Academic literature on the topic 'Indo-Global Social Service Society (New Delhi, India)'

A different name than English literature, ‘Anglo-Indian Literature’, was given to the body of literature in English that emerged on account of the British interaction with India unlike the case with their interaction with America or Australia or New Zealand. Even the Indians’ contributions (translations as well as creative pieces in English) were classed under the caption ‘Anglo-Indian’ initially but later a different name, ‘Indo-Anglian’, was conceived for the growing variety and volume of writings in English by the Indians. However, unlike the former the latter has not found a favour with the compilers of English dictionaries. With the passage of time the fine line of demarcation drawn on the basis of subject matter and author’s point of view has disappeared and currently even Anglo-Indians’ writings are classed as ‘Indo-Anglian’. Besides contemplating on various connotations of the term ‘Indo-Anglian’ the article discusses the related issues such as: the etymology of the term, fixing the name of its coiner and the date of its first use. In contrast to the opinions of the historians and critics like K R S Iyengar, G P Sarma, M K Naik, Daniela Rogobete, Sachidananda Mohanty, Dilip Chatterjee and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak it has been brought to light that the term ‘Indo-Anglian’ was first used in 1880 by James Payn to refer to the Indians’ writings in English rather pejoratively. However, Iyengar used it in a positive sense though he himself gave it up soon. The reasons for the wide acceptance of the term, sometimes also for the authors of the sub-continent, by the members of academia all over the world, despite its rejection by Sahitya Akademi (the national body of letters in India), have also been contemplated on. References Alphonso-Karkala, John B. (1970). Indo-English Literature in the Nineteenth Century, Mysore: Literary Half-yearly, University of Mysore, University of Mysore Press. Amanuddin, Syed. (2016 [1990]). “Don’t Call Me Indo-Anglian”. C. D. Narasimhaiah (Ed.), An Anthology of Commonwealth Poetry. Bengaluru: Trinity Press. B A (Compiler). (1883). Indo-Anglian Literature. Calcutta: Thacker, Spink and Co. PDF. Retrieved from: https://books.google.co.in/books?id=rByZ2RcSBTMC&pg=PA1&source= gbs_selected_pages&cad=3#v=onepage&q&f=false ---. (1887). “Indo-Anglian Literature”. 2nd Issue. Calcutta: Thacker, Spink and Co. PDF. Retrieved from: http://www.jstor.org/stable/60238178 Basham, A L. (1981[1954]). The Wonder That Was India: A Survey of the History and Culture of the Indian Sub-Continent before the Coming of the Muslims. Indian Rpt, Calcutta: Rupa. PDF. Retrieved from: https://archive.org/details/TheWonderThatWasIndiaByALBasham Bhushan, V N. (1945). The Peacock Lute. Bomaby: Padma Publications Ltd. Bhushan, V N. (1945). The Moving Finger. Bomaby: Padma Publications Ltd. Boria, Cavellay. (1807). “Account of the Jains, Collected from a Priest of this Sect; at Mudgeri: Translated by Cavelly Boria, Brahmen; for Major C. Mackenzie”. Asiatick Researches: Or Transactions of the Society; Instituted In Bengal, For Enquiring Into The History And Antiquities, the Arts, Sciences, and Literature, of Asia, 9, 244-286. PDF. Retrieved from: https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.104510 Chamber’s Twentieth Century Dictionary [The]. (1971). Bombay et al: Allied Publishers. Print. Chatterjee, Dilip Kumar. (1989). Cousins and Sri Aurobindo: A Study in Literary Influence, Journal of South Asian Literature, 24(1), 114-123. Retrieved from: http://www.jstor.org/ stable/40873985. Chattopadhyay, Dilip Kumar. (1988). A Study of the Works of James Henry Cousins (1873-1956) in the Light of the Theosophical Movement in India and the West. Unpublished PhD dissertation. Burdwan: The University of Burdwan. PDF. Retrieved from: http://ir.inflibnet. ac.in:8080/jspui/bitstream/10603/68500/9/09_chapter%205.pdf. Cobuild English Language Dictionary. (1989 [1987]). rpt. London and Glasgow. Collins Cobuild Advanced Illustrated Dictionary. (2010). rpt. Glasgow: Harper Collins. Print. Concise Oxford English Dictionary [The]. (1961 [1951]). H. W. Fowler and F. G. Fowler. (Eds.) Oxford: Clarendon Press. 4th ed. Cousins, James H. (1921). Modern English Poetry: Its Characteristics and Tendencies. Madras: Ganesh & Co. n. d., Preface is dated April, 1921. PDF. Retrieved from: http://hdl.handle.net/ 2027/uc1.$b683874 ---. (1919) New Ways in English Literature. Madras: Ganesh & Co. 2nd edition. PDF. Retrieved from: https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.31747 ---. (1918). The Renaissance in India. Madras: Madras: Ganesh & Co., n. d., Preface is dated June 1918. PDF. Retrieved from: https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.203914 Das, Sisir Kumar. (1991). History of Indian Literature. Vol. 1. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi. Encarta World English Dictionary. (1999). London: Bloomsbury. Gandhi, M K. (1938 [1909]). Hind Swaraj Tr. M K Gandhi. Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House. PDF. Retrieved from: www.mkgandhi.org/ebks/hind_swaraj.pdf. Gokak, V K. (n.d.). English in India: Its Present and Future. Bombay et al: Asia Publishing House. PDF. Retrieved from: https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.460832 Goodwin, Gwendoline (Ed.). (1927). Anthology of Modern Indian Poetry, London: John Murray. PDF. Retrieved from: https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.176578 Guptara, Prabhu S. (1986). Review of Indian Literature in English, 1827-1979: A Guide to Information Sources. The Yearbook of English Studies, 16 (1986): 311–13. PDF. Retrieved from: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3507834 Iyengar, K R Srinivasa. (1945). Indian Contribution to English Literature [The]. Bombay: Karnatak Publishing House. PDF. Retrieved from: https://archive.org/details/ indiancontributi030041mbp ---. (2013 [1962]). Indian Writing in English. New Delhi: Sterling. ---. (1943). Indo-Anglian Literature. Bombay: PEN & International Book House. PDF. Retrieved from: https://archive.org/details/IndoAnglianLiterature Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English. (2003). Essex: Pearson. Lyall, Alfred Comyn. (1915). The Anglo-Indian Novelist. Studies in Literature and History. London: John Murray. PDF. Retrieved from: https://archive.org/details/in.ernet. dli.2015.94619 Macaulay T. B. (1835). Minute on Indian Education dated the 2nd February 1835. HTML. Retrieved from: http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00generallinks/macaulay/ txt_minute_education_1835.html Mehrotra, Arvind Krishna. (2003). An Illustrated History of Indian Literature in English. Delhi: Permanent Black. ---. (2003[1992]). The Oxford India Anthology of Twelve Modern Indian Poets. New Delhi: Oxford U P. Minocherhomji, Roshan Nadirsha. (1945). Indian Writers of Fiction in English. Bombay: U of Bombay. Modak, Cyril (Editor). (1938). The Indian Gateway to Poetry (Poetry in English), Calcutta: Longmans, Green. PDF. Retrieved from http://en.booksee.org/book/2266726 Mohanty, Sachidananda. (2013). “An ‘Indo-Anglian’ Legacy”. The Hindu. July 20, 2013. Web. Retrieved from: http://www.thehindu.com/features/magazine/an-indoanglian-legacy/article 4927193.ece Mukherjee, Sujit. (1968). Indo-English Literature: An Essay in Definition, Critical Essays on Indian Writing in English. Eds. M. K. Naik, G. S. Amur and S. K. Desai. Dharwad: Karnatak University. Naik, M K. (1989 [1982]). A History of Indian English Literature. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, rpt.New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles [The], (1993). Ed. Lesley Brown, Vol. 1, Oxford: Clarendon Press.Naik, M K. (1989 [1982]). A History of Indian English Literature. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, rpt. Oaten, Edward Farley. (1953 [1916]). Anglo-Indian Literature. In: Cambridge History of English Literature, Vol. 14, (pp. 331-342). A C Award and A R Waller, (Eds). Rpt. ---. (1908). A Sketch of Anglo-Indian Literature, London: Kegan Paul. PDF. Retrieved from: https://ia600303.us.archive.org/0/items/sketchofangloind00oateuoft/sketchofangloind00oateuoft.pdf) Advanced Learner’s Dictionary of Current English. (1979 [1974]). A. S. Hornby (Ed). : Oxford UP, 3rd ed. Oxford English Dictionary [The]. Vol. 7. (1991[1989]). J. A. Simpson and E. S. C. Weiner, (Eds.). Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2nd ed. Pai, Sajith. (2018). Indo-Anglians: The newest and fastest-growing caste in India. Web. Retrieved from: https://scroll.in/magazine/867130/indo-anglians-the-newest-and-fastest-growing-caste-in-india Pandia, Mahendra Navansuklal. (1950). The Indo-Anglian Novels as a Social Document. Bombay: U Press. Payn, James. (1880). An Indo-Anglian Poet, The Gentleman’s Magazine, 246(1791):370-375. PDF. Retrieved from: https://archive.org/stream/gentlemansmagaz11unkngoog#page/ n382/mode/2up. ---. (1880). An Indo-Anglian Poet, Littell’s Living Age (1844-1896), 145(1868): 49-52. PDF. Retrieved from: https://archive.org/stream/livingage18projgoog/livingage18projgoog_ djvu.txt. Rai, Saritha. (2012). India’s New ‘English Only’ Generation. Retrieved from: https://india.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/01/indias-new-english-only-generation/ Raizada, Harish. (1978). The Lotus and the Rose: Indian Fiction in English (1850-1947). Aligarh: The Arts Faculty. Rajan, P K. (2006). Indian English literature: Changing traditions. Littcrit. 32(1-2), 11-23. Rao, Raja. (2005 [1938]). Kanthapura. New Delhi: Oxford UP. Rogobete, Daniela. (2015). Global versus Glocal Dimensions of the Post-1981 Indian English Novel. Portal Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies, 12(1). Retrieved from: http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/portal/article/view/4378/4589. Rushdie, Salman & Elizabeth West. (Eds.) (1997). The Vintage Book of Indian Writing 1947 – 1997. London: Vintage. Sampson, George. (1959 [1941]). Concise Cambridge History of English Literature [The]. Cambridge: UP. Retrieved from: https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.18336. Sarma, Gobinda Prasad. (1990). Nationalism in Indo-Anglian Fiction. New Delhi: Sterling. Singh, Kh. Kunjo. (2002). The Fiction of Bhabani Bhattacharya. New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers and Distributors. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. (2012). How to Read a ‘Culturally Different’ Book. An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. Sturgeon, Mary C. (1916). Studies of Contemporary Poets, London: George G Hard & Co., Retrieved from: https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.95728. Thomson, W S (Ed). (1876). Anglo-Indian Prize Poems, Native and English Writers, In: Commemoration of the Visit of His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales to India. London: Hamilton, Adams & Co., Retrieved from https://books.google.co.in/ books?id=QrwOAAAAQAAJ Wadia, A R. (1954). The Future of English. Bombay: Asia Publishing House. Wadia, B J. (1945). Foreword to K R Srinivasa Iyengar’s The Indian Contribution to English Literature. Bombay: Karnatak Publishing House. Retrieved from: https://archive.org/ details/indiancontributi030041mbp Webster's Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language. (1989). New York: Portland House. Yule, H. and A C Burnell. (1903). Hobson-Jobson: A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases, and of Kindred Terms, Etymological, Historical, Geographical and Discursive. W. Crooke, Ed. London: J. Murray. Retrieved from: https://archive.org/ details/hobsonjobsonagl00croogoog Sources www.amazon.com/Indo-Anglian-Literature-Edward-Charles-Buck/dp/1358184496 www.archive.org/stream/livingage18projgoog/livingage18projgoog_djvu.txt www.catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/001903204?type%5B%5D=all&lookfor%5B%5D=indo%20anglian&ft= www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B.L._Indo_Anglian_Public_School,_Aurangabad www.everyculture.com/South-Asia/Anglo-Indian.html www.solo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?fn=search&ct=search&initialSearch=true&mode=Basic&tab=local&indx=1&dum=true&srt=rank&vid=OXVU1&frbg=&tb=t&vl%28freeText0%29=Indo-Anglian+Literature+&scp.scps=scope%3A%28OX%29&vl% 28516065169UI1%29=all_items&vl%281UIStartWith0%29=contains&vl%28254947567UI0%29=any&vl%28254947567UI0%29=title&vl%28254947567UI0%29=any www.worldcat.org/title/indo-anglian-literature/oclc/30452040

<div>As an ardent cancer researcher, Dr. Smita Asthana has a vision to create wider awareness on cancer and its prevention, and aims to work on translational research to benefit the general public through the implementation of evidence-based research. “I have been associated with the National Institute of Cancer Prevention and Research (NICPR) and Institute of Cytology and Preventive Oncology (ICPO) since November 2004 and have progressed over a period of time from being a staff scientist to the current role of a senior scientist,” says Dr. Asthana, who is presently with NICPR’s Biostatistics and Epidemiology division.</div><p> </p><p>“I have been working in various positions that deal with the design, execution, and evaluation of medical projects. Recently, we have concluded two major cervical cancer screening projects and conducted a screening of 10,000 women in rural areas,” she tells AMOR. One project, funded by the Indian Council of Medical Research, was carried out 100 km west of New Delhi in the rural town of Dadri “as part of an operational research to see the implementation of VIA (visual inspection with acetic acid) and VILI (visual inspection with Lugol's iodine) screenings with the help of existing healthcare infrastructure,” she explains.</p><p> </p><p>As a leading researcher in cervical cancer screening, she completed an Indo-US collaborative project on the clinical performance of a human papillomavirus (HPV) test, used as a strategy for screening cervical cancer in rural communities, with funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation via the international non-profit global health organization PATH. “The primary objective of the project was to observe the performance of careHPV, a new diagnostic kit, in a rural setup,” she says.</p><p> </p><p>CareHPV is a highly sensitive DNA test, which detects 14 different types of the human papillomavirus that cause cervical cancer, providing results more rapidly than other DNA tests and is designed especially for use in clinics that lack reliable clean water or electricity. It is an incredibly cost-effective option for low-resource countries seeking to develop national cervical cancer screening and treatment programs according to PATH.</p><p> </p><p>“Both projects were completed successfully and brought out research conclusions in the form of national and international publications,” Dr. Asthana says. In addition to the projects, she had also developed health education materials to create cervical cancer awareness among the women of rural Indian community, while providing training to auxiliary nurses and midwives for cervical cancer screening.</p><p> </p><p>Dr. Asthana graduated with a degree in Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery from King George Medical College (KGMC), Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh, India, before pursuing her Doctor of Medicine (MD) in Community Medicine from Ganesh Shankar Vidyarthi Memorial (GSVM) Medical College, Kanpur, India. Throughout her career, she has published over 40 articles in national and international journals. As a result of her hard work and dedication toward the medical field, she has been awarded first prizes for oral presentation in international conferences such as Indian Cancer Congress (ICC 2014) and Asia Oceania Research Organisation on Genital Infections and Neoplasia (AOGIN 2012).</p><p> </p><p>She is an active member of various scientific associations and societies such as the Indian Association for Cancer Research (IACR), Indian Society for Medical Statistics (ISMS), Indian Association of Preventive and Social Medicine (IAPSM), and International Epidemiological Association (IEA). In her effort to provide impactful messages via research publications, she is currently working on remodeling the cancer registry data, which includes a diversified field for incidence of childhood cancer, breast and cervical cancer, trends of major cancer, cancer burden in Northeast of India, among other things.</p><p> </p><p>According to Dr. Asthana, her vision is the utilization of voluminous cancer registry data to produce comprehensive reports in the form of research communication to give a clearer picture of different cancer burden in various Indian registries. “I have also proposed a project for establishing cancer registry at NICPR, which was approved by the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) in principle, but we are currently still waiting for funding,” says the medical scientist.</p><p> </p><p>Focusing on the area of cancer epidemiology and research methodology, Dr. Asthana has faced many challenges commonly encountered by any researcher with a vision to improve medical research. “Gradually, with time and experience, I have overcome these limitations and I now conduct research methodology workshops to help clinicians have a better orientation toward research,” she says. Dr. Asthana is the coordinator of research methodology workshops, which is a series of training courses that started in 2007. Training courses/workshops are being conducted on a regular basis — two to three times a year at ICPO — and on an invitation basis, she has held workshops at other institutions such as her previous visit to Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS in Malaysia to train 30 PhD students.</p><p> </p><p>“The main aim or idea is to educate scientists/researchers and medical faculties about the basics of research methodology, which consist of descriptive statistics, statistical analysis, and clinical trial sampling, as well as research protocol development and scientific reporting/writing,” she elaborates. “The curriculum was formed and executed in such a way that new scientists gain an overall knowledge on how a research project should be planned, executed, and the results communicated,” she adds. The courses, according to her, are targeted for medical faculty members, medical post-graduate students, undergraduate students, and PhD students with a basic science background from various medical institutions.</p><p> </p><p>As a researcher with almost 14 years of experience in medical research, her passion for research does not end there. Dr. Asthana has also ventured into various other new areas that are currently lacking presence in India and other low- and middle-income countries. One such area is palliative care, where she has undergone specialized training in palliative care from the Indian Association of Palliative Care. Additionally, Dr. Asthana is working on a global systematic review project that studies smokeless tobacco attributable risk for oral cancer. She further adds, “As an officer in the district technical support team and in collaboration with World Health Organization, I have devoted quite some time in serving the rural community for leprosy monitoring.”</p><p> </p><p>When asked for her opinion about the future of cancer research, Dr. Asthana believes that targeted therapy is the future of cancer therapy, as it kills only cancer cells and not normal cells, which leads to lesser side effects. “However, the major concern is the cost of it,” she says, “and it doesn’t appear to be affordable in the near future.” Hence, “developing countries like India should focus on the prevention of cancer through the modification of risk factors and adopting healthy lifestyles,” she concludes.</p>

India has one of the world’s highest proportions of plant-based consumers relative to its total population (Sawe). However, the view that India is a predominantly vegetarian nation is likely inaccurate, as recent findings from the 2014 Indian Census indicate that only three in ten Indians self-identity as vegetarian (Census of India). Other studies similarly estimate the prevalence of vegetarianism to range from about 25% (Mintel Global) to about 40% (Euromonitor International; Statista, “Share”), and many Indians are shifting from strict plant-based diets to more flexible versions of plant-based eating (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations). When it comes to meat eating, poultry is the most widely consumed (USDA Foreign Agricultural Service; Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development). Some claim that the changing consumer landscape is also eroding traditional taboos associated with beef and buffalo meat consumption (Kala; Bansal), with many tending to underreport their meat consumption due to religious and cultural stigmas (Bansal).This change in food choices is driven by several factors, such as increasing urbanisation (Devi et al.), rising disposable incomes (Devi et al.; Rukhmini), globalisation, and cross-cultural influences (Majumdar; Sinha). Today, the urban middle-class is one of India’s fastest growing consumer segments (Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania), and the rise in the consumption of animal products is primarily occurring in urban India (National Sample Survey Office), making this an important market to investigate.From a global perspective, while many Western nations are increasingly adopting plant-based diets (Eswaran), the growth in meat consumption is predicted to mainly come from emerging markets (OECD/FAO) like India. With these points in mind, the purpose of this study was to explore contemporary eating practices in urban India and to understand how social structures, cultures, and traditions influence these practices. The findings indicate that the key reasons why many are transitioning away from plant-based diets are the rise of new and diverse meat-based foods in urban India, emerging tastes for meat-based cuisines, and meat becoming to be viewed as a status symbol. These factors are further elaborated upon in this article.MethodA key question of this research was “What are eating practices like in urban India today?” The question itself is a challenge, given India’s varied cultures and traditions, along with its myriad eating practices. Given this diversity, the study used an exploratory qualitative approach, where the main mode of data gathering was twenty-five unstructured individual face-to-face interviews, each approximately sixty minutes in duration. The discussions were left largely open to allow participants to share their unique eating practices and reflect on how their practices are shaped by other socio-cultural practices. The research used an iterative study design, which entailed cycles of simultaneous data collection, analysis, and subsequent adaptations made to some questions to refine the emerging theory. Within the defined parameters of the research objectives, saturation was adequately reached upon completion of twenty-five interviews.The sample comprised Mumbai residents aged 23 to 45 years, which is fairly representative given about a third of India’s population is aged under 40 (Central Intelligence Agency). Mumbai was selected as it is one of India’s largest cities (Central Intelligence Agency) and is considered the country’s commercial capital (Raghavan) and multicultural hub (Gulliver). The interviews were conducted at a popular restaurant in downtown Mumbai. The interviews were conducted predominantly in English, as it is India’s subsidiary official language (Central Intelligence Agency) and the participants were comfortable conversing in English. The sample included participants from two of India’s largest religions—Hindus (80%) and Muslims (13%) (Registrar General and Census Commissioner of India), and comprised an even split of males and females.The Market Research Society of India has developed a socio-economic classification (SEC) grid that segments urban households into twelve groups (Market Research Society of India). This segmentation is based on two questions: level of education—from illiteracy to a postgraduate degree—and the ownership of eleven items that range from fairly basic (e.g., electricity connection, gas stove) to relatively sophisticated (e.g., refrigerator, personal computer). As previous qualitative work has found that education levels and disposable incomes can significantly impact one’s ability to make informed and deliberate food choices (Khara), and given meat is a relatively expensive commodity in India (Puskar-Pasewicz), the study focused on the most affluent segments—i.e., SEC A1 and some of SEC A2.It is said that researcher values and predispositions are to some extent inseparable from the research process, and therefore that potential researcher bias must be managed by being self-aware, looking for contradictory data, and being open to different interpretations of the data (Ogden). As the interviewer is a vegan of Indian ethnicity, she attempted to manage researcher bias in several ways. Triangulation of data sources (e.g., interviews, observations, product analysis) helped provide a multi-faceted understanding of the topic (Patton). The discussion guide and findings were also discussed with researchers from different cultural and dietary backgrounds. It is also argued that when a researcher shares the same background as the participants—as was the case in this study—participants may remain silent on certain issues, as they may assume the researcher knows the context and nuances in relation to these issues (McGinn). This arose in some instances as some participants said, “it’s standard stuff you know?” The interviewer hence took an “outsider” role, stating “I’ll need to know what standard stuff is”, so as to reduce any expectation that she ought to understand the social norms, conventions, and cultural practices related to the issue (Leckie). This helped yield more elaborate discussions and greater insight into the topic from the participant’s own unique perspective.The Rise of New and Diverse Meat-based Foods in Urban India Since the early 1990s, which marked the beginning of globalisation in India, urban Indian food culture has undergone a significant change as food imports have been liberalised and international food brands have made their way into the domestic market (Vepa). As a result, India’s major urban centres appear to be witnessing a food revolution:Bombay has become so metropolitan, I mean it always was but it’s so much more in terms of food now … and it’s so tempting. (Female, age 32)The changing food culture has also seen an increase in new dishes, such as a lamb burger stuffed with blue cheese, and the desire to try out exotic meats such as octopus, camel, rabbit, and emu. Many participants described themselves as “food obsessed” and living in a “present and continuous state of food”, where “we finish a meal and we’ve already started discussing our next meal”.In comparison, traditional plant-based foods were seen to have not undergone the same transformation and were described as “boring” and “standard” in comparison to the more interesting and diverse meat-based dishes:a standard restaurant menu, you don’t have all the different leafy vegetables…It’s mostly a few paneer and this or that—and upon that they don’t do much justice to the vegetable itself. It’s the same masala which they mix in it so everything tastes the same to me. So that’s a big difference when you consider meats. If I eat chicken in different preparations it has a different taste, if I have fish each has a different taste. (Male, age 29)If I’m going out and I’m spending, then I’m not going to eat the same thing which I eat at home every day which is veg food ... I will always pick the non-vegetarian option. (Male, age 32)Liberalisation and the transformation of the local media landscape also appears to have encouraged a new form of consumerism (Sinha). One participant described how an array of new TV channels and programmes have opened up new horizons for food:The whole visual attraction of food, getting it into your living room or into your bedroom and showing you all this great stuff … [There are now] kiddie birthdays which are MasterChef birthdays. There are MasterChef team building activities … So food is very big and I think media has had a very, very large role to play in that. (Female, age 40+)In a similar vein, digital media has also helped shape the food revolution. India has the world’s second largest number of Internet users (Statista, Internet) and new technology seems to have changed the way urban Indians interact with food:We are using social sites. We see all the cooking tips and all the recipes. I have a wife and she’s like, “Oh, let’s cook it!” (Male, age 25)I see everything on YouTube and food channels and all that. I really like the presentation, how they just a little they cook the chicken breast. (Female, age 42)Smartphones and apps have also made access to new cuisines easier, and some participants have become accustomed to instant gratification, givendelivery boys who can satisfy your craving by delivering it to you … You order food from “Zomato” at twelve o’clock, one o’clock also. And order from “Sigree” in the morning also nowadays … more delivery options are there in India. (Male, age 30)This may also partially explain the growing popularity of fusion foods, which include meat-based variations of traditional plant-based dishes, such as meat-filled dosas and parathas.Emerging Tastes for Meat-based Cuisines Many highlighted the sensory pleasure derived from meat eating itself, focusing on a broad range of sensory qualities:There’s the texture, there’s the smell, there’s aroma, there’s the taste itself … Now imagine if chicken or beef was as soft as paneer, we probably wouldn’t enjoy it as much. There’s a bit of that pull. (Female, age 32)Some discussed adopting a plant-based diet for health-related reasons but also highlighted that the experience, overall, was short of satisfactory:I was doing one week of GM Diet … one day it was full of fruits, then one day it was full of vegetables. And then in the third day, when it was actually the chicken part, frankly speaking even I enjoyed … you just cannot have veggies everyday. (Female, age 35)Only eating veg, I think my whole mouth was, I think gone bad. Because I really wanted to have something … keema [minced meat]. (Female, age 38)Plant-based foods, in comparison to meat-based dishes, were described as “bland”, “boring”, and lacking in the “umami zing”. Even if cooked in the same spices, plant-based foods were still seen to be wanting:you have chicken curry and soya bean curry made from the same masala … but if you replace meat with some other substitutes, you’re gonna be able to tell the difference ... the taste of meat, I feel, is better than the taste of a vegetable. (Male, age 32)The thing is, vegetarian dishes are bland … They don’t get the feeling of the spices in the vegetarian dish ... So when you are eating something juicy, having a bite, it’s a mouthful thing. Vegetarian dishes are not mouthful. (Male, age 25)At the end of a vegetarian meal … I think that maybe [it is] a lack of fullness … I’m eating less because you get bored after a while. (Female, age 32)Tasting the Forbidden FruitIn India, chicken is considered to be widely acceptable, as pork is forbidden to Muslims and beef is prohibited for Hindus (Devi et al.; Jishnu). However, the desire for new flavours seems to be pushing the boundaries of what is deemed acceptable, as highlighted in the discussion below with a 25-year-old male Muslim participant:Participant: When I go out with my friends then I try new things like bacon.Moderator: Bacon?Participant: Yeah... when I went with my colleagues to this restaurant in Bandra—it’s called Saltwater Cafe. And they had this chicken burger with bacon wrapped on it.Moderator: Okay.Participant: And I didn’t know at the time that it’s bacon … They didn’t tell me what we are having … When I had it, I told them that it’s tasting like different, totally different, like I haven’t had this in my life.Moderator: Yeah.Participant: And when they told me that it’s bacon then, I thought, okay fine. Something new I can have. Now I’m old enough to make my own choices.Similarly, several Hindu participants expressed similar sentiments about beef consumption:One of our friends, he used to have beef. He said this tastes better than chicken so I tried it. (Male, age 30)I ended up ordering beef which I actually would never eat ... But then everyone was like, it’s a must try ... So I start off with eating the gravy and then it entices me. That’s when I go and try the meat. (Female, aged 23)Although studies on meat eating in India are limited, it seems that many prefer to consume meats outside the home (Suresh; Devi et al.), away from the watchful eyes of parents, partners and, in some instances, the neighbours:My dad would say if you want to eat beef or anything have it outside but don’t bring it home. (Male, age 29)One of my friends … he keeps secret from his girlfriend … he come with us and eat [meat] and tell us not to tell her. (Male, age 26)People around have a little bit of a different view towards people eating non-veg in that area—so we wouldn’t openly talk about eating non-veg when somebody from the locality is around. (Female, age 32)Further to this point, some discussed a certain thrill that arose from pushing social boundaries by eating these forbidden meats:feel excited ... it gave me confidence also. I didn’t know ... my own decision. Something that is riskier in my life, which I hadn’t done before. (Male, age 25)Meat as a Status SymbolIn urban India, meat is increasingly considered a status symbol (Roy; Esselborn; Goswami). Similarly, several participants highlighted that meat-based dishes tend to be cooked for special occasions:non-vegetarian meals [at home] were perceived as being more elaborate and more lavish probably as compared to vegetarian meals. (Male, age 34)Dal [a lentil dish] is one of the basic things which we don’t make in the house when you have guests, or when you have an occasion … We usually make biryani…gravies of chicken or mutton. (Female, age 38)Success in urban India tends to be measured through one’s engagement with commodities that hold status-enhancing appeal (Mathur), and this also appears to apply to eating practices. Among meat-eating communities, it was found that serving only plant-based foods on special occasions was potentially seen as “low grade” and not quite socially acceptable:It’s just considered not something special. In fact, you would be judged…they would be like, “Oh my God, they only served us vegetables.” (Female, age 32)If you are basically from a Gujarati family, you are helpless. You have to serve that thing [vegetarian food] ... But if you are a non-vegetarian … if you serve them veg, it looks too low grade. (Female, age 38)In fact, among some families, serving “simple vegetarian food” tended to be associated with sombre occasions such as funerals, where one tends to avoid eating certain foods that give rise to desires, such as meat. This is elaborated upon in the below discussion with a Hindu participant (female, aged 40+):Participant: So an aunt of mine passed away a little over a year ago … traditionally we have this 13 day thing where you eat—We call it “Oshoge”… the khaana [food] is supposed to be neutral.Moderator: The khaana is supposed to be vegetarian?Participant: Yeah, it’s not just vegetarian … You’re supposed to have very simple vegetarian food like boiled food or you know dahi [plain yoghurt] and puffed rice … after a day of that, we were all looking at each other and then my cousin said, “Let me teach you how to fillet fish.” Similarly, a Muslim participant mentioned how serving certain dishes—such as dal, a common vegetarian dish—tends to be reserved for funeral occasions and is therefore considered socially unacceptable for other occasions:I’m calling a guest and I make dal chawal [lentils and rice] okay? They will think, arrey yeh kya yeh mayat ka khaana hai kya? [oh what is this, is the food for a corpse or what]? ... I can make it on that particular day when somebody has died in the family ... but then whenever guest is at home, or there is an occasion, we cannot make dal. (Female, age 38)ConclusionUrban India is experiencing a shift in norms around food choices, as meat-based dishes appear to have become symbolic of the broader changing landscape. Meat is not only eaten for its sensory properties but also because of its sociocultural associations. In comparison, many plant-based foods are perceived as relatively bland and uninteresting. This raises the question of how to make plant-based eating more appealing, both in terms of social significance and sensory enjoyment. In view of the attachment to familiar customs against the backdrop of a rapidly changing urban culture (Sinha; Venkatesh), perhaps plant-based foods could be re-introduced to the urban Indian as a blend of Western novelty and traditional familiarity (Majumdar), thereby representing the “the new along with the old” (Sinha 18), and hence enhancing their status. 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Diaspora This article looks at diaspora through the transformations of an established public service broadcaster, the BBC World Service, by considering some of the findings of the AHRC-funded Tuning In: Contact Zones at the BBC World Service, which is part of the Diasporas, Migration and Identities program. Tuning In has six themes, each of which focuses upon the role of the BBC WS: The Politics of Translation, Diasporic Nationhood, Religious Transnationalism, Sport across Diasporas, Migrating Music and Drama for Development. The World Service, which was until 2011 funded by the Foreign Office, was set up to cater for the British diaspora and had the specific remit of transmitting ideas about Britishness to its audiences overseas. Tuning In demonstrates interrelationships between the global and the local in the diasporic contact zone of the BBC World Service, which has provided a mediated home for the worldwide British diaspora since its inception in 1932. The local and the global have merged, elided, and separated at different times and in different spaces in the changing story of the BBC (Briggs). The BBC WS is both local and global with activities that present Britishness both at home and abroad. The service has, however, come a long way since its early days as the Empire Service. Audiences for the World Service’s 31 foreign language services, radio, television, and Internet facilities include substantive non-British/English-speaking constituencies, rendering it a contact zone for the exploration of ideas and political opportunities on a truly transnational scale. This heterogeneous body of exilic, refugee intellectuals, writers, and artists now operates alongside an ongoing expression of Britishness in all its diverse reconfiguration. This includes the residual voice of empire and its patriarchal paternalism, the embrace of more recent expressions of neoliberalism as well as traditional values of impartiality and objectivism and, in the case of the arts, elements of bohemianism and creative innovation. The World Service might have begun as a communication system for the British ex-pat diaspora, but its role has changed along with the changing relationship between Britain and its colonial past. In the terrain of sport, for example, cricket, the “game of empire,” has shifted from Britain to the Indian subcontinent (Guha) with the rise of “Twenty 20” and the Indian Premier League (IPL); summed up in Ashis Nandy’s claim that “cricket is an Indian game accidentally discovered by the English” (Nandy viii). English county cricket dominated the airways of the World Service well into the latter half of the twentieth century, but the audiences of the service have demanded a response to social and cultural change and the service has responded. Sport can thus be seen to have offered a democratic space in which new diasporic relations can be forged as well as one in which colonial and patriarchal values are maintained. The BBC WS today is part of a network through which non-British diasporic peoples can reconnect with their home countries via the service, as well as an online forum for debate across the globe. In many regions of the world, it continues to be the single most trusted source of information at times of crisis and disaster because of its traditions of impartiality and objectivity, even though (as noted in the article on Al-Jazeera in this special issue) this view is hotly contested. The principles of objectivity and impartiality are central to the BBC WS, which may seem paradoxical since it is funded by the Commonwealth and Foreign office, and its origins lie in empire and colonial discourse. Archive material researched by our project demonstrates the specifically ideological role of what was first called the Empire Service. The language of empire was deployed in this early programming, and there is an explicit expression of an ideological purpose (Hill). For example, at the Imperial Conference in 1930, the service was supported in terms of its political powers of “strengthening ties” between parts of the empire. This view comes from a speech by John Reith, the BBC’s first Director General, which was broadcast when the service opened. In this speech, broadcasting is identified as having come to involve a “connecting and co-ordinating link between the scattered parts of the British Empire” (Reith). Local British values are transmitted across the globe. Through the service, empire and nation are reinstated through the routine broadcasting of cyclical events, the importance of which Scannell and Cardiff describe as follows: Nothing so well illustrates the noiseless manner in which the BBC became perhaps the central agent of national culture as its cyclical role; the cyclical production year in year out, of an orderly, regular progression of festivities, rituals and celebrations—major and minor, civic and sacred—that mark the unfolding of the broadcast year. (278; italics in the original) State occasions and big moments, including those directly concerned with governance and affairs of state, and those which focused upon sport and religion, were a big part in these “noiseless” cycles, and became key elements in the making of Britishness across the globe. The BBC is “noiseless” because the timetable is assumed and taken for granted as not only what is but what should be. However, the BBC WS has been and has had to be responsive to major shifts in global and local—and, indeed, glocal—power geometries that have led to spatial transformations, notably in the reconfiguration of the service in the era of postcolonialism. Some of these massive changes have involved the large-scale movement of people and a concomitant rethinking of diaspora as a concept. Empire, like nation, operates as an “imagined community,” too big to be grasped by individuals (Anderson), as well as a material actuality. The dynamics of identification are rarely linear and there are inconsistencies and disruptions: even when the voice is officially that of empire, the practice of the World Service is much more diverse, nuanced, and dialogical. The BBC WS challenges boundaries through the connectivities of communication and through different ways of belonging and, similarly, through a problematisation of concepts like attachment and detachment; this is most notable in the way in which programming has adapted to new diasporic audiences and in the reworkings of spatiality in the shift from empire to diversity via multiculturalism. There are tensions between diaspora and multiculturalism that are apparent in a discussion of broadcasting and communication networks. Diaspora has been distinguished by mobility and hybridity (Clifford, Hall, Bhaba, Gilroy) and it has been argued that the adjectival use of diasporic offers more opportunity for fluidity and transformation (Clifford). The concept of diaspora, as it has been used to explain the fluidity and mobility of diasporic identifications, can challenge more stabilised, “classic” understandings of diaspora (Chivallon). A hybrid version of diaspora might sit uneasily with a strong sense of belonging and with the idea that the broadcast media offer a multicultural space in which each voice can be heard and a wide range of cultures are present. Tuning In engaged with ways of rethinking the BBC’s relationship to diaspora in the twenty-first century in a number of ways: for example, in the intersection of discursive regimes of representation; in the status of public service broadcasting; vis-à-vis the consequences of diverse diasporic audiences; through the role of cultural intermediaries such as journalists and writers; and via global economic and political materialities (Gillespie, Webb and Baumann). Tuning In thus provided a multi-themed and methodologically diverse exploration of how the BBC WS is itself a series of spaces which are constitutive of the transformation of diasporic identifications. Exploring the part played by the BBC WS in changing and continuing social flows and networks involves, first, reconfiguring what is understood by transnationalism, diaspora, and postcolonial relationalities: in particular, attending to how these transform as well as sometimes reinstate colonial and patriarchal discourses and practices, thus bringing together different dimensions of the local and the global. Tuning In ranges across different fields, embracing cultural, social, and political areas of experience as represented in broadcasting coverage. These fields illustrate the educative role of the BBC and the World Service that is also linked to its particular version of impartiality; just as The Archers was set up to provide information and guidance through a narrative of everyday life to rural communities and farmers after the Second World War, so the Afghan version plays an “edutainment” role (Skuse) where entertainment also serves an educational, public service information role. Indeed, the use of soap opera genre such as The Archers as a vehicle for humanitarian and health information has been very successful over the past decade, with the “edutainment” genre becoming a feature of the World Service’s broadcasting in places such as Rwanda, Somalia, Nigeria, India, Nepal, Burma, Afghanistan, and Cambodia. In a genre that has been promoted by the World Service Trust, the charitable arm of the BBC WS uses drama formats to build transnational production relationships with media professionals and to strengthen creative capacities to undertake behaviour change through communication work. Such programming, which is in the tradition of the BBC WS, draws upon the service’s expertise and exhibits both an ideological commitment to progressive social intervention and a paternalist approach drawing upon colonialist legacies. Nowadays, however, the BBC WS can be considered a diasporic contact zone, providing sites of transnational intra-diasporic contact as well as cross-cultural encounters, spaces for cross-diasporic creativity and representation, and a forum for cross-cultural dialogue and potentially cosmopolitan translations (Pratt, Clifford). These activities are, however, still marked by historically forged asymmetric power relations, notably of colonialism, imperialism, and globalisation, as well as still being dominated by hegemonic masculinity in many parts of the service, which thus represent sites of contestation, conflict, and transgression. Conversely, diasporic identities are themselves co-shaped by media representations (Sreberny). The diasporic contact zone is a relational space in which diasporic identities are made and remade and contested. Tuning In employed a diverse range of methods to analyse the part played by the BBC WS in changing and continuing social and cultural flows, networks, and reconfigurations of transnationalisms and diaspora, as well as reinstating colonial, patriarchal practices. The research deconstructed some assumptions and conditions of class-based elitism, colonialism, and patriarchy through a range of strategies. Texts are, of course, central to this work, with the BBC Archives at Caversham (near Reading) representing the starting point for many researchers. The archive is a rich source of material for researchers which carries a vast range of data including fragile memos written on scraps of paper: a very local source of global communications. Other textual material occupies the less locatable cyberspace, for example in the case of Have Your Say exchanges on the Web. People also featured in the project, through the media, in cyberspace, and physical encounters, all of which demonstrate the diverse modes of connection that have been established. Researchers worked with the BBC WS in a variety of ways, not only through interviews and ethnographic approaches, such as participant observation and witness seminars, but also through exchanges between the service, its practitioners, and the researchers (for example, through broadcasts where the project provided the content and the ideas and researchers have been part of programs that have gone out on the BBC WS (Goldblatt, Webb), bringing together people who work for the BBC and Tuning In researchers). On this point, it should be remembered that Bush House is, itself, a diasporic space which, from its geographical location in the Strand in London, has brought together diasporic people from around the globe to establish international communication networks, and has thus become the focus and locus of some of our research. What we have understood by the term “diasporic space” in this context includes both the materialities of architecture and cyberspace which is the site of digital diasporas (Anderssen) and, indeed, the virtual exchanges featured on “Have Your Say,” the online feedback site (Tuning In). Living the Glocal The BBC WS offers a mode of communication and a series of networks that are spatially located both in the UK, through the material presence of Bush House, and abroad, through the diasporic communities constituting contemporary audiences. The service may have been set up to provide news and entertainment for the British diaspora abroad, but the transformation of the UK into a multi-ethnic society “at home,” alongside its commitment to, and the servicing of, no less than 32 countries abroad, demonstrates a new mission and a new balance of power. Different diasporic communities, such as multi-ethnic Londoners, and local and British Muslims in the north of England, demonstrate the dynamics and ambivalences of what is meant by “diaspora” today. For example, the BBC and the WS play an ambiguous role in the lives of UK Muslim communities with Pakistani connections, where consumers of the international news can feel that the BBC is complicit in the conflation of Muslims with terrorists. Engaging Diaspora Audiences demonstrated the diversity of audience reception in a climate of marginalisation, often bordering on moral panic, and showed how diasporic audiences often use Al-Jazeera or Pakistani and Urdu channels, which are seen to take up more sympathetic political positions. It seems, however, that more egalitarian conversations are becoming possible through the channels of the WS. The participation of local people in the BBC WS global project is seen, for example, as in the popular “Witness Seminars” that have both a current focus and one that is projected into the future, as in the case of the “2012 Generation” (that is, the young people who come of age in 2012, the year of the London Olympics). The Witness Seminars demonstrate the recuperation of past political and social events such as “Bangladesh in 1971” (Tuning In), “The Cold War seminar” (Tuning In) and “Diasporic Nationhood” (the cultural movements reiterated and recovered in the “Literary Lives” project (Gillespie, Baumann and Zinik). Indeed, the WS’s current focus on the “2012 Generation,” including an event in which 27 young people (each of whom speaks one of the WS languages) were invited to an open day at Bush House in 2009, vividly illustrates how things have changed. Whereas in 1948 (the last occasion when the Olympic Games were held in London), the world came to London, it is arguable that, in 2012, in contemporary multi-ethnic Britain, the world is already here (Webb). This enterprise has the advantage of giving voice to the present rather than filtering the present through the legacies of colonialism that remain a problem for the Witness Seminars more generally. The democratising possibilities of sport, as well as the restrictions of its globalising elements, are well represented by Tuning In (Woodward). Sport has, of course become more globalised, especially through the development of Internet and satellite technologies (Giulianotti) but it retains powerful local affiliations and identifications. At all levels and in diverse places, there are strong attachments to local and national teams that are constitutive of communities, including diasporic and multi-ethnic communities. Sport is both typical and distinctive of the BBC World Service; something that is part of a wider picture but also an area of experience with a life of its own. Our “Sport across Diasporas” project has thus explored some of the routes the World Service has travelled in its engagement with sport in order to provide some understanding of the legacy of empire and patriarchy, as well as engaging with the multiplicities of change in the reconstruction of Britishness. Here, it is important to recognise that what began as “BBC Sport” evolved into “World Service Sport.” Coverage of the world’s biggest sporting events was established through the 1930s to the 1960s in the development of the BBC WS. However, it is not only the global dimensions of sporting events that have been assumed; so too are national identifications. There is no question that the superiority of British/English sport is naturalised through its dominance of the BBC WS airways, but the possibilities of reinterpretation and re-accommodation have also been made possible. There has, indeed, been a changing place of sport in the BBC WS, which can only be understood with reference to wider changes in the relationship between broadcasting and sport, and demonstrates the powerful synchronies between social, political, technological, economic, and cultural factors, notably those that make up the media–sport–commerce nexus that drives so much of the trajectory of contemporary sport. Diasporic audiences shape the schedule as much as what is broadcast. There is no single voice of the BBC in sport. The BBC archive demonstrates a variety of narratives through the development and transformation of the World Service’s sports broadcasting. There are, however, silences: notably those involving women. Sport is still a patriarchal field. However, the imperial genealogies of sport are inextricably entwined with the social, political, and cultural changes taking place in the wider world. There is no detectable linear narrative but rather a series of tensions and contradictions that are reflected and reconfigured in the texts in which deliberations are made. In sport broadcasting, the relationship of the BBC WS with its listeners is, in many instances, genuinely dialogic: for example, through “Have Your Say” websites and internet forums, and some of the actors in these dialogic exchanges are the broadcasters themselves. The history of the BBC and the World Service is one which manifests a degree of autonomy and some spontaneity on the part of journalists and broadcasters. For example, in the case of the BBC WS African sports program, Fast Track (2009), many of the broadcasters interviewed report being able to cover material not technically within their brief; news journalists are able to engage with sporting events and sports journalists have covered social and political news (Woodward). Sometimes this is a matter of taking the initiative or simply of being in the right place at the right time, although this affords an agency to journalists which is increasingly unlikely in the twenty-first century. The Politics of Translation: Words and Music The World Service has played a key role as a cultural broker in the political arena through what could be construed as “educational broadcasting” via the wider terrain of the arts: for example, literature, drama, poetry, and music. Over the years, Bush House has been a home-from-home for poets: internationalists, translators from classical and modern languages, and bohemians; a constituency that, for all its cosmopolitanism, was predominantly white and male in the early days. For example, in the 1930s and 1940s, Louis MacNeice was commissioning editor and surrounded by a friendship network of salaried poets, such as W. H. Auden, Dylan Thomas, C. Day Lewis, and Stephen Spender, who wrote and performed their work for the WS. The foreign language departments of the BBC WS, meanwhile, hired émigrés and exiles from their countries’ educated elites to do similar work. The biannual, book-format journal Modern Poetry in Translation (MPT), which was founded in 1965 by Daniel Weissbort and Ted Hughes, included a dedication in Weissbort’s final issue (MPT 22, 2003) to “Poets at Bush House.” This volume amounts to a celebration of the BBC WS and its creative culture, which extended beyond the confines of broadcasting spaces. The reminiscences in “Poets at Bush House” suggest an institutional culture of informal connections and a fluidity of local exchanges that is resonant of the fluidity of the flows and networks of diaspora (Cheesman). Music, too, has distinctive characteristics that mark out this terrain on the broadcast schedule and in the culture of the BBC WS. Music is differentiated from language-centred genres, making it a particularly powerful medium of cross-cultural exchange. Music is portable and yet is marked by a cultural rootedness that may impede translation and interpretation. Music also carries ambiguities as a marker of status across borders, and it combines aesthetic intensity and diffuseness. The Migrating Music project demonstrated BBC WS mediation of music and identity flows (Toynbee). In the production and scheduling notes, issues of migration and diaspora are often addressed directly in the programming of music, while the movement of peoples is a leitmotif in all programs in which music is played and discussed. Music genres are mobile, diasporic, and can be constitutive of Paul Gilroy’s “Black Atlantic” (Gilroy), which foregrounds the itinerary of West African music to the Caribbean via the Middle Passage, cross-fertilising with European traditions in the Americas to produce blues and other hybrid forms, and the journey of these forms to Europe. The Migrating Music project focused upon the role of the BBC WS as narrator of the Black Atlantic story and of South Asian cross-over music, from bhangra to filmi, which can be situated among the South Asian diaspora in east and south Africa as well as the Caribbean where they now interact with reggae, calypso, Rapso, and Popso. The transversal flows of music and lyrics encompasses the lived experience of the different diasporas that are accommodated in the BBC WS schedules: for example, they keep alive the connection between the Irish “at home” and in the diaspora through programs featuring traditional music, further demonstrating the interconnections between local and global attachments as well as points of disconnection and contradiction. Textual analysis—including discourse analysis of presenters’ speech, program trailers and dialogue and the BBC’s own construction of “world music”—has revealed that the BBC WS itself performs a constitutive role in keeping alive these traditions. Music, too, has a range of emotional affects which are manifest in the semiotic analyses that have been conducted of recordings and performances. Further, the creative personnel who are involved in music programming, including musicians, play their own role in this ongoing process of musical migration. Once again, the networks of people involved as practitioners become central to the processes and systems through which diasporic audiences are re-produced and engaged. Conclusion The BBC WS can claim to be a global and local cultural intermediary not only because the service was set up to engage with the British diaspora in an international context but because the service, today, is demonstrably a voice that is continually negotiating multi-ethnic audiences both in the UK and across the world. At best, the World Service is a dynamic facilitator of conversations within and across diasporas: ideas are relocated, translated, and travel in different directions. The “local” of a British broadcasting service, established to promote British values across the globe, has been transformed, both through its engagements with an increasingly diverse set of diasporic audiences and through the transformations in how diasporas themselves self-define and operate. On the BBC WS, demographic, social, and cultural changes mean that the global is now to be found in the local of the UK and any simplistic separation of local and global is no longer tenable. The educative role once adopted by the BBC, and then the World Service, nevertheless still persists in other contexts (“from Ambridge to Afghanistan”), and clearly the WS still treads a dangerous path between the paternalism and patriarchy of its colonial past and its responsiveness to change. In spite of competition from television, satellite, and Internet technologies which challenge the BBC’s former hegemony, the BBC World Service continues to be a dynamic space for (re)creating and (re)instating diasporic audiences: audiences, texts, and broadcasters intersect with social, economic, political, and cultural forces. The monologic “voice of empire” has been countered and translated into the language of diversity and while, at times, the relationship between continuity and change may be seen to exist in awkward tension, it is clear that the Corporation is adapting to the needs of its twenty-first century audience. ReferencesAnderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities, Reflections of the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983. Anderssen, Matilda. “Digital Diasporas.” 2010. 30 Nov. 2010 ‹http://www8.open.ac.uk/researchprojects/diasporas/cross-research/digital-diasporas›. Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. Briggs, Asa. A History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom, Volume II: The Golden Age of Wireless. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995. Cheesman, Tom. “Poetries On and Off Air.” 2010. 30 Nov. 2010 ‹http://www8.open.ac.uk/researchprojects/diasporas/cross-research/bush-house-cultures›. Chivallon, Christine. “Beyond Gilroy’s Black Atlantic: The Experience of the African Diaspora.” Diaspora 11.3 (2002): 359–82. Clifford, James. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997. Fast Track. BBC, 2009. 30 Nov. 2010 ‹http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/sport/2009/03/000000_fast_track.shtml›. Gillespie, Marie, Alban Webb, and Gerd Baumann (eds.). “The BBC World Service 1932–2007: Broadcasting Britishness Abroad.” Special Issue. The Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 28.4 (Oct. 2008). Gillespie, Marie, Gerd Baumann, and Zinovy Zinik. “Poets at Bush House.” 2010. 30 Nov. 2010 ‹http://www8.open.ac.uk/researchprojects/diasporas/about›. Gilroy, Paul. Black Atlantic. MA: Harvard UP, 1993. Giulianotti, Richard. Sport: A Critical Sociology. Cambridge: Polity, 2005. Goldblatt, David. “The Cricket Revolution.” 2009. 30 Nov. 2010 ‹http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0036ww9›. Guha, Ramachandra. A Corner of a Foreign Field: The Indian History of an English Game. London: Picador, 2002. Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.” Identity: Community, Culture, Difference. Ed. Jonathan Rutherford. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990, 223–37. Hill, Andrew. “The BBC Empire Service: The Voice, the Discourse of the Master and Ventriloquism.” South Asian Diaspora 2.1 (2010): 25–38. Hollis, Robert, Norma Rinsler, and Daniel Weissbort. “Poets at Bush House: The BBC World Service.” Modern Poetry in Translation 22 (2003). Nandy, Ashis. The Tao of Cricket: On Games of Destiny and the Destiny of Games. New Delhi: Oxford UP, 1989. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge, 1992. Reith, John. “Opening of the Empire Service.” In “Empire Service Policy 1932-1933”, E4/6: 19 Dec. 1932. 30 Nov. 2010 ‹http://www.open.ac.uk/socialsciences/diasporas/research.htm›. Scannell, Paddy, and David Cardiff. A Social History of British Broadcasting, 1922-1938. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991. Skuse, Andrew. “Drama for Development.” 2010. 30 Nov. 2010 ‹http://www8.open.ac.uk/researchprojects/diasporas/core-research/drama-for-development›. Sreberny, Annabelle. “The BBC World Service and the Greater Middle East: Comparisons, Contrasts, Conflicts.” Guest ed. Annabelle Sreberny, Marie Gillespie, Gerd Baumann. Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 3.2 (2010). Toynbee, Jason. “Migrating Music.” 2010. 30 Nov. 2010 ‹http://www8.open.ac.uk/researchprojects/diasporas/core-research/migrating-music›. Tuning In. 30 Nov. 2010 ‹http://www.open.ac.uk/socialsciences/diasporas/index.htm›. Webb, Alban. “Cold War Diplomacy.” 2010. 30 Nov. 2010 ‹http://www8.open.ac.uk/researchprojects/diasporas/projects/cold-war-politics-and-bbc-world-service›. Woodward, Kath. Embodied Sporting Practices. Regulating and Regulatory Bodies. Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.

There is no diagram that does not also include, besides the points it connects up, certain relatively free or unbounded points, points of creativity, change and resistance, and it is perhaps with these that we ought to begin in order to understand the whole picture. (Deleuze, “Foucault” 37) Monty Cantsin: Why do we use a pervert software robot to exploit our collective consensual mind? Letitia: Because we want the thief to be a digital entity. Monty Cantsin: But isn’t this really blasphemic? Letitia: Yes, but god – in our case a meta-cocktail of authorship and copyright – can not be trusted anymore. (Amazon Noir, “Dialogue”) In 2006, some 3,000 digital copies of books were silently “stolen” from online retailer Amazon.com by targeting vulnerabilities in the “Search inside the Book” feature from the company’s website. Over several weeks, between July and October, a specially designed software program bombarded the Search Inside!™ interface with multiple requests, assembling full versions of texts and distributing them across peer-to-peer networks (P2P). Rather than a purely malicious and anonymous hack, however, the “heist” was publicised as a tactical media performance, Amazon Noir, produced by self-proclaimed super-villains Paolo Cirio, Alessandro Ludovico, and Ubermorgen.com. While controversially directed at highlighting the infrastructures that materially enforce property rights and access to knowledge online, the exploit additionally interrogated its own interventionist status as theoretically and politically ambiguous. That the “thief” was represented as a digital entity or machinic process (operating on the very terrain where exchange is differentiated) and the emergent act of “piracy” was fictionalised through the genre of noir conveys something of the indeterminacy or immensurability of the event. In this short article, I discuss some political aspects of intellectual property in relation to the complexities of Amazon Noir, particularly in the context of control, technological action, and discourses of freedom. Software, Piracy As a force of distribution, the Internet is continually subject to controversies concerning flows and permutations of agency. While often directed by discourses cast in terms of either radical autonomy or control, the technical constitution of these digital systems is more regularly a case of establishing structures of operation, codified rules, or conditions of possibility; that is, of guiding social processes and relations (McKenzie, “Cutting Code” 1-19). Software, as a medium through which such communication unfolds and becomes organised, is difficult to conceptualise as a result of being so event-orientated. There lies a complicated logic of contingency and calculation at its centre, a dimension exacerbated by the global scale of informational networks, where the inability to comprehend an environment that exceeds the limits of individual experience is frequently expressed through desires, anxieties, paranoia. Unsurprisingly, cautionary accounts and moral panics on identity theft, email fraud, pornography, surveillance, hackers, and computer viruses are as commonplace as those narratives advocating user interactivity. When analysing digital systems, cultural theory often struggles to describe forces that dictate movement and relations between disparate entities composed by code, an aspect heightened by the intensive movement of informational networks where differences are worked out through the constant exposure to unpredictability and chance (Terranova, “Communication beyond Meaning”). Such volatility partially explains the recent turn to distribution in media theory, as once durable networks for constructing economic difference – organising information in space and time (“at a distance”), accelerating or delaying its delivery – appear contingent, unstable, or consistently irregular (Cubitt 194). Attributing actions to users, programmers, or the software itself is a difficult task when faced with these states of co-emergence, especially in the context of sharing knowledge and distributing media content. Exchanges between corporate entities, mainstream media, popular cultural producers, and legal institutions over P2P networks represent an ongoing controversy in this respect, with numerous stakeholders competing between investments in property, innovation, piracy, and publics. Beginning to understand this problematic landscape is an urgent task, especially in relation to the technological dynamics that organised and propel such antagonisms. In the influential fragment, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” Gilles Deleuze describes the historical passage from modern forms of organised enclosure (the prison, clinic, factory) to the contemporary arrangement of relational apparatuses and open systems as being materially provoked by – but not limited to – the mass deployment of networked digital technologies. In his analysis, the disciplinary mode most famously described by Foucault is spatially extended to informational systems based on code and flexibility. According to Deleuze, these cybernetic machines are connected into apparatuses that aim for intrusive monitoring: “in a control-based system nothing’s left alone for long” (“Control and Becoming” 175). Such a constant networking of behaviour is described as a shift from “molds” to “modulation,” where controls become “a self-transmuting molding changing from one moment to the next, or like a sieve whose mesh varies from one point to another” (“Postscript” 179). Accordingly, the crisis underpinning civil institutions is consistent with the generalisation of disciplinary logics across social space, forming an intensive modulation of everyday life, but one ambiguously associated with socio-technical ensembles. The precise dynamics of this epistemic shift are significant in terms of political agency: while control implies an arrangement capable of absorbing massive contingency, a series of complex instabilities actually mark its operation. Noise, viral contamination, and piracy are identified as key points of discontinuity; they appear as divisions or “errors” that force change by promoting indeterminacies in a system that would otherwise appear infinitely calculable, programmable, and predictable. The rendering of piracy as a tactic of resistance, a technique capable of levelling out the uneven economic field of global capitalism, has become a predictable catch-cry for political activists. In their analysis of multitude, for instance, Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt describe the contradictions of post-Fordist production as conjuring forth a tendency for labour to “become common.” That is, as productivity depends on flexibility, communication, and cognitive skills, directed by the cultivation of an ideal entrepreneurial or flexible subject, the greater the possibilities for self-organised forms of living that significantly challenge its operation. In this case, intellectual property exemplifies such a spiralling paradoxical logic, since “the infinite reproducibility central to these immaterial forms of property directly undermines any such construction of scarcity” (Hardt and Negri 180). The implications of the filesharing program Napster, accordingly, are read as not merely directed toward theft, but in relation to the private character of the property itself; a kind of social piracy is perpetuated that is viewed as radically recomposing social resources and relations. Ravi Sundaram, a co-founder of the Sarai new media initiative in Delhi, has meanwhile drawn attention to the existence of “pirate modernities” capable of being actualised when individuals or local groups gain illegitimate access to distributive media technologies; these are worlds of “innovation and non-legality,” of electronic survival strategies that partake in cultures of dispersal and escape simple classification (94). Meanwhile, pirate entrepreneurs Magnus Eriksson and Rasmus Fleische – associated with the notorious Piratbyrn – have promoted the bleeding away of Hollywood profits through fully deployed P2P networks, with the intention of pushing filesharing dynamics to an extreme in order to radicalise the potential for social change (“Copies and Context”). From an aesthetic perspective, such activist theories are complemented by the affective register of appropriation art, a movement broadly conceived in terms of antagonistically liberating knowledge from the confines of intellectual property: “those who pirate and hijack owned material, attempting to free information, art, film, and music – the rhetoric of our cultural life – from what they see as the prison of private ownership” (Harold 114). These “unruly” escape attempts are pursued through various modes of engagement, from experimental performances with legislative infrastructures (i.e. Kembrew McLeod’s patenting of the phrase “freedom of expression”) to musical remix projects, such as the work of Negativland, John Oswald, RTMark, Detritus, Illegal Art, and the Evolution Control Committee. Amazon Noir, while similarly engaging with questions of ownership, is distinguished by specifically targeting information communication systems and finding “niches” or gaps between overlapping networks of control and economic governance. Hans Bernhard and Lizvlx from Ubermorgen.com (meaning ‘Day after Tomorrow,’ or ‘Super-Tomorrow’) actually describe their work as “research-based”: “we not are opportunistic, money-driven or success-driven, our central motivation is to gain as much information as possible as fast as possible as chaotic as possible and to redistribute this information via digital channels” (“Interview with Ubermorgen”). This has led to experiments like Google Will Eat Itself (2005) and the construction of the automated software thief against Amazon.com, as process-based explorations of technological action. Agency, Distribution Deleuze’s “postscript” on control has proven massively influential for new media art by introducing a series of key questions on power (or desire) and digital networks. As a social diagram, however, control should be understood as a partial rather than totalising map of relations, referring to the augmentation of disciplinary power in specific technological settings. While control is a conceptual regime that refers to open-ended terrains beyond the architectural locales of enclosure, implying a move toward informational networks, data solicitation, and cybernetic feedback, there remains a peculiar contingent dimension to its limits. For example, software code is typically designed to remain cycling until user input is provided. There is a specifically immanent and localised quality to its actions that might be taken as exemplary of control as a continuously modulating affective materialism. The outcome is a heightened sense of bounded emergencies that are either flattened out or absorbed through reconstitution; however, these are never linear gestures of containment. As Tiziana Terranova observes, control operates through multilayered mechanisms of order and organisation: “messy local assemblages and compositions, subjective and machinic, characterised by different types of psychic investments, that cannot be the subject of normative, pre-made political judgments, but which need to be thought anew again and again, each time, in specific dynamic compositions” (“Of Sense and Sensibility” 34). This event-orientated vitality accounts for the political ambitions of tactical media as opening out communication channels through selective “transversal” targeting. Amazon Noir, for that reason, is pitched specifically against the material processes of communication. The system used to harvest the content from “Search inside the Book” is described as “robot-perversion-technology,” based on a network of four servers around the globe, each with a specific function: one located in the United States that retrieved (or “sucked”) the books from the site, one in Russia that injected the assembled documents onto P2P networks and two in Europe that coordinated the action via intelligent automated programs (see “The Diagram”). According to the “villains,” the main goal was to steal all 150,000 books from Search Inside!™ then use the same technology to steal books from the “Google Print Service” (the exploit was limited only by the amount of technological resources financially available, but there are apparent plans to improve the technique by reinvesting the money received through the settlement with Amazon.com not to publicise the hack). In terms of informational culture, this system resembles a machinic process directed at redistributing copyright content; “The Diagram” visualises key processes that define digital piracy as an emergent phenomenon within an open-ended and responsive milieu. That is, the static image foregrounds something of the activity of copying being a technological action that complicates any analysis focusing purely on copyright as content. In this respect, intellectual property rights are revealed as being entangled within information architectures as communication management and cultural recombination – dissipated and enforced by a measured interplay between openness and obstruction, resonance and emergence (Terranova, “Communication beyond Meaning” 52). To understand data distribution requires an acknowledgement of these underlying nonhuman relations that allow for such informational exchanges. It requires an understanding of the permutations of agency carried along by digital entities. According to Lawrence Lessig’s influential argument, code is not merely an object of governance, but has an overt legislative function itself. Within the informational environments of software, “a law is defined, not through a statue, but through the code that governs the space” (20). These points of symmetry are understood as concretised social values: they are material standards that regulate flow. Similarly, Alexander Galloway describes computer protocols as non-institutional “etiquette for autonomous agents,” or “conventional rules that govern the set of possible behavior patterns within a heterogeneous system” (7). In his analysis, these agreed-upon standardised actions operate as a style of management fostered by contradiction: progressive though reactionary, encouraging diversity by striving for the universal, synonymous with possibility but completely predetermined, and so on (243-244). Needless to say, political uncertainties arise from a paradigm that generates internal material obscurities through a constant twinning of freedom and control. For Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, these Cold War systems subvert the possibilities for any actual experience of autonomy by generalising paranoia through constant intrusion and reducing social problems to questions of technological optimisation (1-30). In confrontation with these seemingly ubiquitous regulatory structures, cultural theory requires a critical vocabulary differentiated from computer engineering to account for the sociality that permeates through and concatenates technological realities. In his recent work on “mundane” devices, software and code, Adrian McKenzie introduces a relevant analytic approach in the concept of technological action as something that both abstracts and concretises relations in a diffusion of collective-individual forces. Drawing on the thought of French philosopher Gilbert Simondon, he uses the term “transduction” to identify a key characteristic of technology in the relational process of becoming, or ontogenesis. This is described as bringing together disparate things into composites of relations that evolve and propagate a structure throughout a domain, or “overflow existing modalities of perception and movement on many scales” (“Impersonal and Personal Forces in Technological Action” 201). Most importantly, these innovative diffusions or contagions occur by bridging states of difference or incompatibilities. Technological action, therefore, arises from a particular type of disjunctive relation between an entity and something external to itself: “in making this relation, technical action changes not only the ensemble, but also the form of life of its agent. Abstraction comes into being and begins to subsume or reconfigure existing relations between the inside and outside” (203). Here, reciprocal interactions between two states or dimensions actualise disparate potentials through metastability: an equilibrium that proliferates, unfolds, and drives individuation. While drawing on cybernetics and dealing with specific technological platforms, McKenzie’s work can be extended to describe the significance of informational devices throughout control societies as a whole, particularly as a predictive and future-orientated force that thrives on staged conflicts. Moreover, being a non-deterministic technical theory, it additionally speaks to new tendencies in regimes of production that harness cognition and cooperation through specially designed infrastructures to enact persistent innovation without any end-point, final goal or natural target (Thrift 283-295). Here, the interface between intellectual property and reproduction can be seen as a site of variation that weaves together disparate objects and entities by imbrication in social life itself. These are specific acts of interference that propel relations toward unforeseen conclusions by drawing on memories, attention spans, material-technical traits, and so on. The focus lies on performance, context, and design “as a continual process of tuning arrived at by distributed aspiration” (Thrift 295). This later point is demonstrated in recent scholarly treatments of filesharing networks as media ecologies. Kate Crawford, for instance, describes the movement of P2P as processual or adaptive, comparable to technological action, marked by key transitions from partially decentralised architectures such as Napster, to the fully distributed systems of Gnutella and seeded swarm-based networks like BitTorrent (30-39). Each of these technologies can be understood as a response to various legal incursions, producing radically dissimilar socio-technological dynamics and emergent trends for how agency is modulated by informational exchanges. Indeed, even these aberrant formations are characterised by modes of commodification that continually spillover and feedback on themselves, repositioning markets and commodities in doing so, from MP3s to iPods, P2P to broadband subscription rates. However, one key limitation of this ontological approach is apparent when dealing with the sheer scale of activity involved, where mass participation elicits certain degrees of obscurity and relative safety in numbers. This represents an obvious problem for analysis, as dynamics can easily be identified in the broadest conceptual sense, without any understanding of the specific contexts of usage, political impacts, and economic effects for participants in their everyday consumptive habits. Large-scale distributed ensembles are “problematic” in their technological constitution, as a result. They are sites of expansive overflow that provoke an equivalent individuation of thought, as the Recording Industry Association of America observes on their educational website: “because of the nature of the theft, the damage is not always easy to calculate but not hard to envision” (“Piracy”). The politics of the filesharing debate, in this sense, depends on the command of imaginaries; that is, being able to conceptualise an overarching structural consistency to a persistent and adaptive ecology. As a mode of tactical intervention, Amazon Noir dramatises these ambiguities by framing technological action through the fictional sensibilities of narrative genre. Ambiguity, Control The extensive use of imagery and iconography from “noir” can be understood as an explicit reference to the increasing criminalisation of copyright violation through digital technologies. However, the term also refers to the indistinct or uncertain effects produced by this tactical intervention: who are the “bad guys” or the “good guys”? Are positions like ‘good’ and ‘evil’ (something like freedom or tyranny) so easily identified and distinguished? As Paolo Cirio explains, this political disposition is deliberately kept obscure in the project: “it’s a representation of the actual ambiguity about copyright issues, where every case seems to lack a moral or ethical basis” (“Amazon Noir Interview”). While user communications made available on the site clearly identify culprits (describing the project as jeopardising arts funding, as both irresponsible and arrogant), the self-description of the artists as political “failures” highlights the uncertainty regarding the project’s qualities as a force of long-term social renewal: Lizvlx from Ubermorgen.com had daily shootouts with the global mass-media, Cirio continuously pushed the boundaries of copyright (books are just pixels on a screen or just ink on paper), Ludovico and Bernhard resisted kickback-bribes from powerful Amazon.com until they finally gave in and sold the technology for an undisclosed sum to Amazon. Betrayal, blasphemy and pessimism finally split the gang of bad guys. (“Press Release”) Here, the adaptive and flexible qualities of informatic commodities and computational systems of distribution are knowingly posited as critical limits; in a certain sense, the project fails technologically in order to succeed conceptually. From a cynical perspective, this might be interpreted as guaranteeing authenticity by insisting on the useless or non-instrumental quality of art. However, through this process, Amazon Noir illustrates how forces confined as exterior to control (virality, piracy, noncommunication) regularly operate as points of distinction to generate change and innovation. Just as hackers are legitimately employed to challenge the durability of network exchanges, malfunctions are relied upon as potential sources of future information. Indeed, the notion of demonstrating ‘autonomy’ by illustrating the shortcomings of software is entirely consistent with the logic of control as a modulating organisational diagram. These so-called “circuit breakers” are positioned as points of bifurcation that open up new systems and encompass a more general “abstract machine” or tendency governing contemporary capitalism (Parikka 300). As a consequence, the ambiguities of Amazon Noir emerge not just from the contrary articulation of intellectual property and digital technology, but additionally through the concept of thinking “resistance” simultaneously with regimes of control. This tension is apparent in Galloway’s analysis of the cybernetic machines that are synonymous with the operation of Deleuzian control societies – i.e. “computerised information management” – where tactical media are posited as potential modes of contestation against the tyranny of code, “able to exploit flaws in protocological and proprietary command and control, not to destroy technology, but to sculpt protocol and make it better suited to people’s real desires” (176). While pushing a system into a state of hypertrophy to reform digital architectures might represent a possible technique that produces a space through which to imagine something like “our” freedom, it still leaves unexamined the desire for reformation itself as nurtured by and produced through the coupling of cybernetics, information theory, and distributed networking. This draws into focus the significance of McKenzie’s Simondon-inspired cybernetic perspective on socio-technological ensembles as being always-already predetermined by and driven through asymmetries or difference. As Chun observes, consequently, there is no paradox between resistance and capture since “control and freedom are not opposites, but different sides of the same coin: just as discipline served as a grid on which liberty was established, control is the matrix that enables freedom as openness” (71). Why “openness” should be so readily equated with a state of being free represents a major unexamined presumption of digital culture, and leads to the associated predicament of attempting to think of how this freedom has become something one cannot not desire. If Amazon Noir has political currency in this context, however, it emerges from a capacity to recognise how informational networks channel desire, memories, and imaginative visions rather than just cultivated antagonisms and counterintuitive economics. As a final point, it is worth observing that the project was initiated without publicity until the settlement with Amazon.com. There is, as a consequence, nothing to suggest that this subversive “event” might have actually occurred, a feeling heightened by the abstractions of software entities. To the extent that we believe in “the big book heist,” that such an act is even possible, is a gauge through which the paranoia of control societies is illuminated as a longing or desire for autonomy. As Hakim Bey observes in his conceptualisation of “pirate utopias,” such fleeting encounters with the imaginaries of freedom flow back into the experience of the everyday as political instantiations of utopian hope. Amazon Noir, with all its underlying ethical ambiguities, presents us with a challenge to rethink these affective investments by considering our profound weaknesses to master the complexities and constant intrusions of control. It provides an opportunity to conceive of a future that begins with limits and limitations as immanently central, even foundational, to our deep interconnection with socio-technological ensembles. References “Amazon Noir – The Big Book Crime.” http://www.amazon-noir.com/>. Bey, Hakim. T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism. New York: Autonomedia, 1991. Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong. Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fibre Optics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006. Crawford, Kate. “Adaptation: Tracking the Ecologies of Music and Peer-to-Peer Networks.” Media International Australia 114 (2005): 30-39. Cubitt, Sean. “Distribution and Media Flows.” Cultural Politics 1.2 (2005): 193-214. Deleuze, Gilles. Foucault. Trans. Seán Hand. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986. ———. “Control and Becoming.” Negotiations 1972-1990. Trans. Martin Joughin. New York: Columbia UP, 1995. 169-176. ———. “Postscript on the Societies of Control.” Negotiations 1972-1990. Trans. Martin Joughin. New York: Columbia UP, 1995. 177-182. Eriksson, Magnus, and Rasmus Fleische. “Copies and Context in the Age of Cultural Abundance.” Online posting. 5 June 2007. Nettime 25 Aug 2007. Galloway, Alexander. Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. New York: Penguin Press, 2004. Harold, Christine. OurSpace: Resisting the Corporate Control of Culture. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2007. Lessig, Lawrence. Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace. New York: Basic Books, 1999. McKenzie, Adrian. Cutting Code: Software and Sociality. New York: Peter Lang, 2006. ———. “The Strange Meshing of Impersonal and Personal Forces in Technological Action.” Culture, Theory and Critique 47.2 (2006): 197-212. Parikka, Jussi. “Contagion and Repetition: On the Viral Logic of Network Culture.” Ephemera: Theory & Politics in Organization 7.2 (2007): 287-308. “Piracy Online.” Recording Industry Association of America. 28 Aug 2007. http://www.riaa.com/physicalpiracy.php>. Sundaram, Ravi. “Recycling Modernity: Pirate Electronic Cultures in India.” Sarai Reader 2001: The Public Domain. Delhi, Sarai Media Lab, 2001. 93-99. http://www.sarai.net>. Terranova, Tiziana. “Communication beyond Meaning: On the Cultural Politics of Information.” Social Text 22.3 (2004): 51-73. ———. “Of Sense and Sensibility: Immaterial Labour in Open Systems.” DATA Browser 03 – Curating Immateriality: The Work of the Curator in the Age of Network Systems. Ed. Joasia Krysa. New York: Autonomedia, 2006. 27-38. Thrift, Nigel. “Re-inventing Invention: New Tendencies in Capitalist Commodification.” Economy and Society 35.2 (2006): 279-306. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Dieter, Michael. "Amazon Noir: Piracy, Distribution, Control." M/C Journal 10.5 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0710/07-dieter.php>. APA Style Dieter, M. (Oct. 2007) "Amazon Noir: Piracy, Distribution, Control," M/C Journal, 10(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0710/07-dieter.php>.

This paper seeks to explore environmental, social and governance issues arising from investment in special economic zones (SEZs) in the mainland Southeast Asian region through a mixture of thick analytical description and multiple case study approach. All the states studied here have embraced the SEZ approach as it offers rapid economic development without any implications for the political settlement, which is considered beneficial by current administrations. Particular emphasis is placed on environmental, social and governance issues in the region covered and some complex issues that have emerged. It is shown that the situation is complex and continually evolving and that there are limited constraints on the actions of corporations. Consequently, there is an opportunity for investors to set precedents and protocols on a progressive basis. 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Introduction I am a transmigrant who has moved back and forth between the West and the Rest. I was born and raised in a Muslim family in a predominantly Muslim country, Bangladesh, but I spent several years of my childhood in Pakistan. After my marriage, I lived in the United States for a year and a half, the Middle East for 5 years, Australia for three years, back to the Middle East for another 5 years, then, finally, in Australia for the last 12 years. I speak Bengali (my mother tongue), Urdu (which I learnt in Pakistan), a bit of Arabic (learnt in the Middle East); but English has always been my medium of instruction. So where is home? Is it my place of origin, the Muslim umma, or my land of settlement? Or is it my ‘root’ or my ‘route’ (Blunt and Dowling)? Blunt and Dowling (199) observe that the lives of transmigrants are often interpreted in terms of their ‘roots’ and ‘routes’, which are two frameworks for thinking about home, homeland and diaspora. Whereas ‘roots’ might imply an original homeland from which people have scattered, and to which they might seek to return, ‘routes’ focuses on mobile, multiple and transcultural geographies of home. However, both ‘roots’ and ‘routes’ are attached to emotion and identity, and both invoke a sense of place, belonging or alienation that is intrinsically tied to a sense of self (Blunt and Dowling 196-219). In this paper, I equate home with my root (place of birth) and route (transnational homing) within the context of the ‘diaspora and belonging’. First I define the diaspora and possible criteria of belonging. Next I describe my transnational homing within the framework of diaspora and belonging. Finally, I consider how Australia can be a ‘home’ for me and other Muslim Australians. The Diaspora and Belonging Blunt and Dowling (199) define diaspora as “scattering of people over space and transnational connections between people and the places”. Cohen emphasised the ethno-cultural aspects of the diaspora setting; that is, how migrants identify and position themselves in other nations in terms of their (different) ethnic and cultural orientation. Hall argues that the diasporic subjects form a cultural identity through transformation and difference. Speaking of the Hindu diaspora in the UK and Caribbean, Vertovec (21-23) contends that the migrants’ contact with their original ‘home’ or diaspora depends on four factors: migration processes and factors of settlement, cultural composition, structural and political power, and community development. With regard to the first factor, migration processes and factors of settlement, Vertovec explains that if the migrants are political or economic refugees, or on a temporary visa, they are likely to live in a ‘myth of return’. In the cultural composition context, Vertovec argues that religion, language, region of origin, caste, and degree of cultural homogenisation are factors in which migrants are bound to their homeland. Concerning the social structure and political power issue, Vertovec suggests that the extent and nature of racial and ethnic pluralism or social stigma, class composition, degree of institutionalised racism, involvement in party politics (or active citizenship) determine migrants’ connection to their new or old home. Finally, community development, including membership in organisations (political, union, religious, cultural, leisure), leadership qualities, and ethnic convergence or conflict (trends towards intra-communal or inter-ethnic/inter-religious co-operation) would also affect the migrants’ sense of belonging. Using these scholarly ideas as triggers, I will examine my home and belonging over the last few decades. My Home In an initial stage of my transmigrant history, my home was my root (place of birth, Dhaka, Bangladesh). Subsequently, my routes (settlement in different countries) reshaped my homes. In all respects, the ethno-cultural factors have played a big part in my definition of ‘home’. But on some occasions my ethnic identification has been overridden by my religious identification and vice versa. By ethnic identity, I mean my language (mother tongue) and my connection to my people (Bangladeshi). By my religious identity, I mean my Muslim religion, and my spiritual connection to the umma, a Muslim nation transcending all boundaries. Umma refers to the Muslim identity and unity within a larger Muslim group across national boundaries. The only thing the members of the umma have in common is their Islamic belief (Spencer and Wollman 169-170). In my childhood my father, a banker, was relocated to Karachi, Pakistan (then West Pakistan). Although I lived in Pakistan for much of my childhood, I have never considered it to be my home, even though it is predominantly a Muslim country. In this case, my home was my root (Bangladesh) where my grandparents and extended family lived. Every year I used to visit my grandparents who resided in a small town in Bangladesh (then East Pakistan). Thus my connection with my home was sustained through my extended family, ethnic traditions, language (Bengali/Bangla), and the occasional visits to the landscape of Bangladesh. Smith (9-11) notes that people build their connection or identity to their homeland through their historic land, common historical memories, myths, symbols and traditions. Though Pakistan and Bangladesh had common histories, their traditions of language, dress and ethnic culture were very different. For example, the celebration of the Bengali New Year (Pohela Baishakh), folk dance, folk music and folk tales, drama, poetry, lyrics of poets Rabindranath Tagore (Rabindra Sangeet) and Nazrul Islam (Nazrul Geeti) are distinct in the cultural heritage of Bangladesh. Special musical instruments such as the banshi (a bamboo flute), dhol (drums), ektara (a single-stringed instrument) and dotara (a four-stringed instrument) are unique to Bangladeshi culture. The Bangladeshi cuisine (rice and freshwater fish) is also different from Pakistan where people mainly eat flat round bread (roti) and meat (gosh). However, my bonding factor to Bangladesh was my relatives, particularly my grandparents as they made me feel one of ‘us’. Their affection for me was irreplaceable. The train journey from Dhaka (capital city) to their town, Noakhali, was captivating. The hustle and bustle at the train station and the lush green paddy fields along the train journey reminded me that this was my ‘home’. Though I spoke the official language (Urdu) in Pakistan and had a few Pakistani friends in Karachi, they could never replace my feelings for my friends, extended relatives and cousins who lived in Bangladesh. I could not relate to the landscape or dry weather of Pakistan. More importantly, some Pakistani women (our neighbours) were critical of my mother’s traditional dress (saree), and described it as revealing because it showed a bit of her back. They took pride in their traditional dress (shalwar, kameez, dopatta), which they considered to be more covered and ‘Islamic’. So, because of our traditional dress (saree) and perhaps other differences, we were regarded as the ‘Other’. In 1970 my father was relocated back to Dhaka, Bangladesh, and I was glad to go home. It should be noted that both Pakistan and Bangladesh were separated from India in 1947 – first as one nation; then, in 1971, Bangladesh became independent from Pakistan. The conflict between Bangladesh (then East Pakistan) and Pakistan (then West Pakistan) originated for economic and political reasons. At this time I was a high school student and witnessed acts of genocide committed by the Pakistani regime against the Bangladeshis (March-December 1971). My memories of these acts are vivid and still very painful. After my marriage, I moved from Bangladesh to the United States. In this instance, my new route (Austin, Texas, USA), as it happened, did not become my home. Here the ethno-cultural and Islamic cultural factors took precedence. I spoke the English language, made some American friends, and studied history at the University of Texas. I appreciated the warm friendship extended to me in the US, but experienced a degree of culture shock. I did not appreciate the pub life, alcohol consumption, and what I perceived to be the lack of family bonds (children moving out at the age of 18, families only meeting occasionally on birthdays and Christmas). Furthermore, I could not relate to de facto relationships and acceptance of sex before marriage. However, to me ‘home’ meant a family orientation and living in close contact with family. Besides the cultural divide, my husband and I were living in the US on student visas and, as Vertovec (21-23) noted, temporary visa status can deter people from their sense of belonging to the host country. In retrospect I can see that we lived in the ‘myth of return’. However, our next move for a better life was not to our root (Bangladesh), but another route to the Muslim world of Dhahran in Saudi Arabia. My husband moved to Dhahran not because it was a Muslim world but because it gave him better economic opportunities. However, I thought this new destination would become my home – the home that was coined by Anderson as the imagined nation, or my Muslim umma. Anderson argues that the imagined communities are “to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined” (6; Wood 61). Hall (122) asserts: identity is actually formed through unconscious processes over time, rather than being innate in consciousness at birth. There is always something ‘imaginary’ or fantasized about its unity. It always remains incomplete, is always ‘in process’, always ‘being formed’. As discussed above, when I had returned home to Bangladesh from Pakistan – both Muslim countries – my primary connection to my home country was my ethnic identity, language and traditions. My ethnic identity overshadowed the religious identity. But when I moved to Saudi Arabia, where my ethnic identity differed from that of the mainstream Arabs and Bedouin/nomadic Arabs, my connection to this new land was through my Islamic cultural and religious identity. Admittedly, this connection to the umma was more psychological than physical, but I was now in close proximity to Mecca, and to my home of Dhaka, Bangladesh. Mecca is an important city in Saudi Arabia for Muslims because it is the holy city of Islam, the home to the Ka’aba (the religious centre of Islam), and the birthplace of Prophet Muhammad [Peace Be Upon Him]. It is also the destination of the Hajj, one of the five pillars of Islamic faith. Therefore, Mecca is home to significant events in Islamic history, as well as being an important present day centre for the Islamic faith. We lived in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia for 5 years. Though it was a 2.5 hours flight away, I treasured Mecca’s proximity and regarded Dhahran as my second and spiritual home. Saudi Arabia had a restricted lifestyle for women, but I liked it because it was a Muslim country that gave me the opportunity to perform umrah Hajj (pilgrimage). However, Saudi Arabia did not allow citizenship to expatriates. Saudi Arabia’s government was keen to protect the status quo and did not want to compromise its cultural values or standard of living by allowing foreigners to become a permanent part of society. In exceptional circumstances only, the King granted citizenship to a foreigner for outstanding service to the state over a number of years. Children of foreigners born in Saudi Arabia did not have rights of local citizenship; they automatically assumed the nationality of their parents. If it was available, Saudi citizenship would assure expatriates a secure and permanent living in Saudi Arabia; as it was, there was a fear among the non-Saudis that they would have to leave the country once their job contract expired. Under the circumstances, though my spiritual connection to Mecca was strong, my husband was convinced that Saudi Arabia did not provide any job security. So, in 1987 when Australia offered migration to highly skilled people, my husband decided to migrate to Australia for a better and more secure economic life. I agreed to his decision, but quite reluctantly because we were again moving to a non-Muslim part of the world, which would be culturally different and far away from my original homeland (Bangladesh). In Australia, we lived first in Brisbane, then Adelaide, and after three years we took our Australian citizenship. At that stage I loved the Barossa Valley and Victor Harbour in South Australia, and the Gold Coast and Sunshine Coast in Queensland, but did not feel at home in Australia. We bought a house in Adelaide and I was a full time home-maker but was always apprehensive that my children (two boys) would lose their culture in this non-Muslim world. In 1990 we once again moved back to the Muslim world, this time to Muscat, Sultanate of Oman. My connection to this route was again spiritual. I valued the fact that we would live in a Muslim country and our children would be brought up in a Muslim environment. But my husband’s move was purely financial as he got a lucrative job offer in Muscat. We had another son in Oman. We enjoyed the luxurious lifestyle provided by my husband’s workplace and the service provided by the housemaid. I loved the beaches and freedom to drive my car, and I appreciated the friendly Omani people. I also enjoyed our frequent trips (4 hours flight) to my root, Dhaka, Bangladesh. So our children were raised within our ethnic and Islamic culture, remained close to my root (family in Dhaka), though they attended a British school in Muscat. But by the time I started considering Oman to be my second home, we had to leave once again for a place that could provide us with a more secure future. Oman was like Saudi Arabia; it employed expatriates only on a contract basis, and did not give them citizenship (not even fellow Muslims). So after 5 years it was time to move back to Australia. It was with great reluctance that I moved with my husband to Brisbane in 1995 because once again we were to face a different cultural context. As mentioned earlier, we lived in Brisbane in the late 1980s; I liked the weather, the landscape, but did not consider it home for cultural reasons. Our boys started attending expensive private schools and we bought a house in a prestigious Western suburb in Brisbane. Soon after arriving I started my tertiary education at the University of Queensland, and finished an MA in Historical Studies in Indian History in 1998. Still Australia was not my home. I kept thinking that we would return to my previous routes or the ‘imagined’ homeland somewhere in the Middle East, in close proximity to my root (Bangladesh), where we could remain economically secure in a Muslim country. But gradually I began to feel that Australia was becoming my ‘home’. I had gradually become involved in professional and community activities (with university colleagues, the Bangladeshi community and Muslim women’s organisations), and in retrospect I could see that this was an early stage of my ‘self-actualisation’ (Maslow). Through my involvement with diverse people, I felt emotionally connected with the concerns, hopes and dreams of my Muslim-Australian friends. Subsequently, I also felt connected with my mainstream Australian friends whose emotions and fears (9/11 incident, Bali bombing and 7/7 tragedy) were similar to mine. In late 1998 I started my PhD studies on the immigration history of Australia, with a particular focus on the historical settlement of Muslims in Australia. This entailed retrieving archival files and interviewing people, mostly Muslims and some mainstream Australians, and enquiring into relevant migration issues. I also became more active in community issues, and was not constrained by my circumstances. By circumstances, I mean that even though I belonged to a patriarchally structured Muslim family, where my husband was the main breadwinner, main decision-maker, my independence and research activities (entailing frequent interstate trips for data collection, and public speaking) were not frowned upon or forbidden (Khan 14-15); fortunately, my husband appreciated my passion for research and gave me his trust and support. This, along with the Muslim community’s support (interviews), and the wider community’s recognition (for example, the publication of my letters in Australian newspapers, interviews on radio and television) enabled me to develop my self-esteem and built up my bicultural identity as a Muslim in a predominantly Christian country and as a Bangladeshi-Australian. In 2005, for the sake of a better job opportunity, my husband moved to the UK, but this time I asserted that I would not move again. I felt that here in Australia (now in Perth) I had a job, an identity and a home. This time my husband was able to secure a good job back in Australia and was only away for a year. I no longer dream of finding a home in the Middle East. Through my bicultural identity here in Australia I feel connected to the wider community and to the Muslim umma. However, my attachment to the umma has become ambivalent. I feel proud of my Australian-Muslim identity but I am concerned about the jihadi ideology of militant Muslims. By jihadi ideology, I mean the extremist ideology of the al-Qaeda terrorist group (Farrar 2007). The Muslim umma now incorporates both moderate and radical Muslims. The radical Muslims (though only a tiny minority of 1.4 billion Muslims worldwide) pose a threat to their moderate counterparts as well as to non-Muslims. In the UK, some second- and third-generation Muslims identify themselves with the umma rather than their parents’ homelands or their country of birth (Husain). It should not be a matter of concern if these young Muslims adopt a ‘pure’ Muslim identity, providing at the same time they are loyal to their country of residence. But when they resort to terrorism with their ‘pure’ Muslim identity (e.g., the 7/7 London bombers) they defame my religion Islam, and undermine my spiritual connection to the umma. As a 1st generation immigrant, the defining criteria of my ‘homeliness’ in Australia are my ethno-cultural and religious identity (which includes my family), my active citizenship, and my community development/contribution through my research work – all of which allow me a sense of efficacy in my life. My ethnic and religious identities generally co-exist equally, but when I see some Muslims kill my fellow Australians (such as the Bali bombings in 2002 and 2005) my Australian identity takes precedence. I feel for the victims and condemn the perpetrators. On the other hand, when I see politics play a role over the human rights issues (e.g., the Tampa incident), my religious identity begs me to comment on it (see Kabir, Muslims in Australia 295-305). Problematising ‘Home’ for Muslim Australians In the European context, Grillo (863) and Werbner (904), and in the Australian context, Kabir (Muslims in Australia) and Poynting and Mason, have identified the diversity within Islam (national, ethnic, religious etc). Werbner (904) notes that in spite of the “wishful talk of the emergence of a ‘British Islam’, even today there are Pakistani, Bangladeshi and Arab mosques, as well as Turkish and Shia’a mosques”; thus British Muslims retain their separate identities. Similarly, in Australia, the existence of separate mosques for the Bangladeshi, Pakistani, Arab and Shia’a peoples indicates that Australian Muslims have also kept their ethnic identities discrete (Saeed 64-77). However, in times of crisis, such as the Salman Rushdie affair in 1989, and the 1990-1991 Gulf crises, both British and Australian Muslims were quick to unite and express their Islamic identity by way of resistance (Kabir, Muslims in Australia 160-162; Poynting and Mason 68-70). In both British and Australian contexts, I argue that a peaceful rally or resistance is indicative of active citizenship of Muslims as it reveals their sense of belonging (also Werbner 905). So when a transmigrant Muslim wants to make a peaceful demonstration, the Western world should be encouraged, not threatened – as long as the transmigrant’s allegiances lie also with the host country. In the European context, Grillo (868) writes: when I asked Mehmet if he was planning to stay in Germany he answered without hesitation: ‘Yes, of course’. And then, after a little break, he added ‘as long as we can live here as Muslims’. In this context, I support Mehmet’s desire to live as a Muslim in a non-Muslim world as long as this is peaceful. Paradoxically, living a Muslim life through ijtihad can be either socially progressive or destructive. The Canadian Muslim feminist Irshad Manji relies on ijtihad, but so does Osama bin Laden! Manji emphasises that ijtihad can be, on the one hand, the adaptation of Islam using independent reasoning, hybridity and the contesting of ‘traditional’ family values (c.f. Doogue and Kirkwood 275-276, 314); and, on the other, ijtihad can take the form of conservative, patriarchal and militant Islamic values. The al-Qaeda terrorist Osama bin Laden espouses the jihadi ideology of Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966), an Egyptian who early in his career might have been described as a Muslim modernist who believed that Islam and Western secular ideals could be reconciled. But he discarded that idea after going to the US in 1948-50; there he was treated as ‘different’ and that treatment turned him against the West. He came back to Egypt and embraced a much more rigid and militaristic form of Islam (Esposito 136). Other scholars, such as Cesari, have identified a third orientation – a ‘secularised Islam’, which stresses general beliefs in the values of Islam and an Islamic identity, without too much concern for practices. Grillo (871) observed Islam in the West emphasised diversity. He stressed that, “some [Muslims were] more quietest, some more secular, some more clamorous, some more negotiatory”, while some were exclusively characterised by Islamic identity, such as wearing the burqa (elaborate veils), hijabs (headscarves), beards by men and total abstinence from drinking alcohol. So Mehmet, cited above, could be living a Muslim life within the spectrum of these possibilities, ranging from an integrating mode to a strict, militant Muslim manner. In the UK context, Zubaida (96) contends that marginalised, culturally-impoverished youth are the people for whom radical, militant Islamism may have an appeal, though it must be noted that the 7/7 bombers belonged to affluent families (O’Sullivan 14; Husain). In Australia, Muslim Australians are facing three challenges. First, the Muslim unemployment rate: it was three times higher than the national total in 1996 and 2001 (Kabir, Muslims in Australia 266-278; Kabir, “What Does It Mean” 63). Second, some spiritual leaders have used extreme rhetoric to appeal to marginalised youth; in January 2007, the Australian-born imam of Lebanese background, Sheikh Feiz Mohammad, was alleged to have employed a DVD format to urge children to kill the enemies of Islam and to have praised martyrs with a violent interpretation of jihad (Chulov 2). Third, the proposed citizenship test has the potential to make new migrants’ – particularly Muslims’ – settlement in Australia stressful (Kabir, “What Does It Mean” 62-79); in May 2007, fuelled by perceptions that some migrants – especially Muslims – were not integrating quickly enough, the Howard government introduced a citizenship test bill that proposes to test applicants on their English language skills and knowledge of Australian history and ‘values’. I contend that being able to demonstrate knowledge of history and having English language skills is no guarantee that a migrant will be a good citizen. Through my transmigrant history, I have learnt that developing a bond with a new place takes time, acceptance and a gradual change of identity, which are less likely to happen when facing assimilationist constraints. I spoke English and studied history in the United States, but I did not consider it my home. I did not speak the Arabic language, and did not study Middle Eastern history while I was in the Middle East, but I felt connected to it for cultural and religious reasons. Through my knowledge of history and English language proficiency I did not make Australia my home when I first migrated to Australia. Australia became my home when I started interacting with other Australians, which was made possible by having the time at my disposal and by fortunate circumstances, which included a fairly high level of efficacy and affluence. If I had been rejected because of my lack of knowledge of ‘Australian values’, or had encountered discrimination in the job market, I would have been much less willing to embrace my host country and call it home. I believe a stringent citizenship test is more likely to alienate would-be citizens than to induce their adoption of values and loyalty to their new home. Conclusion Blunt (5) observes that current studies of home often investigate mobile geographies of dwelling and how it shapes one’s identity and belonging. Such geographies of home negotiate from the domestic to the global context, thus mobilising the home beyond a fixed, bounded and confining location. Similarly, in this paper I have discussed how my mobile geography, from the domestic (root) to global (route), has shaped my identity. Though I received a degree of culture shock in the United States, loved the Middle East, and was at first quite resistant to the idea of making Australia my second home, the confidence I acquired in residing in these ‘several homes’ were cumulative and eventually enabled me to regard Australia as my ‘home’. I loved the Middle East, but I did not pursue an active involvement with the Arab community because I was a busy mother. Also I lacked the communication skill (fluency in Arabic) with the local residents who lived outside the expatriates’ campus. I am no longer a cultural freak. I am no longer the same Bangladeshi woman who saw her ethnic and Islamic culture as superior to all other cultures. I have learnt to appreciate Australian values, such as tolerance, ‘a fair go’ and multiculturalism (see Kabir, “What Does It Mean” 62-79). My bicultural identity is my strength. With my ethnic and religious identity, I can relate to the concerns of the Muslim community and other Australian ethnic and religious minorities. And with my Australian identity I have developed ‘a voice’ to pursue active citizenship. Thus my biculturalism has enabled me to retain and merge my former home with my present and permanent home of Australia. References Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London, New York: Verso, 1983. Australian Bureau of Statistics: Census of Housing and Population, 1996 and 2001. Blunt, Alison. Domicile and Diaspora: Anglo-Indian Women and the Spatial Politics of Home. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005. Blunt, Alison, and Robyn Dowling. Home. London and New York: Routledge, 2006. Cesari, Jocelyne. “Muslim Minorities in Europe: The Silent Revolution.” In John L. Esposito and Burgat, eds., Modernising Islam: Religion in the Public Sphere in Europe and the Middle East. London: Hurst, 2003. 251-269. Chulov, Martin. “Treatment Has Sheik Wary of Returning Home.” Weekend Australian 6-7 Jan. 2007: 2. Cohen, Robin. Global Diasporas: An Introduction. Seattle: University of Washington, 1997. Doogue, Geraldine, and Peter Kirkwood. Tomorrow’s Islam: Uniting Old-Age Beliefs and a Modern World. Sydney: ABC Books, 2005. Esposito, John. The Islamic Threat: Myth or Reality? 3rd ed. New York, Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999. Farrar, Max. “When the Bombs Go Off: Rethinking and Managing Diversity Strategies in Leeds, UK.” International Journal of Diversity in Organisations, Communities and Nations 6.5 (2007): 63-68. Grillo, Ralph. “Islam and Transnationalism.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 30.5 (Sep. 2004): 861-878. Hall, Stuart. Polity Reader in Cultural Theory. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994. Huntington, Samuel, P. The Clash of Civilisation and the Remaking of World Order. London: Touchstone, 1998. Husain, Ed. The Islamist: Why I Joined Radical Islam in Britain, What I Saw inside and Why I Left. London: Penguin, 2007. Kabir, Nahid. Muslims in Australia: Immigration, Race Relations and Cultural History. London: Kegan Paul, 2005. ———. “What Does It Mean to Be Un-Australian: Views of Australian Muslim Students in 2006.” People and Place 15.1 (2007): 62-79. Khan, Shahnaz. Aversion and Desire: Negotiating Muslim Female Identity in the Diaspora. Toronto: Women’s Press, 2002. Manji, Irshad. The Trouble with Islam Today. Canada:Vintage, 2005. Maslow, Abraham. Motivation and Personality. New York: Harper, 1954. O’Sullivan, J. “The Real British Disease.” Quadrant (Jan.-Feb. 2006): 14-20. Poynting, Scott, and Victoria Mason. “The Resistible Rise of Islamophobia: Anti-Muslim Racism in the UK and Australia before 11 September 2001.” Journal of Sociology 43.1 (2007): 61-86. Saeed, Abdallah. Islam in Australia. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2003. Smith, Anthony D. National Identity. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991. Spencer, Philip, and Howard Wollman. Nationalism: A Critical Introduction. London: Sage, 2002. Vertovec, Stevens. The Hindu Diaspora: Comparative Patterns. London: Routledge. 2000. Werbner, Pnina, “Theorising Complex Diasporas: Purity and Hybridity in the South Asian Public Sphere in Britain.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 30.5 (2004): 895-911. Wood, Dennis. “The Diaspora, Community and the Vagrant Space.” In Cynthia Vanden Driesen and Ralph Crane, eds., Diaspora: The Australasian Experience. New Delhi: Prestige, 2005. 59-64. Zubaida, Sami. “Islam in Europe: Unity or Diversity.” Critical Quarterly 45.1-2 (2003): 88-98. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Kabir, Nahid. "Why I Call Australia ‘Home’?: A Transmigrant’s Perspective." M/C Journal 10.4 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/15-kabir.php>. APA Style Kabir, N. (Aug. 2007) "Why I Call Australia ‘Home’?: A Transmigrant’s Perspective," M/C Journal, 10(4). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/15-kabir.php>.

Borders seem to be dropping all around us. Interdisciplinary university curricula, international free trade, wireless broadband technologies—these and many other phenomena suggest a steady decline in the rigidity and quantity of borders delimiting social interactions. In response to this apparent loss of borders, critical scholars might point out that university hiring practices remain discipline-bound, international tariffs are widespread, and technological access is uneven. But even as this critical response points out the limited extent of border-loss, it still affirms the weakening of these borders. Since the 9/11 tragedy, the world has witnessed much fortification of national and cultural borders through essentializing discourses (epitomized by America’s “us versus them” response to terror). But can critical scholars, as affirmative as they are of the dissolution and the crossing of borders, also support the building of exclusionary national and cultural borders? More importantly, can this reasoning responsibly emerge from a postmodern or postcolonial perspective that both favors marginalized voices and recognizes the routinely violent excesses of nationalism? By considering the practice of hybridity within the context of international capitalism, I will argue that maintaining the “conditions of possibility” for hybridity, and thus, maintaining the possibility of resistance to essentializing discourses, requires the strategic reinforcement of national and cultural borders. Border-Crossing as Hybrid Practice The most critical aspect of hybridity in relation to culture is the hybrid’s position as border-crosser. Postmodern theory typically affirms individual instances of border-crossing, but its overall project in regards to boundaries is more comprehensive. Henri Giroux writes: …postmodernism constitutes a general attempt to transgress the borders sealed by modernism, to proclaim the arbitrariness of all boundaries, and to call attention to the sphere of culture as a shifting social and historical construction. (Border 55) The figure of the hybrid emerges in postcolonial discourses as the embodiment of this postmodern critique of borders. Hybrid identities such as Gloria Anzaldua’s “mestiza consciousness”—a hybrid of white, Indian, and Mexican identities—creates the possibility of resisting oppression because such multiplicity disavows the reductive and essentializing binaries that colonizers employ to maintain power (Anzaldua 892). By embracing these hybrid identities, colonized people thus affirm cultural differences in ways that resist essentialism and which conceive of these differences in ways that “are not identified with backwardness” (Martín-Barbero 352). In studying the border-crossing work of critical intellectual Paulo Freire, Giroux claims that border-crossing offers the hybrid the “opportunity for new subject positions, identities, and social relations that can produce resistance to and relief from the structures of domination and oppression” (“Paulo” 18). Prior to these claims, postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha wrote that the “third space” of hybridity surfaces as an “ambivalence” toward colonial authority and as a “strategic reversal of the process of domination through disavowal” (34). But what if we take seriously Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s claim in their book, Empire, that postcolonial theory, with its acclaim of the subversive potential of the hybrid, is “entirely insufficient for theorizing contemporary global power”? Or what if we admit that, unfortunately, the postcolonial hybrid is nowhere near as successful or as efficient a border-crosser as corporations have become, corporations which have made their own successful ‘runs for the borders’ by colonizing the markets of nations across the globe? In what forms can the ambivalence and disavowal identified by Bhabha emerge when cultures are now being colonized, not by other cultures, but by the influence of corporations? In the context of this new state of empire, Hardt and Negri warn that traditional hybridity becomes “an empty gesture … or worse, these gestures risk reinforcing imperial power rather than challenging it” (216–17). But in a world where “the freedom of self-fashioning is often indistinguishable from the powers of an all-encompassing control,” how can scholars approve a program of aggressive national self-fashioning (Hardt 216)? Stanley Fish suggests one answer. In Professional Correctness, Fish states that only enterprises “bent on suicide” would fail to establish their “distinctiveness.” He writes: An enterprise acquires an identity by winning a space at the table of enterprises …. Within the space that has been secured, all questions, including questions on basic concepts, remain open. Nor are the boundaries between enterprises fixed and impermeable; negotiations on the borders go on continually, and at times border skirmishes can turn into large-scale territorial disputes (19) If we substitute the word “nations” or “cultures” here for “enterprises,” Fish’s text reminds us that the building of national and cultural borders is always at best a temporary event, and that ‘openness’ is only available within a “space that has [previously] been secured.” Although nations may risk many things when they resist colonization, cultural fixity is not one of them. Cultures can thus maintain distinctiveness from other cultures without giving up their aspirations to hybridity. Pragmatically, Fish might say, one needs to secure a space at the table before one can negotiate. Essentialist border-building is just such a pragmatic effort. Building Borders That Disavow Cultural turf and national turf are inseparable. In the idealistic American view of culture as a “melting pot,” cultural identity relinquishes its substance to a greater national identity. Especially in the wake of 9/11, nationalistic maintenance of identity has prompted a host of culturally-focused turf disputes ranging from the bombing of mosques to the deliberate dumping of French champagne. Such disputes reveal cultural antagonisms that emerge from essentializing discourses. In his speech to the United Nations only two months after the September 11th attack, President George W. Bush explicitly connected the willingness of countries to form a coalition against terror (and thus to accept the essentializing “us versus them” mentality) with the ability to maintain secure borders by stating “Some nations want to play their part in the fight against terror, but tell us they lack the means to enforce their laws and control their borders” (n.pag.). Clear and manageable borders are presented here as stabilizing influences that enable the war against terror. By maintaining Western economic and political interests, these borders appear to delimit a space most unlike the subversive hybrid space that Bhabha imagines. Although essentializing discourses naturally seem to threaten the space of hybridity, it is important here to recall Bhabha’s definition of hybridity as a “strategic reversal of the process of domination” (emphasis added). Gayatri Spivak reminds us that “it’s the idea of strategy that has been forgotten” in current critiques of essentialism (5). In fact, essentialism, properly situated, can be used as a strategy against essentialism. While Spivak warns that a “strategic use of essentialism can turn into an alibi for proselytizing academic essentialisms,” she more forcefully claims that the “strategic use of a positivist essentialism in a scrupulously visible political interest” is “something one cannot not use”; a strategy that is “unavoidably useful” (4, 5). For Spivak, the critical qualities of a strategic essentialism are its “self-conscious” use (i.e. its “scrupulously visible political interest”) and its ongoing “critique of the ‘fetish-character’” of its own master terms (3–4). Three short examples will serve to highlight this strategic use of border-building in service of “scrupulously visible political interests.” While Russians may have the distinction of being the first to turn a candy bar’s name (“Snickers”) into a swear word, there have been no more visible borders that disavow multinational capitalism than those in France. Predictably, the key sites of struggle are the traditional repositories of French high culture: art, language, and food. One highly visible effort in this struggle is the ten per cent cinema tax (which, based on American dominance in the industry, affects mainly American films), the revenue from which is used to subsidize French filmmaking. Also, the controversial 1997 Toubon Law built borders by establishing fines and even prison sentences for refusal to use French language in venues such as advertising; as did the 1999 “dismantling” of a McDonald’s restaurant by José Bové, a French sheep farmer protesting U.S. sanctions, the WTO, and “Americanization” in general (Gordon 23, 35). Two nations that erected “borders of disavowal” in regards to the war on terror are Turkey and the Philippines. In March of 2003, even after being offered $6 billion in aid from the U.S., Turkey refused to allow 62,000 U.S. troops to be deployed in Turkey to facilitate the war in Iraq (Lee). While Turkey did allow the U.S. the use of airbases for certain purposes, the refusal to allow U.S. troops to cross the Turkey-Iraq border marked a significant site of cultural resistance. Even after the Philippines accepted a $78 billion increase in military aid from the U.S. to fight terrorism, public outcry there forced the U.S. to remove its “active” military presence since it violated a portion of the Philippines’s constitution that banned combat by foreign soldiers on its soil. (Klein). Also significant here is the degree to which the negotiation of national and cultural borders is primarily a negotiation of capital. As The Nation reported: For [Philippine President Arroyo], the global antiterrorist campaign is first and foremost a business proposition, and she made this very clear when she emerged from her meeting with President Bush in Washington in November and boasted to Filipino reporters that "it's $4.6 billion, and counting.” (Bello) All of these examples reinforce cultural and national borders in order to resist domination by capital. In French Foreign Minister Védrine’s words, the “desire to preserve cultural diversity in the world is in no way a sign of anti-Americanism but of antihegemonism, a refusal of impoverishment” (qtd. in Gordon 30). This “refusal of impoverishment” is the accomplishment of identities that refuse to supplant culture with capital. As these examples show, borders need not simply reinforce existing power relations, but are sites of resistance as well. But Is This Turf Really Cultural? Can one legitimately refer to the examples of Turkey and the Philippines, as well as the web of forces that structure the interactions of all nations in a system of multinational capitalism, as being “cultural”? If the subtitle of Fredric Jameson’s book, Postmodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, does not suggest strongly enough the particularly cultural turf of these systems, Jameson makes this explicit when he states that we have witnessed . . . a prodigious expansion of culture throughout the social realm, to the point at which everything in our social life—from economic value and state power to practices and to the very structure of the psyche itself—can be said to have become ”cultural.” (48). One of Jameson’s basic arguments in his second chapter is that “every position on postmodernism in culture . . . is also at one and the same time, and necessarily, an implicitly or explicitly political stance on the nature of multinational capitalism today” (3). I would like to transpose this statement somewhat by asserting that every position on culture in postmodernism is necessarily a political stance on the nature of multinational capitalism. Therefore, actions that negotiate cultural turf and modify national identities can be methods of influencing the contours of multinational capitalism. In other words, strategic border-building maintains the space of hybridity because it seeks to disavow the dominance of cultural turf by capital. Without such protectionist and essentializing efforts, the conditions of possibility for hybrid identities would be at the mercy of market forces. The pragmatic use of essentialism as a mode of resistance is a move one can imagine Fish would approve of, and that Hardt and Negri hint at the necessity of when they state: The creative forces that sustain Empire are also capable of autonomously constructing a counter-Empire, an alternative political organization of global flows and exchanges. The struggles to contest and subvert Empire, as well as those to construct a real alternative, will thus take place on the imperial terrain itself. (xv) Essentialism is admittedly one of the “creative forces that sustain Empire.” The dangers of struggling “on the imperial terrain itself” lie in not retaining the critical self-consciousness of one’s own strategies that Spivak argues for, and in not remaining mindful of the histories of genocide and tyranny that have accompanied much modern nationalism. In constructing a “counter-Empire,” cultures can resist both the seductions of aggressive nationalism and the homogenizing forces of multinational capitalism. The turf of hybridity provides a space from which to launch this counter-Empire, but this space may only exist between cultural identities, not between multiple versions of a homogenized consumer identity maintained by corporate influence. Nations should neither be afraid to rebuild self-consciously their cultural borders nor to act strategically to maintain their distinctiveness, despite postmodern theory’s acclamation of the dissolution of borders and political appeals for global solidarity against the terrorist ‘Other.’ In order to establish resistance in the context of international capitalism, the strategic disavowal necessary to hybridity may need to emerge as a disavowal of hybridity itself. Works Cited Anzaldua, Gloria. “Borderlands/La Frontera.” Literary Theory, An Anthology. Ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Malden: Blackwell, 2001. 887–902. Bello, Waldo. “A ‘Second Front’ in the Philippines.” The Nation 18 Mar. 2002. 16 Feb. 2004. <http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20020318&s=bello>. Bhabha, Homi. K. “Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and Authority Under a Tree Outside Delhi, May 1817.” The Postcolonial Studies Reader. Ed. Bill Ashcroft, et al. New York: Routledge, 1995. 29–35. Bush, George W. “President Bush Speaks to United Nations.” The White House. 11 Jan. 2004. <http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/11/20011110-3.php>. Fish, Stanley. Professional Correctness: Literary Studies and Political Change. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995. Giroux, Henry. Border Crossings: Cultural Workers and the Politics of Education. New York: Routledge, 1992. ---. “Paulo Freire and the Politics of Postcolonialism.” JAC 12.1 (1992): 15–26. Gordon, Philip H., and Sophie Meunier. “Globalization and French Cultural Identity.”French Politics, Culture, and Society 19.1 (2001): 22–41. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2000. Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke UP, 1991. Klein, Naomi. “Mutiny in Manila.” The Nation 1 Sep. 2003. 16 Feb. 2004. <http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20030901&s=klein>. Lee, Matthew. “Turkey’s Refusal Stuns U.S.” Common Dreams News Center. 1 Mar. 2003. 12 Jan. 2004. <http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0301-10.htm>. Martín-Barbero, Jésus. “The Processes: From Nationalisms to Transnationals.” Media and Cultural Studies: Keyworks. Ed. Meenakshi Gigi Durham and Douglas M. Kellner. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001. 351–84. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. Outside in the Teaching Machine. New York: Routledge, 1993. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Mason's, Eric D. "Border-Building" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0403/03-border-building.php>. APA Style Mason's, E. (2004, Mar17). Border-Building. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 7, <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0403/03-border-building.php>

IntroductionIn the year 2000, a group of likeminded individuals got together and convened the first annual World Barista Championship in Monte Carlo. With twelve competitors from around the globe, each competitor was judged by seven judges: one head judge who oversaw the process, two technical judges who assessed technical skills, and four sensory judges who evaluated the taste and appearance of the espresso drinks. Competitors had fifteen minutes to serve four espresso coffees, four cappuccino coffees, and four “signature” drinks that they had devised using one shot of espresso and other ingredients of their choice, but no alcohol. The competitors were also assessed on their overall barista skills, their creativity, and their ability to perform under pressure and impress the judges with their knowledge of coffee. This competition has grown to the extent that eleven years later, in 2011, 54 countries held national barista championships with the winner from each country competing for the highly coveted position of World Barista Champion. That year, Alejandro Mendez from El Salvador became the first world champion from a coffee producing nation. Champion baristas are more likely to come from coffee consuming countries than they are from coffee producing countries as countries that produce coffee seldom have a culture of espresso coffee consumption. While Ireland is not a coffee-producing nation, the Irish are the highest per capita consumers of tea in the world (Mac Con Iomaire, “Ireland”). Despite this, in 2008, Stephen Morrissey from Ireland overcame 50 other national champions to become the 2008 World Barista Champion (see, http://vimeo.com/2254130). Another Irish national champion, Colin Harmon, came fourth in this competition in both 2009 and 2010. This paper discusses the history and development of coffee and coffee houses in Dublin from the 17th century, charting how coffee culture in Dublin appeared, evolved, and stagnated before re-emerging at the beginning of the 21st century, with a remarkable win in the World Barista Championships. The historical links between coffeehouses and media—ranging from print media to electronic and social media—are discussed. In this, the coffee house acts as an informal public gathering space, what urban sociologist Ray Oldenburg calls a “third place,” neither work nor home. These “third places” provide anchors for community life and facilitate and foster broader, more creative interaction (Oldenburg). This paper will also show how competition from other “third places” such as clubs, hotels, restaurants, and bars have affected the vibrancy of coffee houses. Early Coffee Houses The first coffee house was established in Constantinople in 1554 (Tannahill 252; Huetz de Lemps 387). The first English coffee houses opened in Oxford in 1650 and in London in 1652. Coffee houses multiplied thereafter but, in 1676, when some London coffee houses became hotbeds for political protest, the city prosecutor decided to close them. The ban was soon lifted and between 1680 and 1730 Londoners discovered the pleasure of drinking coffee (Huetz de Lemps 388), although these coffee houses sold a number of hot drinks including tea and chocolate as well as coffee.The first French coffee houses opened in Marseille in 1671 and in Paris the following year. Coffee houses proliferated during the 18th century: by 1720 there were 380 public cafés in Paris and by the end of the century there were 600 (Huetz de Lemps 387). Café Procope opened in Paris in 1674 and, in the 18th century, became a literary salon with regular patrons: Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot and Condorcet (Huetz de Lemps 387; Pitte 472). In England, coffee houses developed into exclusive clubs such as Crockford’s and the Reform, whilst elsewhere in Europe they evolved into what we identify as cafés, similar to the tea shops that would open in England in the late 19th century (Tannahill 252-53). Tea quickly displaced coffee in popularity in British coffee houses (Taylor 142). Pettigrew suggests two reasons why Great Britain became a tea-drinking nation while most of the rest of Europe took to coffee (48). The first was the power of the East India Company, chartered by Elizabeth I in 1600, which controlled the world’s biggest tea monopoly and promoted the beverage enthusiastically. The second was the difficulty England had in securing coffee from the Levant while at war with France at the end of the seventeenth century and again during the War of the Spanish Succession (1702-13). Tea also became the dominant beverage in Ireland and over a period of time became the staple beverage of the whole country. In 1835, Samuel Bewley and his son Charles dared to break the monopoly of The East India Company by importing over 2,000 chests of tea directly from Canton, China, to Ireland. His family would later become synonymous with the importation of coffee and with opening cafés in Ireland (see, Farmar for full history of the Bewley's and their activities). Ireland remains the highest per-capita consumer of tea in the world. Coffee houses have long been linked with social and political change (Kennedy, Politicks; Pincus). The notion that these new non-alcoholic drinks were responsible for the Enlightenment because people could now gather socially without getting drunk is rejected by Wheaton as frivolous, since there had always been alternatives to strong drink, and European civilisation had achieved much in the previous centuries (91). She comments additionally that cafés, as gathering places for dissenters, took over the role that taverns had long played. Pennell and Vickery support this argument adding that by offering a choice of drinks, and often sweets, at a fixed price and in a more civilized setting than most taverns provided, coffee houses and cafés were part of the rise of the modern restaurant. It is believed that, by 1700, the commercial provision of food and drink constituted the second largest occupational sector in London. Travellers’ accounts are full of descriptions of London taverns, pie shops, coffee, bun and chop houses, breakfast huts, and food hawkers (Pennell; Vickery). Dublin Coffee Houses and Later incarnations The earliest reference to coffee houses in Dublin is to the Cock Coffee House in Cook Street during the reign of Charles II (1660-85). Public dining or drinking establishments listed in the 1738 Dublin Directory include taverns, eating houses, chop houses, coffee houses, and one chocolate house in Fownes Court run by Peter Bardin (Hardiman and Kennedy 157). During the second half of the 17th century, Dublin’s merchant classes transferred allegiance from taverns to the newly fashionable coffee houses as places to conduct business. By 1698, the fashion had spread to country towns with coffee houses found in Cork, Limerick, Kilkenny, Clonmel, Wexford, and Galway, and slightly later in Belfast and Waterford in the 18th century. Maxwell lists some of Dublin’s leading coffee houses and taverns, noting their clientele: There were Lucas’s Coffee House, on Cork Hill (the scene of many duels), frequented by fashionable young men; the Phoenix, in Werburgh Street, where political dinners were held; Dick’s Coffee House, in Skinner’s Row, much patronized by literary men, for it was over a bookseller’s; the Eagle, in Eustace Street, where meetings of the Volunteers were held; the Old Sot’s Hole, near Essex Bridge, famous for its beefsteaks and ale; the Eagle Tavern, on Cork Hill, which was demolished at the same time as Lucas’s to make room for the Royal Exchange; and many others. (76) Many of the early taverns were situated around the Winetavern Street, Cook Street, and Fishamble Street area. (see Fig. 1) Taverns, and later coffee houses, became meeting places for gentlemen and centres for debate and the exchange of ideas. In 1706, Francis Dickson published the Flying Post newspaper at the Four Courts coffee house in Winetavern Street. The Bear Tavern (1725) and the Black Lyon (1735), where a Masonic Lodge assembled every Wednesday, were also located on this street (Gilbert v.1 160). Dick’s Coffee house was established in the late 17th century by bookseller and newspaper proprietor Richard Pue, and remained open until 1780 when the building was demolished. In 1740, Dick’s customers were described thus: Ye citizens, gentlemen, lawyers and squires,who summer and winter surround our great fires,ye quidnuncs! who frequently come into Pue’s,To live upon politicks, coffee, and news. (Gilbert v.1 174) There has long been an association between coffeehouses and publishing books, pamphlets and particularly newspapers. Other Dublin publishers and newspapermen who owned coffee houses included Richard Norris and Thomas Bacon. Until the 1850s, newspapers were burdened with a number of taxes: on the newsprint, a stamp duty, and on each advertisement. By 1865, these taxes had virtually disappeared, resulting in the appearance of 30 new newspapers in Ireland, 24 of them in Dublin. Most people read from copies which were available free of charge in taverns, clubs, and coffee houses (MacGiolla Phadraig). Coffee houses also kept copies of international newspapers. On 4 May 1706, Francis Dickson notes in the Dublin Intelligence that he held the Paris and London Gazettes, Leyden Gazette and Slip, the Paris and Hague Lettres à la Main, Daily Courant, Post-man, Flying Post, Post-script and Manuscripts in his coffeehouse in Winetavern Street (Kennedy, “Dublin”). Henry Berry’s analysis of shop signs in Dublin identifies 24 different coffee houses in Dublin, with the main clusters in Essex Street near the Custom’s House (Cocoa Tree, Bacon’s, Dempster’s, Dublin, Merchant’s, Norris’s, and Walsh’s) Cork Hill (Lucas’s, St Lawrence’s, and Solyman’s) Skinners’ Row (Bow’s’, Darby’s, and Dick’s) Christ Church Yard (Four Courts, and London) College Green (Jack’s, and Parliament) and Crampton Court (Exchange, and Little Dublin). (see Figure 1, below, for these clusters and the locations of other Dublin coffee houses.) The earliest to be referenced is the Cock Coffee House in Cook Street during the reign of Charles II (1660-85), with Solyman’s (1691), Bow’s (1692), and Patt’s on High Street (1699), all mentioned in print before the 18th century. The name of one, the Cocoa Tree, suggests that chocolate was also served in this coffee house. More evidence of the variety of beverages sold in coffee houses comes from Gilbert who notes that in 1730, one Dublin poet wrote of George Carterwright’s wife at The Custom House Coffee House on Essex Street: Her coffee’s fresh and fresh her tea,Sweet her cream, ptizan, and whea,her drams, of ev’ry sort, we findboth good and pleasant, in their kind. (v. 2 161) Figure 1: Map of Dublin indicating Coffee House clusters 1 = Sackville St.; 2 = Winetavern St.; 3 = Essex St.; 4 = Cork Hill; 5 = Skinner's Row; 6 = College Green.; 7 = Christ Church Yard; 8 = Crampton Court.; 9 = Cook St.; 10 = High St.; 11 = Eustace St.; 12 = Werburgh St.; 13 = Fishamble St.; 14 = Westmorland St.; 15 = South Great George's St.; 16 = Grafton St.; 17 = Kildare St.; 18 = Dame St.; 19 = Anglesea Row; 20 = Foster Place; 21 = Poolbeg St.; 22 = Fleet St.; 23 = Burgh Quay.A = Cafe de Paris, Lincoln Place; B = Red Bank Restaurant, D'Olier St.; C = Morrison's Hotel, Nassau St.; D = Shelbourne Hotel, St. Stephen's Green; E = Jury's Hotel, Dame St. Some coffee houses transformed into the gentlemen’s clubs that appeared in London, Paris and Dublin in the 17th century. These clubs originally met in coffee houses, then taverns, until later proprietary clubs became fashionable. Dublin anticipated London in club fashions with members of the Kildare Street Club (1782) and the Sackville Street Club (1794) owning the premises of their clubhouse, thus dispensing with the proprietor. The first London club to be owned by the members seems to be Arthur’s, founded in 1811 (McDowell 4) and this practice became widespread throughout the 19th century in both London and Dublin. The origin of one of Dublin’s most famous clubs, Daly’s Club, was a chocolate house opened by Patrick Daly in c.1762–65 in premises at 2–3 Dame Street (Brooke). It prospered sufficiently to commission its own granite-faced building on College Green between Anglesea Street and Foster Place which opened in 1789 (Liddy 51). Daly’s Club, “where half the land of Ireland has changed hands”, was renowned for the gambling that took place there (Montgomery 39). Daly’s sumptuous palace catered very well (and discreetly) for honourable Members of Parliament and rich “bucks” alike (Craig 222). The changing political and social landscape following the Act of Union led to Daly’s slow demise and its eventual closure in 1823 (Liddy 51). Coincidentally, the first Starbucks in Ireland opened in 2005 in the same location. Once gentlemen’s clubs had designated buildings where members could eat, drink, socialise, and stay overnight, taverns and coffee houses faced competition from the best Dublin hotels which also had coffee rooms “in which gentlemen could read papers, write letters, take coffee and wine in the evening—an exiguous substitute for a club” (McDowell 17). There were at least 15 establishments in Dublin city claiming to be hotels by 1789 (Corr 1) and their numbers grew in the 19th century, an expansion which was particularly influenced by the growth of railways. By 1790, Dublin’s public houses (“pubs”) outnumbered its coffee houses with Dublin boasting 1,300 (Rooney 132). Names like the Goose and Gridiron, Harp and Crown, Horseshoe and Magpie, and Hen and Chickens—fashionable during the 17th and 18th centuries in Ireland—hung on decorative signs for those who could not read. Throughout the 20th century, the public house provided the dominant “third place” in Irish society, and the drink of choice for itd predominantly male customers was a frothy pint of Guinness. Newspapers were available in public houses and many newspapermen had their own favourite hostelries such as Mulligan’s of Poolbeg Street; The Pearl, and The Palace on Fleet Street; and The White Horse Inn on Burgh Quay. Any coffee served in these establishments prior to the arrival of the new coffee culture in the 21st century was, however, of the powdered instant variety. Hotels / Restaurants with Coffee Rooms From the mid-19th century, the public dining landscape of Dublin changed in line with London and other large cities in the United Kingdom. Restaurants did appear gradually in the United Kingdom and research suggests that one possible reason for this growth from the 1860s onwards was the Refreshment Houses and Wine Licences Act (1860). The object of this act was to “reunite the business of eating and drinking”, thereby encouraging public sobriety (Mac Con Iomaire, “Emergence” v.2 95). Advertisements for Dublin restaurants appeared in The Irish Times from the 1860s. Thom’s Directory includes listings for Dining Rooms from the 1870s and Refreshment Rooms are listed from the 1880s. This pattern continued until 1909, when Thom’s Directory first includes a listing for “Restaurants and Tea Rooms”. Some of the establishments that advertised separate coffee rooms include Dublin’s first French restaurant, the Café de Paris, The Red Bank Restaurant, Morrison’s Hotel, Shelbourne Hotel, and Jury’s Hotel (see Fig. 1). The pattern of separate ladies’ coffee rooms emerged in Dublin and London during the latter half of the 19th century and mixed sex dining only became popular around the last decade of the 19th century, partly infuenced by Cesar Ritz and Auguste Escoffier (Mac Con Iomaire, “Public Dining”). Irish Cafés: From Bewley’s to Starbucks A number of cafés appeared at the beginning of the 20th century, most notably Robert Roberts and Bewley’s, both of which were owned by Quaker families. Ernest Bewley took over the running of the Bewley’s importation business in the 1890s and opened a number of Oriental Cafés; South Great Georges Street (1894), Westmoreland Street (1896), and what became the landmark Bewley’s Oriental Café in Grafton Street (1927). Drawing influence from the grand cafés of Paris and Vienna, oriental tearooms, and Egyptian architecture (inspired by the discovery in 1922 of Tutankhamen’s Tomb), the Grafton Street business brought a touch of the exotic into the newly formed Irish Free State. Bewley’s cafés became the haunt of many of Ireland’s leading literary figures, including Samuel Becket, Sean O’Casey, and James Joyce who mentioned the café in his book, Dubliners. A full history of Bewley’s is available (Farmar). It is important to note, however, that pots of tea were sold in equal measure to mugs of coffee in Bewley’s. The cafés changed over time from waitress- to self-service and a failure to adapt to changing fashions led to the business being sold, with only the flagship café in Grafton Street remaining open in a revised capacity. It was not until the beginning of the 21st century that a new wave of coffee house culture swept Ireland. This was based around speciality coffee beverages such as espressos, cappuccinos, lattés, macchiatos, and frappuccinnos. This new phenomenon coincided with the unprecedented growth in the Irish economy, during which Ireland became known as the “Celtic Tiger” (Murphy 3). One aspect of this period was a building boom and a subsequent growth in apartment living in the Dublin city centre. The American sitcom Friends and its fictional coffee house, “Central Perk,” may also have helped popularise the use of coffee houses as “third spaces” (Oldenberg) among young apartment dwellers in Dublin. This was also the era of the “dotcom boom” when many young entrepreneurs, software designers, webmasters, and stock market investors were using coffee houses as meeting places for business and also as ad hoc office spaces. This trend is very similar to the situation in the 17th and early 18th centuries where coffeehouses became known as sites for business dealings. Various theories explaining the growth of the new café culture have circulated, with reasons ranging from a growth in Eastern European migrants, anti-smoking legislation, returning sophisticated Irish emigrants, and increased affluence (Fenton). Dublin pubs, facing competition from the new coffee culture, began installing espresso coffee machines made by companies such as Gaggia to attract customers more interested in a good latté than a lager and it is within this context that Irish baristas gained such success in the World Barista competition. In 2001 the Georges Street branch of Bewley’s was taken over by a chain called Café, Bar, Deli specialising in serving good food at reasonable prices. Many ex-Bewley’s staff members subsequently opened their own businesses, roasting coffee and running cafés. Irish-owned coffee chains such as Java Republic, Insomnia, and O’Brien’s Sandwich Bars continued to thrive despite the competition from coffee chains Starbucks and Costa Café. Indeed, so successful was the handmade Irish sandwich and coffee business that, before the economic downturn affected its business, Irish franchise O’Brien’s operated in over 18 countries. The Café, Bar, Deli group had also begun to franchise its operations in 2008 when it too became a victim of the global economic downturn. With the growth of the Internet, many newspapers have experienced falling sales of their printed format and rising uptake of their electronic versions. Most Dublin coffee houses today provide wireless Internet connections so their customers can read not only the local newspapers online, but also others from all over the globe, similar to Francis Dickenson’s coffee house in Winetavern Street in the early 18th century. Dublin has become Europe’s Silicon Valley, housing the European headquarters for companies such as Google, Yahoo, Ebay, Paypal, and Facebook. There are currently plans to provide free wireless connectivity throughout Dublin’s city centre in order to promote e-commerce, however, some coffee houses shut off the wireless Internet in their establishments at certain times of the week in order to promote more social interaction to ensure that these “third places” remain “great good places” at the heart of the community (Oldenburg). Conclusion Ireland is not a country that is normally associated with a coffee culture but coffee houses have been part of the fabric of that country since they emerged in Dublin in the 17th century. These Dublin coffee houses prospered in the 18th century, and survived strong competition from clubs and hotels in the 19th century, and from restaurant and public houses into the 20th century. In 2008, when Stephen Morrissey won the coveted title of World Barista Champion, Ireland’s place as a coffee consuming country was re-established. 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Education of women severely lags behind that of men in many developing nations. Fewer girls go to school, tend to drop out earlier than boys, do not receive the same level of education as their male counterparts, and often choose careers that are female predominant (Kelly, 1987). Without exception, India is quite representative of these gender-biased phenomena in education. However, the recent explosion of offshore outsourcing market in India has created a new recognition regarding the role of women in technological careers. The Indian IT sector has seen a trend contrary to what most western nations are experiencing—predominance of women in IT, particularly in IT-enabled services (ITES). India has acknowledged that extensive and intensive use of information and communications technologies (ICT) alone can help the nation develop its neglected human resources, emerge as a knowledge-based society, and participate competitively in the global trade and services. Consequently, the development of ICT has become a national issue with strong impetus from the union government in New Delhi (Choudhary, 1999). Explicit in this initiative is the recognition that to progress as an information society, women must be empowered as key players the IT sector. In parallel, two other trends have focused attention on women in the information society—a nationwide movement for women’s rights spearheaded by many non-government organizations (NGOs) and an increased awareness of corporate social responsibility. Consequently, over the last decade, there has been an increased emphasis on education and reskilling India’s female workforce. While many government efforts are targeted toward the overall upliftment of women, many grassroots level initiatives led by NGO’s and corporations emphasize technological training. This article highlights how the intertwining of grassroots and policy level efforts can increase the pace at which a nation’s female workforce can be reskilled and prepared for a technological world. The article also addresses concerns about such rapid development and potentially challenging outcomes while making recommendations for improvement.