted Kanchi in Black Narcissus. In The Eternal Return, Istha crosses the character and gender boundary by playing Sabu. Such casting tactics subvert the gender and colonial hegemonies inherent in Pressburger and Powell’s film.The reflexive and experimental approach of Williams Gamaker’s filmmaking deploys serial narrative tactics for its political goals. Yet, the use of “serial” needs to be nuanced. Glen Creeber sets out three terms: “episodic,” “series” and “serial.” For Creeber, a series provides continuous storylines in which the connection between episodes is strong. In the serial format, the connection between the episodes is less foregrounded. While it is not possible to enjoy stand-alone episodes in a serial, at the same time, serials produce inviting gaps between episodes. Final resolutions are discouraged so that there are greater narrative possibilities for later seasons and the audience’s own game of speculative storytelling (11).The emerging “serial” gaps between Williams Gamaker’s episodes offer opportunities for political interpretation. From House of Women and The Fruit Is There to Be Eaten, Kanchi develops an even stronger political voice. Kanchi’s character arc moves from the wordless obedience of Pressburger and Powell’s feature to the transgender voice of post-colonial discourse in House of Women. In the next episode, The Fruit Is There to Be Eaten, Kanchi becomes Clodagh’s guide both politically, spiritually, and erotically.I will read The Fruit Is There to Be Eaten as both my primary case-study and as the third episode in what I shall theorise to be a four-part serial. The first is the feature film Black Narcissus. After this is Williams Gamaker’s House of Women, which is then followed by The Fruit Is There to Be Eaten, my central case study here. There may be immediate objections to my argument that Williams Gamaker’s series can be read by treating Pressburger and Powell’s feature as the first in the series. After all, Godden’s novel could be theorised as the camouflaged pilot. Yet, a series or serial is defined as such when it is in the same medium. Game of Thrones (2011-) is a TV series that adapts George R.R. Martin’s novel cycle, but the novels are not episodes. In this regard, I follow Hutcheon’s emphasis on theorising adapted works as forged between different media, most commonly novels to films. The adaptive “deliveries” scatter through The Fruit Is There to Be Eaten with an ecological precision.Eco SeriesEcological descriptions from Godden’s novel and Pressburger and Powell’s mise-en-scene are performed in The Fruit Is There to Be Eaten through Kelly Hunter’s velvety voiceover as it enjoys a painterly language: butterflies daub the ferns with “spots of ochre, scarlet, and lemon sherbet.” Hutcheon’s term transcoding usefully describes the channelling of particles from the novelist’s text into an intensified, ecological language and cinematic mise-en-scene. The intensification involves an ingestion of Godden’s descriptive prose, which both mimics and adds an adjectival and alliterative density. The opening descriptions of the nuns’ arrival in Mopu is a case in point. In the novel, the grooms joke about the nuns’ habits appearing as “snows, tall and white” (Godden “Black,” 1). One man remarks that they look like “a row of teeth” (Godden “Black,” 2). Williams Gamaker resists shots of nuns as Godden described them, namely on Bhotiya ponies. Rather, projected onto a white screen is an image of white and red flowers slowly coming into focus. Kelly Hunter’s voiceover describes the white habits as a set of “pearly whites” which are “hungry for knowledge” and “eat into the landscape.” White, western nuns in white habits are metaphorically implied to be like a consuming mouth, eating into Indian territories and Indian people.This metaphor of colonial consumption finds its corollary in Godden’s memoirs where she describes the Pressburger, Powell, and Simons representation of Kanchi as “a basket of fruit, piled high and luscious and ready to eat” (“A House,” 24-5; 52). The nun’s quest colonially consumes Mopu’s natural environment. Presumably, nuns who colonially eat consume the colonised Other like fruit. The Kanchi of the feature film Black Narcissus is a supporting character, performed by Simmons as mute, feral and objectified. If Kanchi is to release herself from the “fruity” projections of sexism and racism, it will be through the filmmaker’s aesthetic and feminist tactic of ensuring that planets, trees, fruits and flowers become members of the film cast. If in episode 1 (Black Narcissus), plants and Asian subalterns are colonised, in episode 2, House of Women, these fruits and flowers turn up as smart, young Asian women actors with degrees in law and photography, ready to hold their own in the face of a faceless interviewer. In episode 3, The Fruit Is There to Be Eaten, it is important that Krishna Istha’s Kanchi, turning up like a magical character from another time and space (transformed from episode 1), commands the film set amidst an excess of flowers, plants and fruits. The visual overflow correlates with Kanchi’s assertiveness. Flowers and Kanchi know how to “answer back.”Like Black Narcissus the feature, The Fruit Is There to Be Eaten relies heavily on a mise-en-scene of horticultural and mountain ecology. Just as Michael Powell filmed at Pinewood and Leonardslee Gardens in East Sussex, Williams Gamaker used Rotherhithe’s Brunel Museum roof Gardens and Sands Film Studios. The lusciousness of Leonardslee is film-intertextually echoed in the floral exuberance of the 2018 shots of Rotherhithe. After the crew have set up the classroom, interwoven with Kelly Hunter’s voiceover, there is a hard cut to a full, cinematic shot of the Leonardslee garden (fig. 1).Then cutting back to the classroom, we see Kanchi calmly surveying the set, of which she is the protagonist, with a projection of an encyclopaedic display of the flowers behind her. The soundtrack plays the voices of young women students intoning the names of flowers from delphinium to lupens.These meta-filmic moments are supported by the film’s sharp juxtaposition between classroom and outdoor scenes. In Pressburger and Powell’s school scenes, Sister Ruth attempts to teach the young General how to conjugate the French verb “recevoir.” But the lesson is not successfully received. The young General becomes aphasic, Kanchi is predictably mute and the children remain demure. Will colonialism let the Other speak? One way to answer back in episode 3 is through that transgressive discourse, the language of flowers.In The Fruit Is There to Be Eaten, the young women study under Sister Clodagh and Sister Philippa (myself, Catherine Lord). The nuns teach botanical lists and their ecological contexts through rote learning. The young women learn unenthusiastically. What is highlighted is the ludicrous activity of repetition and abstractions. When knowledge becomes so objectified, so do natural environments, territories and people. Clodagh aligns floral species to British locations. The young women are relatively more engaged in the garden with Sister Philippa. They study their environment through sketching and painting a diverse range of flowers that could grow in non-British territory. Philippa is the now the one who becomes feral and silent, stroking stalks and petals, eschewing for the time being, the game of naming (fig. 2).However, lessons with colonial lexicons will be back. The young women look at screen projections of flowers. Sister Philippa takes the class through an alphabet: “D is for Dogbright … L is for Ladies’ Fingers.” Clodagh whirls through a list of long, Latin names for wild flowers in British Woodlands. Kanchi halts Clodagh’s act of associating the flowers with the British location, which colonizes them. Kanchi asks: “How many of us will actually travel, and which immigration border will test our botanical knowledge?” Kanchi then presents a radically different alphabet, including “Anne is African … Ian is Intersex … Lucy loves Lucy.” These are British names attributed to Africans, Arabs, and Asians, many of their identities revealed to be LGBQT-POC, non-binary, transgender, and on the move. Clodagh’s riposte is “How do you know you are not travelling already?” The flowers cannot be pinned down to one location. They cannot be owned by one nation.Like characters who travel between episodes, the travelling flowers represent a collision of spaces that undermine the hegemonies of race, gender and sexuality. In episode 1, Black Narcissus the feature film, the western nuns face the immensities of mountain atmosphere, ecology and an unfamiliar ethnic group. In episode 2, House of Women, the subalterns have transformed their role, achieving educational and career status. Such political and dramatic stakes are raised in episode 3, The Fruit Is There to Be Eaten. There is a strong focus on the overlapping oppressions of racial, colonial and ecological exploitation. Just as Kanchi has a character arc and serial development, so do plants, fauna, fruits, flowers and trees. ‘Post’-Space and Its AtmosphereThe British Empire colonised India’s ecological space. “Remember you and your God aren't on British Territory anymore” declares the auditioning Krishna Istha in House of Women. Kanchi’s calm, civil disobedience continues its migration into The Fruit is There to be Eaten between two simultaneously existing spaces, Mopu and Rotherhithe, London. According to literature scholar Brian McHale, postmodern worlds raise ontological questions about the dramatic space into which we are drawn. “Which” worlds are we in? Postmodern worlds can overlap between separate spaces and different temporalities (McHale 34-35). As McHale notes, “If entities can migrate across the semipermeable membrane that divides a fictional world from the real, they can also migrate between two different fictional worlds” (35).In The Fruit Is There to Be Eaten, the semipermeable membrane between it and Black Narcissus folds together the temporalities of 1947 and 2018, and the terrains of India and London. Sister Philippa tells a Kanchi seeking Mopu, that “My dear, you are already here.” This would seem odd as Sister Philippa describes the death of a young man close to Saint Mary’s Church, London. The British capital and woodlands and the Himalayas co-exist as intensified, inter-crossing universes that disrupt the membranes between both colonial and ecological space-time, or what I term “post-space.”Williams Gamaker’s post-spaces further develop Pressburger and Powell’s latent critique of post-colonialism. As film scholar Sarah Street has observed, Black Narcissus the film performs a “post-colonial” exploration of the waning British Empire: “Out of the persistence of the colonial past the present is inflected with a haunting resonance, creating gaps and fissures” (31). This occurs in Powell’s film in the initial Calcutta scenes. The designer Alfred Junge made “God shots” of the nuns at dinner, creating from them the iconic shape of a cross. This image produces a sense of over-exactness. Once in the mountains, it is the spirit of exactitude that deteriorates. In contrast, Williams Gamaker prefers to reveal the relative chaos of setting up her world. We watch as the crew dress the school room. Un-ceremoniously, Kanchi arrives in shorts before she picks up a floral dress bearing the label “Kanchi.” There is then a shot in which Kanchi purveys the organised set, as though she is its organiser (fig. 3).Post-spaces are rich in atmosphere. The British agent Dean tells Clodagh in Black Narcissus the film that the mountain “is no place to put a nunnery” due its “atmosphere.” In the climactic scene of The Fruit Is There to Be Eaten, Kanchi and Clodagh face two screens revealing the atmospheric projection of the high mountains, the black cut between them visible, like some shadowy membrane. Such aesthetic strategies continue Powell’s use of technical artifice. Street details the extensive labour of technical and craft work involved in creating the artificial world of Black Narcissus, its mountains, artificial colours, and hence atmosphere, all constructed at Pinewood studios. There was a vast amount of matte painting and painting on glass for special effects (19).William Gamaker’s screens (projection work by Sophie Bramley and Nick Jaffe) reflexively emphasise atmosphere as artifices. The atmosphere intensifies with the soundscape of mountain air and Wayne Urquhart’s original and haunting music. In Powell and Pressburger’s feature, Brian Easdale’s music also invokes a sense of mystery and vastness. Just as TV series and serials maintain musical and mise-scene-scene signatures from one episode to another, so too does Williams Gamaker reframe her precursor’s cinematic aesthetics with that of her own episode. Thus, serial as stylistic consistency is maintained between episodes and their post-spaces.At the edge of such spaces, Kanchi will scare Clodagh by miming a tight-rope walk across the mountain: it is both real and pretend, dramatic, but reflexively so. Kanchi walks a membrane between colliding worlds, between colonialism and its transgression. In this episode of extreme spirituality and eroticism, Kanchi reaches greater heights than in previous episodes, discoursing on the poetics of atmosphere: “… in the midst of such peaks, one can draw near what is truly placeless … the really divine.” Here, the membrane between the political and cultural regions and the mountains that eschew even the human, is about to be breached. Kanchi relates the legend of those who go naked in the snow. These “Abominable Men” are creatures who become phantoms when they merge with the mountain. If the fractures between locations are too spacious, as Kanchi warns, one can go mad. In this episode 3, Kanchi and Clodagh may have completed their journeys. In Powell and Pressburger’s interpretation, Sister Ruth discards nun’s attire for a Parisian, seductive dress and red lipstick. Yet, she does so for a man, Dean. However, the Sister Clodagh of 2018 is filmed in a very long take as she puts on an elegant dress and does her make-up. In a scene of philosophical intimacy with Kanchi, the newly dressed Clodagh confesses her experience of “immensity.” As they break through the erotic membrane separating their identities, both immersed in their full, queer, transgender kiss, all racial hierarchies melt into atmosphere (fig. 4).Conclusion: For a Pitch By making a film as one episode in a series, Williams Gamaker’s accomplishment is to enhance the meeting of narrative and political aims. As an arthouse film serial, The Fruit Is There to Be Eaten has enabled definitions of “serial” to migrate from the field of television studies. Between Hutcheon’s “adaptation” and Mittell and Creeber’s articulations of “narrative complexity,” a malleable concept for arthouse seriality has emerged. It has stretched the theoretical limits of what can be meant by a serial in an arthouse context. By allowing the notion of works “adapted” to occur between different media, Henry Jenkins’ broader term of “transmedia storytelling” (Convergence) can describe how particles of Godden’s work transmigrate through episodes 1, 2, and 3, where the citational richness emerges most in episodes 3, The Fruit Is There to Be Eaten.Because one novel informs all the episodes while each has entirely different narratives and genres, The Fruit Is There to Be Eaten is not a serial adaptation, as is Game of Thrones. It is an experimental serial inflected with trans-serial properties. Kanchi evolves into a postcolonial, transgender, ecological protagonist who can traverse postmodern worlds. Perhaps the witty producer in a pitch meeting might say that in its serial context, The Fruit Is There to Be Eaten is like a cross between two fantasy TV serials, still to be written: Transgender Peaks meets Kanchi Is the New Black. The “new black” is multifaceted and occupies multi-worlds in a post-space environment. ReferencesCreeber, Glen. Serial Television: Big Drama on the Small Screen. London: BFI, 2004.Godden, Rumer. 1939. Black Narcissus: A Virago Modern Classic. London: Hatchette Digital, 2013.———. A House with Four Rooms. New York: William Morrow, 1989. Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation. 2nd ed. New York: New York University Press, 2012.Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press, 2006.———. “Transmedia, 202: Further Reflections.” Confessions of an Aca-Fan 1 Aug. 2011. 1 May 2012 <http://henryjenkins.org/blog/2011/08/defining_transmedia_further_re.html>.McHale, Brian. Postmodernist Fiction. London: Routledge, 1987.Powell, Michael. A Life in Movies: An Autobiography. London: Heinemann, 1986.Mittell, Jason. “Narrative Complexity in Contemporary American Television.” The Velvet Light Trap 58 (Fall 2006): 29-40. Street, Sarah. Black Narcissus. London: I.B. Tauris, 2005.FilmographyBlack Narcissus. Dirs. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. Pinewood Studios, 1947.House of Women. Dir. Michelle Williams Gamaker. Cinema Suitcase, 2017.The Fruit Is There to Be Eaten. Dir. Michelle Williams Gamaker. Cinema Suitcase, 2018.The Eternal Return. Dir. Michelle Williams Gamaker. Cinema Suitcase, 2018-2019.

Introduction In November 2020, upon learning that the company’s Covid-19 vaccine trial had been successful, the head of Pfizer’s Vaccine Research and Development, Kathrin Jansen, celebrated with champagne – “some really good stuff” (Cohen). Bubbles seem to go naturally with celebration, and champagne is fundamentally associated with bubbles. Yet, until the late-seventeenth century, champagne was a still wine, and it only reached the familiar levels of bubbliness in the late-nineteenth century (Harding). During this period and on into the early twentieth century, “champagne” was in many ways created, defined, and defended. A “champagne bubble” was created, within which the “nature” of champagne was contested and constructed. Champagne today is the result of hundreds of years of labour by many sorts of bubble-makers: those who make the bubbly drink, and those who construct, maintain, and defend the champagne bubble. In this article, I explore some elements of the champagne bubble, in order to understand both its fragility and rigidity over the years and today. Creating the Champagne Bubble – the Labour of Centuries It is difficult to separate the physical from the mythical as regards champagne. Therefore the categorisations below are always overlapping, and embedded in legal, political, economic, and socio-cultural factors. Just as assemblage – the mixing of wine from different grapes – is an essential element of champagne wine, the champagne bubble may be called heterogeneous assemblage. Indeed, the champagne bubble, as we will see below, is a myriad of different sorts of bubbles, such as terroir, appellation, myth and brand. And just as any assemblage, its heterogeneous elements exist and operate in relation to each other. Therefore the “champagne bubble” discussed here is both one and many, all of its elements fundamentally interconnected, constituting that “one” known as “champagne”. It is not my intention to be comprehensive of all the elements, historical and contemporary. Indeed, that would not be possible within such a short article. Instead, I seek to demonstrate some of the complexity of the champagne bubble, noting the elaborate labour that has gone into its creation. The Physical Champagne and Champagne – from Soil to Bubbles Champagne means both a legally protected geographical area (Champagne), and the wine (here: champagne) produced in this area from grapes defined as acceptable: most importantly pinot noir, pinot meunier (“black” grapes), and chardonnay (“white” grape). The method of production, too, is regulated and legally protected: méthode champenoise. Although the same method is used in numerous locations, these must be called something different: metodo classico (Italy), método tradicional (Spain), Methode Cap Classique (South Africa). The geographical area of Champagne was first legally defined in 1908, when it only included the areas of Marne and Aisne, leaving out, most importantly, the area of Aube. This decision led to severe unrest and riots, as the Aube vignerons revolted in 1911, forcing the inclusion of “zone 2”: Aube, Haute-Marne, and Seine-et-Marne (Guy). Behind these regulations was a surge in fraudulent production in the early twentieth century, as well as falling wine prices resulting from increasing supply of cheap wines (Colman 18). These first appellations d’origine had many consequences – they proved financially beneficial for the “zone 1”, but less so for the “zone 2”. When both these areas were brought under the same appellation in 1927, the financial benefits were more limited – but this may have been due to the Great Depression triggered in 1929 (Haeck et al.). It is a long-standing belief that the soil and climate of Champagne are key contributors to the quality of champagne wines, said to be due to “conditions … most suitable for making this type of wine” (Simon 11). Already in the end of the nineteenth century, the editor of Vigneron champenois attributed champagne’s quality to “a fortunate combination of … chalky soil … [and] unrivalled exposure [to the sun]” (Guy 119) among other things. Factors such as soil and climate, commonly included in and expressed through the idea of terroir, undoubtedly influence grapes and wines made thereof, but the extent remains unproven. Indeed, terroir itself is a very contested concept (Teil; Inglis and Almila). It is also the case that climate change has had, and will continue to have, devastating effects on wine production in many areas, while benefiting others. The highly successful English sparkling wine production, drawing upon know-how from the Champagne area, has been enabled by the warming climate (Inglis), while Champagne itself is at risk of becoming too hot (Robinson). Champagne is made through a process more complicated than most wines. I present here the bare bones of it, to illustrate the many challenges that had to be overcome to enable its production in the scale we see today. Freshly picked grapes are first pressed and the juice is fermented. Grape juice contains natural yeasts and therefore will ferment spontaneously, but fermentation can also be started with artificial yeasts. In fermentation, alcohol and carbon dioxide (CO2) are formed, but the latter usually escapes the liquid. The secret of champagne is its second fermentation, which happens in bottles, after wines from different grapes and/or vineyards have been blended for desired characteristics (assemblage). For the second fermentation, yeast and sugar are added. As the fermentation happens inside a bottle, the CO2 that is created does not escape, but dissolves into the wine. The average pressure inside a champagne bottle in serving temperature is around 5 bar – 5 times the pressure outside the bottle (Liger-Belair et al.). The obvious challenge this method poses has to do with managing the pressure. Exploding bottles used to be a common problem, and the manner of sealing bottles was not very developed, either. Seventeenth-century developments in bottle-making, and using corks to seal bottles, enabled sparkling wines to be produced in the first place (Leszczyńska; Phillips 137). Still today, champagne comes in heavy-bottomed bottles, sealed with characteristically shaped cork, which is secured with a wire cage known as muselet. Scientific innovations, such as calculating the ideal amount of sugar for the second fermentation in 1836, also helped to control the amount of gas formed during the second fermentation, thus making the behaviour of the wine more predictable (Leszczyńska 265). Champagne is characteristically a “manufactured” wine, as it involves several steps of interference, from assemblage to dosage – sugar added for flavour to most champagnes after the second fermentation (although there are also zero dosage champagnes). This lends champagne particularly suitable for branding, as it is possible to make the wine taste the same year after year, harvest after harvest, and thus create a distinctive and recognisable house style. It is also possible to make champagnes for different tastes. During the nineteenth century, champagnes of different dosage were made for different markets – the driest for the British, the sweetest for the Russians (Harding). Bubbles are probably the most striking characteristic of champagne, and they are enabled by the complicated factors described above. But they are also formed when the champagne is poured in a glass. Natural impurities on the surface of the glass provide channels through which the gas pockets trapped in the wine can release themselves, forming strains of rising bubbles (Liger-Belair et al.). Champagne glasses have for centuries differed from other wine glasses, often for aesthetic reasons (Harding). The bubbles seem to do more than give people aesthetic pleasure and sensory experiences. It is often claimed that champagne makes you drunk faster than other drinks would, and there is, indeed, some (limited) research showing that this may well be the case (Roberts and Robinson; Ridout et al.). The Mythical Champagne – from Dom Pérignon to Modern Wonders Just as the bubbles in a champagne glass are influenced by numerous forces, so the metaphorical champagne bubble is subject to complex influences. Myth-creation is one of the most significant of these. The origin of champagne as sparkling wine is embedded in the myth of Dom Pérignon of Hautvillers monastery (1638–1715), who according to the legend would have accidentally developed the bubbles, and then enthusiastically exclaimed “I am drinking the stars!” (Phillips 138). In reality, bubbles are a natural phenomenon provoked by winter temperatures deactivating the fermenting yeasts, and spring again reactivating them. The myth of Dom Pérignon was first established in the nineteenth century and quickly embraced by the champagne industry. In 1937, Moët et Chandon launched a premium champagne called Dom Pérignon, which enjoys high reputation until this day (Phillips). The champagne industry has been active in managing associations connected with champagne since the nineteenth century. Sparkling champagnes had already enjoyed fashionability in the later seventeenth and early eighteenth century, both in the French Court, and amongst the British higher classes. In the second half of the nineteenth century, champagne found ever increasing markets abroad, and the clientele was not aristocratic anymore. Before the 1860s, champagne’s association was with high status celebration, as well as sexual activity and seduction (Harding; Rokka). As the century went on, and champagne sales radically increased, associations with “modernity” were added: “hot-air balloons, towering steamships, transcontinental trains, cars, sports, and other ‘modern’ wonders were often featured in quickly proliferating champagne advertising” (Rokka 280). During this time, champagne grew both drier and more sparkling, following consumer tastes (Harding). Champagne’s most important markets in later nineteenth century included the UK, where the growing middle classes consumed champagne for both celebration and hospitality (Harding), the US, where (upper) middle-class women were served champagne in new kinds of consumer environments (Smith; Remus), and Russia, where the upper classes enjoyed sweeter champagne – until the Revolution (Phillips 296). The champagne industry quickly embraced the new middle classes in possession of increasing wealth, as well as new methods of advertising and marketing. What is remarkable is that they managed to integrate enormously varied cultural thematics and still retain associations with aristocracy and luxury, while producing and selling wine in industrial scale (Harding; Rokka). This is still true today: champagne retains a reputation of prestige, despite large-scale branding, production, and marketing. Maintaining and Defending the Bubble: Formulas, Rappers, and the Absolutely Fabulous Tipplers The falling wine prices and increasing counterfeit wines coincided with Europe’s phylloxera crisis – the pest accidentally brought over from North America that almost wiped out all Europe’s vineyards. The pest moved through Champagne in the 1890s, killing vines and devastating vignerons (Campbell). The Syndicat du Commerce des vins de Champagne had already been formed in 1882 (Rokka 280). Now unions were formed to fight phylloxera, such as the Association Viticole Champenoise in 1898. The 1904 Fédération Syndicale des Vignerons was formed to lobby the government to protect the name of Champagne (Leszczyńska 266) – successfully, as we have seen above. The financial benefits from appellations were certainly welcome, but short-lived. World War I treated Champagne harshly, with battle lines stuck through the area for years (Guy 187). The battle went on also in the lobbying front. In 1935, a new appellation regime was brought into law, which came to be the basis for all European systems, and the Comité National des appellations d'origine (CNAO) was founded (Colman 1922). Champagne’s protection became increasingly international, and continues to be so today under EU law and trade deals (European Commission). The post-war recovery of champagne relied on strategies used already in the “golden years” – marketing and lobbying. Advertising continued to embrace “luxury, celebration, transport (extending from air travel to the increasingly popular automobile), modernity, sports” (Guy 188). Such advertisement must have responded accurately to the mood of post-war, pre-depression Europe. Even in the prohibition US it was known that the “frivolous” French women might go as far as bathe in champagne, like the popular actress Mistinguett (Young 63). Curiously, in the 1930s Soviet Russia, “champagne” (not produced in Champagne) was declared a sign of good living, symbolising the standard of living that any Soviet worker had access to (at least in theory) (Gronow). Today, the reputation of champagne is fiercely defended in legal terms. This is not only in terms of protection against other sparkling wine making areas, but also in terms of exploitation of champagne’s reputation by actors in other commercial fields, and even against mass market products containing genuine champagne (Mahy and d’Ath; Schneider and Nam). At the same time, champagne has been widely “democratised” by mass production, enabled partly by increasing mechanisation and scientification of champagne production from the 1950s onwards (Leszczyńska 266). Yet champagne retains its association with prestige, luxury, and even royalty. This has required some serious adaptation and flexibility. In what follows, I look into three cultural phenomena that illuminate processes of such adaptation: Formula One (F1) champagne spraying, the 1990s sitcom Absolutely Fabulous, and the Cristal racism scandal in 2006. The first champagne bottle is said to have been presented to F1 grand prix winner in Champagne in 1950 (Wheels24). Such a gesture would have been fully in line with champagne’s association with cars, sport, and modernity. But what about the spraying? Surely that is not in line with the prestige of the wine? The first spraying is attributed to Jo Siffert in 1966 and Dan Gurney in 1967, the former described as accidental, the latter as a spontaneous gesture of celebration (Wheels24; Dobie). Moët had become the official supplier of F1 champagnes in 1966, and there are no signs that the new custom would have been problematic for them, as their sponsorship continued until 1999, after which Mumm sponsored the sport for 15 years. Today, the champagne to be popped and sprayed is Chanson, in special bottles “coated in the same carbon fibre that F1 cars are made of” (Wheels24). Such an iconic status has the spraying gained that it features in practically all TV broadcasts concerning F1, although non-alcoholic substitute is used in countries where sale of alcohol is banned (Barker et al., “Quantifying”; Barker et al., “Alcohol”). As disturbing as the champagne spraying might look for a wine snob, it is perfectly in line with champagne’s marketing history and entrepreneurial spirit shown since the nineteenth century. Nor is it unheard of to let champagne spray. The “art” of sabrage, opening champagne bottle with a sable, associated with glamour, spectacle, and myth – its origin is attributed to Napoleon and his officers – is perfectly acceptable even for the snob. Sparkling champagne was always bound up with joy and celebration, not a solemn drink, and the champagne bubble was able to accommodate middle classes as well as aristocrats. This brings us to our second example, the British sitcom Absolutely Fabulous. The show, first released in 1992, featured two women, “Eddy” (Jennifer Saunders) and “Patsy” (Joanna Lumley), who spent their time happily smoking, taking drugs, and drinking large quantities of “Bolly” (among other things). Bollinger champagne may have initially experienced “a bit of a shock” for being thus addressed, but soon came to see the benefits of fame (French). In 2005, they hired PR support to make better use of the brand’s “Ab Fab” recognisability, and to improve its prestige reputation in order to justify their higher price range (Cann). Saunders and Lumley were warmly welcomed by the Bollinger house when filming for their champagne tour Absolutely Champers (2017). It is befitting indeed that such controversial fame came from the UK, the first country to discover sparkling champagne outside France (Simon 48), and where the aspirational middle classes were keen to consume it already in the nineteenth century (Harding). More controversial still is the case of Cristal (made by Louis Roederer) and the US rap world. Enthusiastically embraced by the “bling-bling” world of (black) rappers, champagne seems to fit their ethos well. Cristal was long favoured as both a drink and a word in rap lyrics. But in 2006, the newly appointed managing director at the family owned Roederer, Frédéric Rouzaud, made comments considered racist by many (Woodland). Rouzard told in an interview with The Economist that the house observed the Cristal-rap association “with curiosity and serenity”. He reportedly continued: “but what can we do? We can’t forbid people from buying it. I’m sure Dom Pérignon or Krug would be delighted to have their business”. It was indeed those two brands that the rapper Jay-Z replaced Cristal with, when calling for a boycott on Cristal. It would be easy to dismiss Rouzard’s comments as snobbery, or indeed as racism, but they merit some more reflection. Cristal is the premium wine of a house that otherwise does not enjoy high recognisability. While champagne’s history involves embracing new sorts of clientele, and marketing flexibly to as many consumer groups as possible (Rokka), this was the first spectacular crossing of racial boundaries. It was always the case that different houses and their different champagnes were targeted at different clienteles, and it is apparent that Cristal was not targeted at black rap artists. Whereas Bollinger was able to turn into a victory the questionable fame brought by the white middle-class association of Absolutely Fabulous, the more prestigious Cristal considered the attention of the black rapper world more threatening and acted accordingly. They sought to defend their own brand bubble, not the larger champagne bubble. Cristal’s reputation seems to have suffered little – its 2008 vintage, launched in 2018, was the most traded wine of that year (Schultz). Jay-Z’s purchase of his own champagne brand (Armand de Brignac, nicknamed Ace of Spades) has been less successful reputation-wise (Greenburg). It is difficult to break the champagne bubble, and it may be equally difficult to break into it. Conclusion In this article, I have looked into the various dilemmas the “bubble-makers” of Champagne encountered when fabricating what is today known as “champagne”. There have been moments of threat to the bubble they formed, such as in the turn of nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and eras of incomparable success, such as from the 1860s to 1880s. The discussion has demonstrated the remarkable flexibility with which the makers and defenders of champagne have responded to challenges, and dealt with material, socio-cultural, economic, and other problems. It feels appropriate to end with a note on the current challenge the champagne industry faces: Covid-19. The pandemic hit champagne sales exceptionally hard, leaving around 100 million bottles unsold (Micallef). This was not very surprising, given the closure of champagne-selling venues, banning of public and private celebrations, and a general mood not particularly prone to (or even likely to frown upon) such light-hearted matters as glamour and champagne. Champagne has survived many dramatic drops in sales during the twentieth century, such as the Great Depression of the 1930s, and the post-financial crisis collapse in 2009. Yet they seem to be able to make astonishing recoveries. 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Introduction: Socialism – from Eternal Reality to Passing DreamThe Year of Revolutions in 1989 presaged the end of the Cold War. For many people, it must have felt like the end of the Twentieth Century, and the 1990s a period of waiting for the Millennium. However, the 1990s was, in fact, a period of profound transformation in the post-Socialist world.In early representations of Socialism’s end, a dominant narrative was that of collapse. Dramatic events, such as the dismantling of the Berlin Wall in Germany enabled representation of the end as an unexpected moment. Senses of unexpectedness rested on erstwhile perceptions of Socialism as eternal.In contrast, the 1990s came to be a decade of revision in which thinking switched from considering Socialism’s persistence to asking, “why it went wrong?” I explore this question in relation to former-Yugoslavia. In brief, the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY) was replaced through the early 1990s by six independent nation states: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, and Slovenia. Kosovo came much later. In the states that were significantly ethnically mixed, the break-up was accompanied by violence. Bosnia in the 1990s will be remembered for an important contribution to the lexicon of ideas – ethnic cleansing.Revisionist historicising of the former-Yugoslavia in the 1990s was led by the scholarly community. By and large, it discredited the Ancient Ethnic Hatreds (AEH) thesis commonly held by nationalists, simplistic media commentators and many Western politicians. The AEH thesis held that Socialism’s end was a consequence of the up-swelling of primordial (natural) ethnic tensions. Conversely, the scholarly community tended to view Socialism’s failure as an outcome of systemic economic and political deficiencies in the SFRY, and that these deficiencies were also, in fact the root cause of those ethnic tensions. And, it was argued that had such deficiencies been addressed earlier Socialism may have survived and fulfilled its promise of eternity (Verdery).A third significant perspective which emerged through the 1990s was that the collapse of Socialism was an outcome of the up-swelling of, if not primordial ethnic tensions then, at least repressed historical memories of ethnic tensions, especially of the internecine violence engendered locally by Nazi and Italian Fascist forces in WWII. This perspective was particularly en vogue within the unusually rich arts scene in former-Yugoslavia. Its leading exponent was Slovenian avant-garde rock band Laibach.In this article, I consider Laibach’s career and methods. For background the article draws substantially on Alexei Monroe’s excellent biography of Laibach, Interrogation Machine: Laibach and NSK (2005). However, as I indicate below, my interpretation diverges very significantly from Monroe’s. Laibach’s most significant body of work is the cover versions of Western pop songs it recorded in the middle part of its career. Using a technique that has been labelled retroquotation (Monroe), it subtly transforms the lyrical content, and radically transforms the musical arrangement of pop songs, thereby rendering them what might be described as martial anthems. The clearest illustration of the process is Laibach’s version of Opus’s one hit wonder “Live is Life”, which is retitled as “Life is Life” (Laibach 1987).Conventional scholarly interpretations of Laibach’s method (including Monroe’s) present it as entailing the uncovering of repressed forms of individual and collective totalitarian consciousness. I outline these ideas, but supplement them with an alternative interpretation. I argue that in the cover version stage of its career, Laibach switched its attention from seeking to uncover repressed totalitarianism towards uncovering repressed memories of ethnic tension, especially from WWII. Furthermore, I argue that its creative medium of Western pop music is especially important in this regard. On the bases of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Bosnia (University of Melbourne Human Ethics project 1544213.1), and of a reading of SFRY’s geopolitical history, I demonstrate that for many people, Western popular cultural forms came to represent the quintessence of what it was to be Yugoslav. In this context, Laibach’s retroquotation of Western pop music is akin to a broader cultural practice in the post-SFRY era in which symbols of the West were iconoclastically transformed. Such transformation served to reveal a public secret (Taussig) of repressed historic ethnic enmity within the very heart of things that were regarded as quintessentially and pan-ethnically Yugoslav. And, in so doing, this delegitimised memory of SFRY ever having been a properly functioning entity. In this way, Laibach contributed significantly to a broader process in which perceptions of Socialist Yugoslavia came to be rendered less as a reality with the potential for eternity than a passing dream.What Is Laibach and What Does It Do?Originally of the industrial rock genre, Laibach has evolved through numerous other genres including orchestral rock, choral rock and techno. It is not, however, a rock group in any conventional sense. Laibach is the musical section of a tripartite unit named Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK) which also encompasses the fine arts collective Irwin and a variety of theatre groups.Laibach was the name by which the Slovenian capital Ljubljana was known under the Austrian Habsburg Empire and then Nazi occupation in WWII. The choice of name hints at a central purpose of Laibach and NSK in general, to explore the relationship between art and ideology, especially under conditions of totalitarianism. In what follows, I describe how Laibach go about doing this.Laibach’s central method is eclecticism, by which symbols of the various ideological regimes that are its and the NSK’s subject matter are intentionally juxtaposed. Eclecticism of this kind was characteristic of the postmodern aesthetics typical of the 1990s. Furthermore, and counterintuitively perhaps, postmodernism was as much a condition of the Socialist East as it was the Capitalist West. As Mikhail N. Epstein argues, “Totalitarianism itself may be viewed as a specific postmodern model that came to replace the modernist ideological stance elaborated in earlier Marxism” (102). However, Western and Eastern postmodernisms were fundamentally different. In particular, while the former was largely playful, ironicising and depoliticised, the latter, which Laibach and NSK may be regarded as being illustrative of, involved placing in opposition to one another competing and antithetical aesthetic, political and social regimes, “without the contradictions being fully resolved” (Monroe 54).The performance of unresolved contradictions in Laibach’s work fulfils three principal functions. It works to (1) reveal hidden underlying connections between competing ideological systems, and between art and power more generally. This is evident in Life is Life. The video combines symbols of Slovenian romantic nationalism (stags and majestic rural landscapes) with Nazism and militarism (uniforms, bodily postures and a martial musical arrangement). Furthermore, it presents images of the graves of victims of internecine violence in WWII. The video is a reminder to Slovenian viewers of a discomforting public secret within their nation’s history. While Germany is commonly viewed as a principal oppressor of Slovenian nationalism, the rural peasantry, who are represented as embodying Slovenian nationalism most, were also the most willing collaborators in imperialist processes of Germanicisation. The second purpose of the performance of unresolved contradictions in Laibach’s work is to (2) engender senses of the alienation, especially as experienced by the subjects of totalitarian regimes. Laibach’s approach in this regard is quite different to that of punk, whose concern with alienation - symbolised by safety pins and chains - was largely celebratory of the alienated condition. Rather, Laibach took a lead from seminal industrial rock bands such as Einstürzende Neubauten and Throbbing Gristle (see, for example, Walls of Sound (Throbbing Gristle 2004)), whose sound one fan accurately describes as akin to, “the creation of the universe by an angry titan/God and a machine apocalypse all rolled into one” (rateyourmusic.com). Certainly, Laibach’s shows can be uncomfortable experiences too, involving not only clashing symbols and images, but also the dissonant sounds of, for example, martial music, feedback, recordings of the political speeches of totalitarian leaders and barking dogs, all played at eardrum-breaking high volumes. The purpose of this is to provide, as Laibach state: “a ritualized demonstration of political force” (NSK, Neue Slowenische Kunst 44). In short, more than simply celebrating the experience of totalitarian alienation, Laibach’s intention is to reproduce that very alienation.More than performatively representing tyranny, and thereby senses of totalitarian alienation, Laibach and NSK set out to embody it themselves. In particular, and contra the forms of liberal humanism that were hegemonic at the peak of their career in the 1990s, their organisation was developed as a model of totalitarian collectivism in which the individual is always subjugated. This is illustrated in the Onanigram (NSK, Neue Slowenische Kunst), which, mimicking the complexities of the SFRY in its most totalitarian dispensation, maps out in labyrinthine detail the institutional structure of NSK. Behaviour is governed by a Constitution that states explicitly that NSK is a group in which, “each individual is subordinated to the whole” (NSK, Neue Slowenische Kunst 273). Lest this collectivism be misconceived as little more than a show, the case of Tomaž Hostnik is instructive. The original lead singer of Laibach, Hostnik committed ritual suicide by hanging himself from a hayrack, a key symbol of Slovenian nationalism. Initially, rather than mourning his loss, the other members of Laibach posthumously disenfranchised him (“threw him out of the band”), presumably for his act of individual will that was collectively unsanctioned.Laibach and the NSK’s collectivism also have spiritual overtones. The Onanigram presents an Immanent Consistent Spirit, a kind of geist that holds the collective together. NSK claim: “Only God can subdue LAIBACH. People and things never can” (NSK, Neue Slowenische Kunst 289). Furthermore, such rhetorical bombast was matched in aspiration. Most famously, in one of the first instances of a micro-nation, NSK went on to establish itself as a global and virtual non-territorial state, replete with a recruitment drive, passports and anthem, written and performed by Laibach of course. Laibach’s CareerLaibach’s career can be divided into three overlapping parts. The first is its career as a political provocateur, beginning from the inception of the band in 1980 and continuing through to the present. The band’s performances have touched the raw nerves of several political actors. As suggested above, Laibach offended Slovenian nationalists. The band offended the SFRY, especially when in its stage backdrop it juxtaposed images of a penis with Marshal Josip Broz “Tito”, founding President of the SFRY. Above all, it offended libertarians who viewed the band’s exploitation of totalitarian aesthetics as a route to evoking repressed totalitarian energies in its audiences.In a sense the libertarians were correct, for Laibach were quite explicit in representing a third function of their performance of unresolved contradictions as being to (3) evoke repressed totalitarian energies. However, as Žižek demonstrates in his essay “Why Are Laibach and NSK Not Fascists”, Laibach’s intent in this regard is counter-totalitarian. Laibach engage in what amounts to a “psychoanalytic cure” for totalitarianism, which consists of four envisaged stages. The consumers of Laibach’s works and performances go through a process of over-identification with totalitarianism, leading through the experience of alienation to, in turn, disidentification and an eventual overcoming of that totalitarian alienation. The Žižekian interpretation of the four stages has, however been subjected to critique, particularly by Deleuzian scholars, and especially for its psychoanalytic emphasis on the transformation of individual (un)consciousness (i.e. the cerebral rather than bodily). Instead, such scholars prefer a schizoanalytic interpretation which presents the cure as, respectively collective (Monroe 45-50) and somatic (Goddard). Laibach’s works and pronouncements display, often awareness of such abstract theoretical ideas. However, they also display attentiveness to the concrete realities of socio-political context. This was reflected especially in the 1990s, when its focus seemed to shift from the matter of totalitarianism to the overriding issue of the day in Laibach’s homeland – ethnic conflict. For example, echoing the discourse of Truth and Reconciliation emanating from post-Apartheid South Africa in the early 1990s, Laibach argued that its work is “based on the premise that traumas affecting the present and the future can be healed only by returning to the initial conflicts” (NSK Padiglione).In the early 1990s era of post-socialist violent ethnic nationalism, statements such as this rendered Laibach a darling of anti-nationalism, both within civil society and in what came to be known pejoratively as the Yugonostagic, i.e. pro-SFRY left. Its darling status was cemented further by actions such as performing a concert to celebrate the end of the Bosnian war in 1996, and because its ideological mask began to slip. Most famously, when asked by a music journalist the standard question of what the band’s main influences were, rather than citing other musicians Laibach stated: “Tito, Tito and Tito.” Herein lies the third phase of Laibach’s career, dating from the mid-1990s to the present, which has been marked by critical recognition and mainstream acceptance, and in contrasting domains. Notably, in 2012 Laibach was invited to perform at the Tate Modern in London. Then, entering the belly of what is arguably the most totalitarian of totalitarian beasts in 2015, it became the first rock band to perform live in North Korea.The middle part in Laibach’s career was between 1987 and 1996. This was when its work consisted mostly of covers of mainstream Western pop songs by, amongst others Opus, Queen, The Rolling Stones, and, in The Final Countdown (1986), Swedish ‘big hair’ rockers. It also covered entire albums, including a version of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar. No doubt mindful of John Lennon’s claim that his band was more popular than the Messiah himself, Laibach covered the Beatles’ final album Let It Be (1970). Highlighting the perilous hidden connections between apparently benign and fascistic forms of sedentarism, lead singer Milan Fras’ snarling delivery of the refrain “Get Back to where you once belong” renders the hit single from that album less a story of homecoming than a sinister warning to immigrants and ethnic others who are out of place.This career middle stage invoked critique. However, commonplace suggestions that Laibach could be characterised as embodying Retromania, a derivative musical trend typical of the 1990s that has been lambasted for its de-politicisation and a musical conservatism enabled by new sampling technologies that afforded a forensic documentary precision that prohibits creative distortion (Reynolds), are misplaced. Several scholars highlight Laibach’s ceaseless attention to musical creativity in the pursuit of political subversiveness. For example, for Monroe, the cover version was a means for Laibach to continue its exploration of the connections between art and ideology, of illuminating the connections between competing ideological systems and of evoking repressed totalitarian energies, only now within Western forms of entertainment in which ideological power structures are less visible than in overt totalitarian propaganda. However, what often seems to escape intellectualist interpretations presented by scholars such as Žižek, Goddard and (albeit to a lesser extent) Monroe is the importance of the concrete specificities of the context that Laibach worked in in the 1990s – i.e. homeland ethno-nationalist politics – and, especially, their medium – i.e. Western pop music.The Meaning and Meaningfulness of Western Popular Culture in Former YugoslaviaThe Laibach covers were merely one of many celebrations of Western popular culture that emerged in pre- and post-socialist Yugoslavia. The most curious of these was the building of statues of icons of screen and stage. These include statues of Tarzan, Bob Marley, Rocky Balboa and, most famously, martial arts cinema legend Bruce Lee in the Bosnian city of Mostar.The pop monuments were often erected as symbols of peace in contexts of ethnic-national violence. Each was an ethnic hybrid. With the exception of original Tarzan Johnny Weismuller — an ethnic-German American immigrant from Serbia — none was remotely connected to the competing ethnic-national groups. Thus, it was surprising when these pop monuments became targets for iconoclasm. This was especially surprising because, in contrast, both the new ethnic-national monuments that were built and the old Socialist pan-Yugoslav monuments that remained in all their concrete and steel obduracy in and through the 1990s were left largely untouched.The work of Simon Harrison may give us some insight into this curious situation. Harrison questions the commonplace assumption that the strength of enmity between ethnic groups is related to their cultural dissimilarity — in short, the bigger the difference the bigger the biffo. By that logic, the new ethnic-national monuments erected in the post-SFRY era ought to have been vandalised. Conversely, however, Harrison argues that enmity may be more an outcome of similarity, at least when that similarity is torn asunder by other kinds of division. This is so because ownership of previously shared and precious symbols of identity appears to be seen as subjected to appropriation by ones’ erstwhile comrades who are newly othered in such moments.This is, indeed, exactly what happened in post-socialist former-Yugoslavia. Yugoslavs were rendered now as ethnic-nationals: Bosniaks (Muslims), Croats and Serbs in the case of Bosnia. In the process, the erection of obviously non-ethnic-national monuments by, now inevitably ethnic-national subjects was perceived widely as appropriation – “the Croats [the monument in Mostar was sculpted by Croatian artist Ivan Fijolić] are stealing our Bruce Lee,” as one of my Bosnian-Serb informants exclaimed angrily.However, this begs the question: Why would symbols of Western popular culture evoke the kinds of emotions that result in iconoclasm more so than other ethnically non-reducible ones such as those of the Partisans that are celebrated in the old Socialist pan-Yugoslav monuments? The answer lies in the geopolitical history of the SFRY. The Yugoslav-Soviet Union split in 1956 forced the SFRY to develop ever-stronger ties with the West. The effects of this became quotidian, especially as people travelled more or less freely across international borders and consumed the products of Western Capitalism. Many of the things they consumed became deeply meaningful. Notably, barely anybody above a certain age does not reminisce fondly about the moment when participation in martial arts became a nationwide craze following the success of Bruce Lee’s films in the golden (1970s-80s) years of Western-bankrolled Yugoslav prosperity.Likewise, almost everyone above a certain age recalls the balmy summer of 1985, whose happy zeitgeist seemed to be summed up perfectly by Austrian band Opus’s song “Live is Life” (1985). This tune became popular in Yugoslavia due to its apparently feelgood message about the joys of attending live rock performances. In a sense, these moments and the consumption of things “Western” in general came to symbolise everything that was good about Yugoslavia and, indeed to define what it was to be Yugoslavs, especially in comparison to their isolated and materially deprived socialist comrades in the Warsaw Pact countries.However, iconoclastic acts are more than mere emotional responses to offensive instances of cultural appropriation. As Michael Taussig describes, iconoclasm reveals the public secrets that the monuments it targets conceal. SFRY’s great public secret, known especially to those people old enough to have experienced the inter-ethnic violence of WWII, was ethnic division and the state’s deceit of the historic normalcy of pan-Yugoslav identification. The secret was maintained by a formal state policy of forgetting. For example, the wording on monuments in sites of inter-ethnic violence in WWII is commonly of the variety: “here lie the victims in Yugoslavia’s struggle against imperialist forces and their internal quislings.” Said quislings were, of course, actually Serbs, Croats, and Muslims (i.e. fellow Yugoslavs), but those ethnic nomenclatures were almost never used.In contrast, in a context where Western popular cultural forms came to define the very essence of what it was to be Yugoslav, the iconoclasm of Western pop monuments, and the retroquotation of Western pop songs revealed the repressed deceit and the public secret of the reality of inter-ethnic tension at the heart of that which was regarded as quintessentially Yugoslav. In this way, the memory of Yugoslavia ever having been a properly functioning entity was delegitimised. Consequently, Laibach and their kind served to render the apparent reality of the Yugoslav ideal as little more than a dream. ReferencesEpstein, Mikhail N. 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Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Žižek, Slavoj. “Why Are Laibach and NSK Not Fascists?” 3 Sep. 2018 <www.nskstate.com/appendix/articles/why_are_laibach.php.>