Journal articles on the topic 'Self-exoticism'

The Orient was almost a European invention, and had been since antiquity a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experiences. (Said 1978,1)The past century has witnessed the phenomenon of belly dancing becoming a key icon of the Middle East in the West. This iconic representation often causes outrage, resentment, and even protest among Arabs who resent Westerners (mis)representing them by focusing on cabaret-style belly dance, a low-class and disreputable symbol for many in the Arab world, as a primary media image of the Middle East. Since the 1970s, millions of women and some men in the West have been attracted to belly dancing, investing millions of dollars and enormous time acquiring the basic skill of the dance in order to perform it. This essay will address several issues that are raised by the phenomenon of belly dancing and its transformation, globalization, and acculturation in the West; it is designed to develop a newly emerging area of performance/cultural research, drawing from the fields of dance and transnational studies.

Victorian travelers in colonial contextsencountered differences in landscape, mores and manners, society, politics and culture, among other things, and registered their responses to the places visited in their published travel books for the home audience. Postcolonial critics contend that exoticism, i.e., a Western traveler's response to and description of the differences encountered in the context of travel, was deeply informed by the asymmetrical power relation between the representer/colonizer and the represented/colonized. As a result, these critics argue, exoticism in colonial travel writing was appropriative since it tended to construct the dichotomy of self/other in such a way as to justify imperial interventions in other countries (Forsdick, “Sa(L)Vaging Exoticism” 30–34; Said 1–28). As Graham Huggan rightly argues, difference of the colonial other in its various aspects was denigrated and dismissed as exotic when “translated into the master code of empire,” since it superimposed “a dominant way of seeing, speaking and thinking onto marginalised peoples” (24).

Celebrity has become common in many fields of endeavour and is increasingly manifested in the emerging form of self-mediated microcelebrity or social media Influencer. One regular tactic for both celebrity and microcelebrity is to use the media for a dual performance at once ordinary and extraordinary, linking the world of the exotic with that of the everyday. Turning the spotlight of (micro)celebrity studies on travel bloggers illuminates social norms and cultural values at the intersection of lifestyle and economics enabled by digital social media, and the role of self-mediation in their online success. This article analyses the About Me sections of 50 popular travel blogs to see how writers take control of their own media representations to combine the everyday with the exotic in such a way that appeals to readers and subsequently to commercial entities – commodifying themselves alongside their readers through media and on their own subjective terms.

Bricolage, the mixing of diverse religious resources, has been highlighted as a key process in contemporary spiritualities. Since, in this process, historically or culturally distant and foreign traditions are self-referentially drawn upon as representatives of a true spirituality deemed lost in the materialistic West, exoticism has further been identified as its core feature. In this article, through an in-depth ethnographic study, I examine operations of bricolage and exoticism in spiritual women workshops in North Western Europe that focused on the trope of the “wild woman.” In particular, I highlight the transformational power of these retreats in reference to Michael Taussig’s notion of mimesis as a sensuous embodiment of imagined otherness. I argue that, through enacting wildness in their bodies, the participants were overtaken by their own—historically determined—imaginations of primitiveness and naturalness, which not only created new visions of the feminine and female power, but also led to important life changes.

Serbia was an Ottoman province for almost four centuries; after some rebellions, the First and Second Uprising, she received the status of autonomous principality in 1830, and became independent in 1878. Due to the historical and cultural circumstances, the first stage music form was komad s pevanjem (theater play with music numbers), following with the first operas only at the beginning of the twentieth century. Contrary to the usual practice to depict “golden age” of medieval national past, like in many other traditions of national opera, the earliest Serbian operas were dedicated to the recent past and coexistence with Ottomans. Thus the operas Na uranku (At dawn, 1904) by Stanislav Binički (1872–1942), Knez Ivo od Semberije (Prince Ivo of Semberia, 1911) by Isidor Bajić (1878–1915), both based on the libretti by the leading Serbian playwright Branislav Nušić, and also Zulumćar (The Hooligan, librettists: Svetozar Ćorović and Aleksa Šantić, 1927) by Petar Krstić (1877–1957), presented Serbia from the first decades of the nineteenth century. Later Serbian operas, among which is the most significant Koštana (1931, revised in 1940 and 1948) by Petar Konjović (1883–1970), composed after the theatre play under the same name by the author Borisav Stanković, shifts the focus of exoticism, presenting a life of a south-Serbian town in 1880. Local milieu of Vranje is depicted through tragic destiny of an enchanting beauty, a Roma singer Koštana, whose exoticism is coming from her belonging to the undesirable minority. These operas show how the national identity was constructed – by libretto, music and iconography – through Oriental Self. The language (marked by numerous Turkish loan words), musical (self)presentation and visual image of the main characters of the operas are identity signifiers, which show continuity as well as perception of the Ottoman cultural imperial legacy.

Utopia as a concept points towards a world essentially alien to us. Utopia as a work describes this otherness and confronts us with a world whose strangeness might seem disturbing. Utopia and Europe differ in their relationship to what is other (Latin alienus) – that is, that which belongs to someone else, that which is foreign, that which is strange. These two worlds are at odds in regards to their foreign policy and way of life: Utopia aspires to self-sufficiency but remains open to whatever good may arrive from beyond its borders, while the Old World appears alienated by exteriority yet refuses to welcome any kind of otherness. This issue also plays a major part in the reception of More’s work. Book I invites the reader to distance himself from a European point of view in order to consider what is culturally strange not as logically absurd but merely as geographically remote. Utopia still makes room for some exoticism, but mostly in its paratexts, and this exoticism needs to be deciphered. All in all, Utopia may invite us to transcend the horizontal dialectics of worldly alterity in order to open our eyes to a more radical, metaphysical otherness.

In this text, Rudolf Brucci?s opera Gilgamesh is viewed in the light of Ralph Locke?s ?All the Music in the Full Context? Paradigm which promotes the approach that one should search for the exotic elements in musical works first in the discursive components (title, program, accompanying notes), visual representations (costume, scenery) and a ?horizon of expectations? of a particular culture, and only then to observe exoticism as the aspect of a musical style. In the light of this Paradigm, ?exoticism? of the opera Gilgamesh is detected at the level of the music material and compositional procedures, but not in the dramaturgical profiling of characters, narrative adaptation of the Sumerian epic, costumes and scenery. The plot, costumes and the scenery of the opera do not construct the Orient with either positive or negative projections attributed to it by the Western European Orientalist discourse, but portray Gilgamesh and Enkidu as ancient mythic protagonists on the margin of the (not-always) exoticist once/now binarism. The musical language of the opera, which abounds in the usage of oriental musical scales and citations, indicates that oriental/exotic was one of the author?s ?target levels? when conceiving and composing Gilgamesh. Brucci, however, did not build the ?ethnological model? in his opera, but gave oriental scales and ?exotic? musical citations their meaning within the Western musical tradition, which is why his approach can be compared with the ?veiled exoticism? of the French composers of the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. In the light of the self/other binarism, reaching for the exotic in Gilgamesh can be presented as an auto-exotic creative behavior of Brucci as a composer who perceives his ?minority identity? in a relation to an imaginary referential system of the Center. However, I am more inclined to see Brucci?s identificational intention in his advocacy of the Yugoslav NAM (Non-Aligned Movement) project, and his dealing with the ?exotic? as part of his strategy to support cultural achievements of the Third World which predominantly participated in that project.

AbstractIn the late 1960s, the prominent psychologist Abraham Maslow argued that music-making was an inherently bodily activity, which like sex, could induce what Maslow called “peak experiences”—moments of mystical transcendence and personal insight. Amass enough such peak experiences, Maslow suggested, and one could achieve “self-actualization”—the full realization of one's potential as a human being. This article argues that though many musicians would heed Maslow's words, few embodied Maslow's program more than composer John Coolidge Adams did in the late 1970s. The article shows how Maslowian ideas shaped some of Adams's formative musical experiences in the San Francisco Bay Area. The article further demonstrates how these same concepts inspired the development of Adams's idiosyncratic postminimalist idiom, with particular attention to Adams's 1978 string septetShaker Loops. By considering the influence of Adams's countercultural milieu, the article reveals strains of primitivism, eroticism, and exoticism in Adams's work more closely associated with Adams's minimalist predecessors. It also presents an alternative view of postmodernism in music, arguing that for Adams, at least, to make music “after” modernism was to make music a medium of self-actualization.

Abstract. Within the academic field of Geography, there is an "identity crisis" facing German-language scholarship in Development Studies programs, particularly in terms of disciplinary characteristics, epistemological aims and methodological approaches. This critical self-reflection finds its expression in the use of terms like "mid-range theory" or "global south", and is manifest as well in repeated calls for a re-formulation of the discipline. Simultaneously, an increasing number of empirical studies in this field are informed by readings of Bourdieu, and are relying on praxeological and corresponding relational perspectives. These studies are transcending the prevalent actor-centered paradigms. Against such a background this paper not only shows how Bourdieu's suggestions can contribute to countering conceptual and discursive dichotomies, regionalized exoticism of cultural contexts and a normative bias (especially in applied research), but also indicates directions for a reformulation or alternative interpretation of the discipline. In order to address these issues, we focus on the key concept of relationality, which is epistemologically central to understanding the "social world"; academically central for a praxeological concept of global social research; and methodologically central in terms of self-reflexivity and a heuristic approach to social categories.

The performative representation of the Spanish Roma woman reveals a historical journey that brings her closer to many symbolic elaborations of the feminine, giving her a special affinity with the imaginary concerning the colonized woman, particularly with the Orientalist vision. Developed initially by the travelling intellectuals in Spain who sought a fusion of the topics of sexualized exoticism, the myth was reworked by local artists and thinkers without undermining their power to silence and make invisible the reality of the most vulnerable and most represented members of the ethnic group, their women. Today, a growing awareness of the importance of collective action directs Roma women to initiatives such as the revision of their historical memory, at the intersection between the external gaze and self-perception. These searches lead to the pioneering creation of community museum institutions, which have arisen around feminine Roma associations and are a symptom of an emerging desire to be heard. Based on the terminological tools shared by women and memory studies, this article seeks the personal dimension of this invitation to listen. The authors analyse a series of interviews with Roma women that investigate the social agents of representation, self-representation and their conceptual and experiential foundations.

ABSTRACTThis article presents an analytical and cultural reading of the 1932 song ‘Der Onkel Bumba aus Kalumba tanzt nur Rumba’ by the German vocal group the Comedian Harmonists. It incorporates Erving Goffman's stigma theory to propose an alternative interpretation of performances of commercial rumba and jazz by members of a Weimar cosmopolitan youth culture that pushes beyond paradigms of appropriation and exoticism. The author argues that songs seemingly exoticizing an Other could rather serve as a means of articulating concerns of an Othered Self in the context of the rise of National Socialism. The article contrasts a close reading of the Comedian Harmonists’ performance of the song with performances by Leo Monosson and the Melody Gents and incorporates the contrasting experiences of the lyricist Fritz Rotter with those of the Comedian Harmonists to show how ‘Der Onkel Bumba’ presented jazz/rumba as an indicator for both utopian idealism and looming dystopian horror.

AbstractThis article deals with the life and work of the early twentieth-century British modernist composers Cyril Scott and John Foulds, in the context of British national music and ‘imperial culture’ at large. Through a discussion of their Theosophical spirituality, Indian musical exoticism, and modernist aesthetics (for all of which they became outsiders to the British music establishment), it tentatively investigates their ideas as part of an ‘alternative’ ideological cluster, which equally influenced British ‘imperial culture’. Furthermore, it discusses the role of Theosophists (such as Annie Besant, Margaret Cousins, and Rukmini Devi) in Indian nationalism and the making of modern South Indian music. This situates the cases of Scott and Foulds within Theosophy as a global movement, and illustrates how cosmopolitan radicalism, Western self-questioning, modernist aesthetics, and anti-establishment thinking linked up with the emergence of non-Western anti-imperial nationalism through an intricate network of personal relationships in metropolis and colony.

This collection of essays has threaded several lines of argument through and around the topic of autoexoticism. With Minyan Sun we saw how an exoticizing gaze can develop the feedback loop of autoexoticism when the self recognizes its investment in the other and subjects itself to its own desiring attention. Daniele Nunziata and Naomi Charlotte Fukuzawa both traced further complexities of identity that cross the self-other boundary in colonial Cyprus and between Britain and Japan. Peter Hill, Kasia Szymanska, and Valentina Gosetti all explored the tactical potential of autoexotic elements in a politics of representation, in locations as diverse as Syria, Poland, and Flanders. With Adriana Jacobs we found autoexoticism in recent Hebrew poetry to be a “transcreative and relational” imaginative practice. Finally, Xiaofan Amy Li argued that autoexoticism opens “the boundaries of one's subjectivity and culture to change and rupture,” creating “a holistic field of intercultural experience” where “what is considered self and other are transient and plastic,” since they are drawn into an intercultural practice that “consciously selects and re-creates elements and aspects from disparate cultures and identities.” As these accounts reveal, there can be much that is attractive in autoexoticist styles of being, of self-representation, and of encounter. They are formally and linguistically mobile. They have a strong affective charge, provoking reactions of amusement, embarrassment, or outrage. They are courageous, since they run the risk of being dismissed as mere exoticism. And they can loosen established identities, opening them to change.

This essay explores Vernon Lee's ‘Amour Dure’ and ‘Prince Alberic and the Snake Lady’, as well as Oscar Wilde's ‘The Sphinx’, ‘The Truth of Masks’, and ‘The Portrait of Mr. W. H.’ to uncover how writers at the turn of the twentieth century represented encounters with material artefacts of the past to facilitate the expression of queer identity and experience. While Lee's stories address derelict material remains to expose neglected individual histories, illustrating unconventional relationships through temporal collision, Wilde's ‘The Sphinx’ adopts the exoticism of ancient Egypt to more explicitly discuss sexual transgression. Furthermore, through ‘The Truth of Masks’ and ‘The Portrait of Mr. W. H.’, Wilde can be seen to employ archaeological experience to envision queer desire. In their appropriation of the mysteries of the buried past to suggest non-normative desires buried within the self, these late-Victorian works constitute a precursor to major concepts generally associated with the twentieth century, including Freud's analogy between archaeology and psychoanalysis, and the rise of queer archaeology in the late 1980s.

Ever since jazz began to make an impact in white aesthetic culture in the late 1910s and 1920s, critics, regardless of whether they celebrated or condemned the music, enmeshed their discourse with images of exoticism, noble savageness, and racial brutishness. As Jazz Studies emerged as an academic discipline, scholars have shown increasing interest in exposing these images in order to illustrate the pervading racist sentiment inscribed within white perception of the jazz idiom and also to establish the connections between jazz and the modernist obsession with primitivism. The aim of this paper is to contribute further study to the intricacies of primitivism through a close examination of the rhetorical devices enabling the subsistence and efficiency of the white supremacy’s mystification of jazz. In this way, we may better comprehend how the primitivist construct is not a matter of an ideology’s conglomeration of superficial images, nor of mere associations between the music and rituals. These features are certainly operative, but by approaching the metaliguistic techniques implicit in what Roland Barthes calls the bourgeois myth, jazz primitiveness can be conceived as an act of colonization that begins and is self-nurtured by patterns of speech.

This article explores the Orientalist dynamics of North/South sexual tourism in Laurent Cantet’s Vers le sud/Heading South (2005). The narrative of the film is structured around the self-interested motivations of three white middle-aged bourgeois Western women who travel from North America to Haiti in the late 1970s in order to explore their sexuality in what they perceive as an island paradise, effectively exiling themselves from the codified social behavior expected of them in their homeland. The women avail themselves of the pleasures offered by young black Haitian men, often in exchange for money or goods, and fuel one-sided fantasies of romantic love with their local hosts, seemingly oblivious to the Orientalist nature of such an imbalance of social and economic power. The article explores the historical context of the political repression and violence of late-1970s Haiti under the Duvalier regime, as well as the manifestations of spatial politics represented in the film. In its Haitian setting, Vers le sud sheds light on a relatively unfamiliar cultural and social milieu for the Western/Northern audience, with the director keenly aware of the exoticism of the subject matter and the impossibility of the film to maintain its neutrality in a problematic engagement with the Orient/South. The article argues that the privileged position of the film’s protagonists is matched not only by Cantet’s directorial gaze, but also by the intellectual detachment of postcolonial scholars such as the article’s authors, who acknowledge that their engagement with the subject matter risks re-enacting the Orientalist dynamics they seek to expose.

In her study of Transnational South Asians (2008), Susan Koshy highlights the systematic neglect by scholars of the perspectives and activities of such seemingly peripheral actors as diasporic subjects in the macro-narratives of nationalism and globalization. Such neglect was even more pronounced in the case of the “repatriates” from European colonies in Asia and Africa. The epistemological implications of the dislocated, de-territorialized discourse produced by repatriates from former European colonies remain largely overlooked. One of those groups that seem to have slipped between the pages of history is the diasporic Eurasian “Indo” community that has its roots in the former Dutch East Indies. In this article, I focus on Tjalie Robinson, the intellectual leader of this community from the 1950s to the mid-1970s. In recent decades, there has been a growing interest in what Homi Bhabha, in The Location of Culture (1994, 38), called “the conceptualization of an international culture, based not on the exoticism of multiculturalism or the diversity of cultures, but on the inscription and articulation of culture’s hybridity.” Long before Bhabha, Robinson had already published substantially on hybrid, transnational identity. As the son of a Dutch father and a British-Javanese mother, Robinson had made a name in Indonesia with his writings. He left Indonesia in 1954, and soon became the leading voice of the diasporic Indo community in the Netherlands and, later, also in the United States. His engagement resulted in the founding of the Indo magazine Tong Tong and the annual Pasar Malam, the world’s biggest Eurasian festival. With his writings, Robinson played an essential role in the cultural awareness and self-pride of the Indo community through the acceptance of their essentially hybrid and transnational identity.

Although the heraldry theme does not belong to the main poetry themes of Viktor Krivulin, it is indicative of his poetic reflections on the relationship between self-comprehension of the Russian authorities, the dynamics of Russian art development and the fate of a private person. V. Krivulin’s poems are adjacent to the poet’s numerous ekphrases in which the coat of arms acts as a lyrical motif and the marginality of the theme in his lyrical world proves some of the mechanisms of this type of ekphrasis. The coat of arms acts simultaneously as a representation of authority and an artifact or image, dependent on the general world art development and on the specifics of power and art relationship. Therefore, underlining in the coat of arms such aspects as collectibility, provocativeness, exoticism, correlates V. Krivulin’s heraldry poems with ekphrases, devoted to the presence of art in Saint-Petersburg and to the complex fate of artifacts in the vicissitudes of history. In V. Krivulin’s lyrical heraldry I trace the visual semiotics influence of the Tartu-Moscow semiotic school, primarily in understanding the unity of the material, form, perspective view and conditional symbols of coat of arms, which immediately recalls the method of analyzing iconography as a spiritual authority manifestation in the Russian structuralism. But at the same time V. Krivulin gives enough markers that distinguish the coat of arms from works of art, and thus showing the crisis status of art in the 20th century. I note that these coats of arms are not conditional, a reader can always find real prototypes of these coats of arms, and thus their function turns out to be a historical linkage of the lyrical plot to the historical one. Close reading of these verses allows to clarify relationship between ekphrasis and historical reflections, its paradox and dynamism in V. Krivulin’s lyrical poetry, thereby identifying in a new perspective a combination of deeply melancholic mood and satirical, almost close to Sots Art principles in his works.

Covid 19 – living the experience As I sit at my desk at home in suburban Brisbane, following the dictates on self-isolation shared with so many around the world, I am forced to contemplate the limits of human prediction. I look out on a world which few could have predicted six months ago. My thoughts at that time were all about 2020 as a metaphor for perfect vision and a plea for it to herald a new period of clarity which would arm us in resolving the whole host of false divisions that surrounded us. False, because so many appear to be generated by the use of polarised labelling strategies which sought to categorise humans by a whole range of identities, while losing the essential humanity and individuality which we all share. This was a troublesome trend and one which seemed reminiscent of the biblical tale concerning the tower of Babel, when a single unified language was what we needed to create harmony in a globalising world. However, yesterday’s concerns have, at least for the moment, been overshadowed by a more urgent and unifying concern with humanity’s health and wellbeing. For now, this concern has created a world which we would not have recognised in 2019. We rely more than ever on our various forms of electronic media to beam instant shots of the streets of London, New York, Berlin, Paris, Hong Kong etc. These centres of our worldly activity normally characterised by hustle and bustle, are now serenely peaceful and ordered. Their magnificent buildings have become foregrounded, assuming a dignity and presence that is more commonly overshadowed by the mad ceaseless scramble of humanity all around them. From there however the cameras can jump to some of the less fortunate areas of the globe. These streets are still teeming with people in close confined areas. There is little hope here of following frequent extended hand washing practices, let alone achieving the social distance prescribed to those of us in the global North. From this desk top perspective, it has been interesting to chart the mood as the crisis has unfolded. It has moved from a slightly distant sense of superiority as the news slowly unfolded about events in remote Wuhan. The explanation that the origins were from a live market, where customs unfamiliar to our hygienic pre-packaged approach to food consumption were practised, added to this sense of separateness and exoticism surrounding the source and initial development of the virus. However, this changed to a growing sense of concern as its growth and transmission slowly began to reveal the vulnerability of all cultures to its spread. At this early stage, countries who took steps to limit travel from infected areas seemed to gain some advantage. Australia, as just one example banned flights from China and required all Chinese students coming to study in Australia to self-isolate for two weeks in a third intermediate port. It was a step that had considerable economic costs associated with it. One that was vociferously resisted at the time by the university sector increasingly dependent on the revenue generated by servicing Chinese students. But it was when the epicentre moved to northern Italy, that the entire messaging around the event began to change internationally. At this time the tone became increasingly fearful, anxious and urgent as reports of overwhelmed hospitals and mass burials began to dominate the news. Consequently, governments attracted little criticism but were rather widely supported in the action of radically closing down their countries in order to limit human interaction. The debate had become one around the choice between health and economic wellbeing. The fact that the decision has been overwhelmingly for health, has been encouraging. It has not however stopped the pressure from those who believe that economic well-being is a determinant of human well-being, questioning the decisions of politicians and the advice of public health scientists that have dominated the responses to date. At this stage, the lives versus livelihoods debate has a long way still to run. Of some particular interest has been the musings of the opinion writers who have predicted that the events of these last months will change our world forever. Some of these predictions have included the idea that rather than piling into common office spaces working remotely from home and other advantageous locations will be here to stay. Schools and universities will become centres of learning more conveniently accessed on-line rather than face to face. Many shopping centres will become redundant and goods will increasingly be delivered via collection centres or couriers direct to the home. Social distancing will impact our consumption of entertainment at common venues and lifestyle events such as dining out. At the macro level, it has been predicted that globalisation in its present form will be reversed. The pandemic has led to actions being taken at national levels and movement being controlled by the strengthening and increased control of physical borders. Tourism has ground to a halt and may not resume on its current scale or in its present form as unnecessary travel, at least across borders, will become permanently reduced. Advocates of change have pointed to some of the unpredicted benefits that have been occurring. These include a drop in air pollution: increased interaction within families; more reading undertaken by younger adults; more systematic incorporation of exercise into daily life, and; a rediscovered sense of community with many initiatives paying tribute to the health and essential services workers who have been placed at the forefront of this latest struggle with nature. Of course, for all those who point to benefits in the forced lifestyle changes we have been experiencing, there are those who would tell a contrary tale. Demonstrations in the US have led the push by those who just want things to get back to normal as quickly as possible. For this group, confinement at home creates more problems. These may be a function of the proximity of modern cramped living quarters, today’s crowded city life, dysfunctional relationships, the boredom of self-entertainment or simply the anxiety that comes with an insecure livelihood and an unclear future. Personally however, I am left with two significant questions about our future stimulated by the events that have been ushered in by 2020. The first is how is it that the world has been caught so unprepared by this pandemic? The second is to what extent do we have the ability to recalibrate our current practices and view an alternative future? In considering the first, it has been enlightening to observe the extent to which politicians have turned to scientific expertise in order to determine their actions. Terms like ‘flattening the curve’, ‘community transmission rates’, have become part of our daily lexicon as the statistical modellers advance their predictions as to how the disease will spread and impact on our health systems. The fact that scientists are presented as the acceptable and credible authority and the basis for our actions reflects a growing dependency on data and modelling that has infused our society generally. This acceptance has been used to strengthen the actions on behalf of the human lives first and foremost position. For those who pursue the livelihoods argument even bigger figures are available to be thrown about. These relate to concepts such as numbers of jobless, increase in national debt, growth in domestic violence, rise in mental illness etc. However, given that they are more clearly estimates and based on less certain assumptions and variables, they do not at this stage seem to carry the impact of the data produced by public health experts. This is not surprising but perhaps not justifiable when we consider the failure of the public health lobby to adequately prepare or forewarn us of the current crisis in the first place. Statistical predictive models are built around historical data, yet their accuracy depends upon the quality of those data. Their robustness for extrapolation to new settings for example will differ as these differ in a multitude of subtle ways from the contexts in which they were initially gathered. Our often uncritical dependence upon ‘scientific’ processes has become worrying, given that as humans, even when guided by such useful tools, we still tend to repeat mistakes or ignore warnings. At such a time it is an opportunity for us to return to the reservoir of human wisdom to be found in places such as our great literature. Works such as The Plague by Albert Camus make fascinating and educative reading for us at this time. As the writer observes Everybody knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world, yet somehow, we find it hard to believe in ones that crash down on our heads from a blue sky. There have been as many plagues as wars in history, yet always plagues and wars take people equally by surprise. So it is that we constantly fail to study let alone learn the lessons of history. Yet 2020 mirrors 1919, as at that time the world was reeling with the impact of the Spanish ‘Flu, which infected 500 million people and killed an estimated 50 million. This was more than the 40 million casualties of the four years of the preceding Great War. There have of course been other pestilences since then and much more recently. Is our stubborn failure to learn because we fail to value history and the knowledge of our forebears? Yet we can accept with so little question the accuracy of predictions based on numbers, even with varying and unquestioned levels of validity and reliability. As to the second question, many writers have been observing some beneficial changes in our behaviour and our environment, which have emerged in association with this sudden break in our normal patterns of activity. It has given us the excuse to reevaluate some of our practices and identify some clear benefits that have been occurring. As Australian newspaper columnist Bernard Salt observes in an article titled “the end of narcissism?” I think we’ve been re-evaluating the entire contribution/reward equation since the summer bushfires and now, with the added experience of the pandemic, we can see the shallowness of the so-called glamour professions – the celebrities, the influencers. We appreciate the selflessness of volunteer firefighters, of healthcare workers and supermarket staff. From the pandemic’s earliest days, glib forays into social media by celebrities seeking attention and yet further adulation have been met with stony disapproval. Perhaps it is best that they stay offline while our real heroes do the heavy lifting. To this sad unquestioning adherence to both scientism and narcissism, we can add and stir the framing of the climate rebellion and a myriad of familiar ‘first world’ problems which have caused dissension and disharmony in our communities. Now with an external threat on which to focus our attention, there has been a short lull in the endless bickering and petty point scoring that has characterised our western liberal democracies in the last decade. As Camus observed: The one way of making people hang together is to give ‘em a spell of the plague. So, the ceaseless din of the topics that have driven us apart has miraculously paused for at least a moment. Does this then provide a unique opportunity for us together to review our habitual postures and adopt a more conciliatory and harmonious communication style, take stock, critically evaluate and retune our approach to life – as individuals, as nations, as a species? It is not too difficult to hypothesise futures driven by the major issues that have driven us apart. Now, in our attempts to resist the virus, we have given ourselves a glimpse of some of the very things the climate change activists have wished to happen. With few planes in the air and the majority of cars off the roads, we have already witnessed clearer and cleaner air. Working at home has freed up the commuter driven traffic and left many people with more time to spend with their family. Freed from the continuing throng of tourists, cities like Venice are regenerating and cleansing themselves. This small preview of what a less travelled world might start to look like surely has some attraction. But of course, it does not come without cost. With the lack of tourism and the need to work at home, jobs and livelihoods have started to change. As with any revolution there are both winners and losers. The lockdown has distinguished starkly between essential and non-essential workers. That represents a useful starting point from which to assess what is truly of value in our way of life and what is peripheral as Salt made clear. This is a question that I would encourage readers to explore and to take forward with them through the resolution of the current situation. However, on the basis that educators are seen as providing essential services, now is the time to turn to the content of our current volume. Once again, I direct you to the truly international range of our contributors. They come from five different continents yet share a common focus on one of the most popular of shared cultural experiences – sport. Unsurprisingly three of our reviewed papers bring different insights to the world’s most widely shared sport of all – football, or as it would be more easily recognised in some parts of the globe - soccer. Leading these offerings is a comparison of fandom in Australia and China. The story presented by Knijnk highlights the rise of the fanatical supporters known as the ultras. The origin of the movement is traced to Italy, but it is one that claims allegiances now around the world. Kniijnk identifies the movement’s progression into Australia and China and, in pointing to its stance against the commercialisation of their sport by the scions of big business, argues for its deeper political significance and its commitment to the democratic ownership of sport. Reflecting the increasing availability and use of data in our modern societies, Karadog, Parim and Cene apply some of the immense data collected on and around the FIFA World Cup to the task of selecting the best team from the 2018 tournament held in Russia, a task more usually undertaken by panels of experts. Mindful of the value of using data in ways that can assist future decision making, rather than just in terms of summarising past events, they also use the statistics available to undertake a second task. The second task was the selection of the team with the greatest future potential by limiting eligibility to those at an early stage in their careers, namely younger than 28 and who arguably had still to attain their prime as well as having a longer career still ahead of them. The results for both selections confirm how membership of the wealthy European based teams holds the path to success and recognition at the global level no matter what the national origins of players might be. Thirdly, taking links between the sport and the world of finance a step further, Gomez-Martinez, Marques-Bogliani and Paule-Vianez report on an interesting study designed to test the hypothesis that sporting success within a community is reflected in positive economic outcomes for members of that community. They make a bold attempt to test their hypothesis by examining the relationship of the performance of three world leading clubs in Europe - Bayern Munich, Juventus and Paris Saint Germain and the performance of their local stock markets. Their findings make for some interesting thoughts about the significance of sport in the global economy and beyond into the political landscape of our interconnected world. Our final paper comes from Africa but for its subject matter looks to a different sport, one that rules the subcontinent of India - cricket. Norrbhai questions the traditional coaching of batting in cricket by examining the backlift techniques of the top players in the Indian Premier league. His findings suggest that even in this most traditional of sports, technique will develop and change in response to the changing context provided by the game itself. In this case the context is the short form of the game, introduced to provide faster paced entertainment in an easily consumable time span. It provides a useful reminder how in sport, techniques will not be static but will continue to evolve as the game that provides the context for the skilled performance also evolves. To conclude our pages, I must apologise that our usual book review has fallen prey to the current world disruption. In its place I would like to draw your attention to the announcement of a new publication which would make a worthy addition to the bookshelf of any international sports scholar. “Softpower, Soccer, Supremacy – The Chinese Dream” represents a unique and timely analysis of the movement of the most popular and influential game in the world – Association Football, commonly abbreviated to soccer - into the mainstream of Chinese national policy. The editorial team led by one of sports histories most recognised scholars, Professor J A Mangan, has assembled a who’s who of current scholars in sport in Asia. Together they provide a perspective that takes in, not just the Chinese view of these important current developments but also, the view of others in the geographical region. From Japan, Korea and Australia, they bring with them significant experience to not just the beautiful game, but sport in general in that dynamic and fast-growing part of the world. Particularly in the light of the European dominance identified in the Karog, Parim and Cene paper this work raises the question as to whether we can expect to see a change in the world order sooner rather than later. It remains for me to make one important acknowledgement. In my last editorial I alerted you to the sorts of decisions we as an editorial and publication team were facing with regard to ensuring the future of the journal. Debates as to how best to proceed while staying true to our vision and goals are still proceeding. However, I am pleased to acknowledge the sponsorship provided by The University of Macao for volume 42 and recognise the invaluable contribution made by ISCPES former president Walter Ho to this process. Sponsorship can provide an important input to the ongoing existence and strength of this journal and we would be interested in talking to other institutions or groups who might also be interested in supporting our work, particularly where their goals align closely with ours. May I therefore commend to you the works of our international scholars and encourage your future involvement in sharing your interest in and expertise with others in the world of comparative and international sport studies, John Saunders, Brisbane, May 2020

Abstract In their respective debut collections Chick and Loop of Jade, Hannah Lowe and Sarah Howe explore the questions of identity and cultural hybridity through semi-autobiographical family narratives. Conscious of their partial Chinese ancestry, their poetry reflects what it means or feels to self-perceive or be taken as ‘the Other’. In this article, I analyse and compare their poetry to shed light on the significance and representation of multicultural heritage in contemporary women’s poetry, with reference to the multiple identities of the female figure. In particular, their different writing approaches explore the questions of identity for a multicultural poet and the necessity of exoticism and self-exoticism. Through close reading of their poetry and interviews with these authors, I examine the experimentation of poetic form and language in their work, the role of imagination in connecting personal with collective history, and the complexities that underlie the relationship between poetic language, racial, and class barriers.

The present paper, originating from its author’s innocent search for his identity in his twenties as a postcolonial yearning for an emotion-driven, if not unconsciously voluntary, cultural self-colonization, appears ten years later as a self-reflexive and self-critical essay. It can be read as a piece of postcolonial literature apart, or as a commentary to his documentary Ou Mun Ian, Macaenses (2009) and its textual research (2010). This quest, if not construction or invention of identity, resonated with a cross-epochal public discourse which transcended Macau’s last colonial years and its first postcolonial decade, that Macau was never a colony but a unique result from a China-West exchange. Originally to mark the tenth anniversary of the postcolonial Macau, between 2008 and 2009, the author, who was a great yet naïve admirer of the domestic exoticism and the colonial nostalgia of the mix-blood Portuguese Macanese, travelled across Portugal, Canada, US and Brazil to create a project from filmed interviews in the diaspora, in a government-sponsored adventure which let to the author’s self-discovery. This very amateur thirty-three-minute documentary largely shaped the author’s earlier belief in his undecolonizability and his later extended search and creation of his multiplying beliefs inside an Eurocentric expansion of an European universe.

“In the performing arts the very absence of a complete score, i.e., of a complete duplicate, enables music, dances and plays to survive. The tension created by the adaptation of a work of yesterday to the style of today is an essential part of the history of the art in progress” (Rudolf Arnheim, “On Duplication”). In his essay “On Duplication”, Rudolf Arnheim proposes the idea that a close look at the life of adaptations indicates that change is not only necessary and inevitable, but also increases our understanding of the adapted work. To Arnheim, the most fruitful approach to adaptations is therefore to investigate the ways in which the various re-interpretations partake of the (initial) work and concretise latent aspects in a new historical and cultural context. This article analyzes how, and to what ends, the re-contextualising of Georges Bizet’s Carmen in other media—flamenco dance and film – changes, distorts and subverts our perception of the opera’s music. The text under analysis is Carlos Saura’s 1983 movie about a flamenco transposition of Bizet’s Carmen. I discuss this film in terms of how flamenco music and dance, on the one hand, and the film camera, on the other hand, gradually demystify the fascinating power of Bizet’s music, as well as its clichéd associations. Although these forms displace and defamiliarise music in many ways, the main argument of the analysis centers on how flamenco dance and the film image foreground the artificiality of the exotic sections from Bizet’s opera, as well as their inadequacy in the Spanish context, and also on how the film translates and self-reflexively comments on the absence of an embodied voice for Carmen. “C’est la Carmen! Non, ce n’est pas celle-là!” As the credits from Carlos Saura’s Carmen are displayed against the backdrop of Gustave Doré’s drawings, we can hear the chorus of the cigarières from Bizet’s opera singing “C’est la Carmen! Non, ce n’est pas celle-là!”. Why did the director choose this particular section of Bizet’s Carmen with which to begin his film? Moreover, what is the significance of combining Doré’s drawings with these words? In a way, we can say that the reality/illusion polarity signified by the sung words informs and gives a preview of one of the movie’s main themes—the futility of an adapter’s attempt at finding a “true” Carmen. The music’s juxtaposition with Doré’s drawings of nineteenth-century espagnolades adds to the idea of artifice and inauthenticity: Saura seems to be dismissing Bizet’s music by pairing it with the work of another one of the creators of a stereotyped (and false) image of Spain. Demystifying the untrue image that foreigners have created of Spain is one of the film director’s main concerns in his adaptation of both Bizet and Mérimée’s Carmen. The movie’s production history reinforces this idea. In his book on the films of Carlos Saura, Marvin D’Lugo notes that in 1981 the French company Gaumont had approached Saura with the project of making a filmed version of Bizet’s Carmen, “with a maximum of fidelity to the original text” (202), an idea which the director clearly rejected. Another important aspect related to the production history is the fact that Antonio Gadés, the film’s choreographer and actor for Don José’s part, had previously created a ballet version of Bizet’s Carmen, based solely on the second act of the opera. The 1983 film production is then the result of Carlos Saura—the film director attempting to reframe the French opera in the Spanish context—and Antonio Gadés—the flamenco troupe director—collaborating to create a Spanish dance version of Carmen. The film’s constant superimposition of its two diegetic levels—the fictional level, consisting in the rehearsal scenes, and the actual level, which coincides with the characters’ lives outside of and in-between rehearsals—and the constant blurring of the lines separating these two worlds, have been the cause of a plethora of varying interpretations. Susan McClary sees the movie as “a brilliant commentary on ‘exoticism’: on the distance between actual ethnic music and the mock-ups Bizet and others produced for their own ideological purposes” (137); to D’Lugo, the film is an illustration and critique of how “the Spaniards, having come under the spell of the foreign, imposter impression of Spain, find themselves seduced by the falsification of their own cultural past” (203). Other notable interpretations come from Marshall H. Leicester, who sees the film as a comment on the fact that Carmen has become a discourse and a cultural artifact, and from Linda M. Willem, who interprets the movie as a metafictional mise en abyme. I will discuss the movie from a somewhat different perspective, bearing in mind, however, McClary and D’Lugo’s readings. Saura’s Carmen is also a story about adaptation, constantly commenting on the failed attempts at perfect fidelity to the source text(s), by the intradiegetic adapter (Antonio) and, at the same time, self-reflexively embedding hints to the presence of the extradiegetic adapter: the filmmaker Saura. On the one hand, as juxtaposed with flamenco music and dance, the opera’s music is made to appear artificial and inadequate; we are presented with an adaptation in the making, in which many of the oddities and difficulties of transposing opera music to flamenco dance are problematised. On the other hand, the film camera, by constantly foregrounding the movie’s materiality—the possibility to cut and edit the images and the soundtrack, its refusal to maintain a realist illusion—displaces and re-codifies music in other contexts, thus bringing to light dormant interpretations of particular sections of Bizet’s opera, or completely altering their significance. One of the film’s most significant departures from Bizet’s opera is the problematised absence of a suitable Carmen character. Bizet’s opera, however revolves around Carmen: it is very hard, if not impossible, to dissociate the opera from the fascinating Carmen personage. Her transgressive nature, her “otherness” and exoticism, are translated in her singing, dancing and bodily presence on the stage, all these leading to the creation of a character that cannot be neglected. The songs that Bizet adapted from the cabaret numéros in order to add exotic flavor to the music, as well as the provocative dances accompanying the Habaňera and the Seguidilla help create this dimension of Carmen’s fascinating power. It is through her singing and dancing that she becomes a true enchantress, inflicting madness or unreason on the ones she chooses to charm. Saura’s Carmen has very few of the charming attributes of her operatic predecessor. Antonio, however, becomes obsessed with her because she is close to his idea of Carmen. The film foregrounds the immense gap between the operatic Carmen and the character interpreted by Laura del Sol. This double instantiation of Carmen has usually been interpreted as a sign of the demystification of the stereotyped and inauthentic image of Bizet’s character. Another way to interpret it could be as a comment on one of the inevitable losses in the transposition of opera to dance: the separation of the body from the voice. Significantly, the recorded music of Bizet’s opera accompanies more the scenes between rehearsals than the flamenco dance sections, which are mostly performed on traditional Spanish music. The re-codification of the music reinforces the gap between Saura and Gadés’ Carmen and Bizet’s character. The character interpreted by Laura del Sol is not a particularly gifted dancer; therefore, her dance translation of the operatic voice fails to convey the charm and self-assuredness that Carmen’s voice and the sung words fully express. Moreover, the musical and dance re-insertion in a Spanish context completely removes the character’s exoticism and alterity. We could say, rather, that in Saura’s movie it is the operatic Carmen who is becoming exotic and distant. In one of the movie’s first scenes, we are shown an image of Paco de Lucia and a group of flamenco singers as they play and sing a traditional Spanish song. This scene is abruptly interrupted by Bizet’s Seguidilla; immediately after, the camera zooms in on Antonio, completely absorbed by the opera, which he is playing on the tape-recorder. The contrast between the live performance of the Spanish song and the recorded Carmen opera reflects the artificiality of the latter. The Seguidilla is also one of the opera’s sections that Bizet adapted so that it would sound authentically exotic, but which was as far from authentic traditional Spanish music as any of the songs that were being played in the cabarets of Paris in the nineteenth century. The contrast between the authentic sound of traditional Spanish music, as played on the guitar by Paco de Lucia, and Bizet’s own version makes us aware, more than ever, of the act of fabrication underlying the opera’s composition. Most of the rehearsal scenes in the movie are interpreted on original flamenco music, Bizet’s opera appearing mostly in the scenes associated with Antonio, to punctuate the evolution of his love for Carmen and to reinforce the impossibility of transposing Bizet’s music to flamenco dance without making significant modifications. This also signifies the mesmerising power the operatic music has on Antonio’s imagination, gradually transposing him in a universe of understanding completely different from that of his troupe, a world in which he becomes unable to distinguish reality from illusion. With Antonio’s delusion, we are reminded of the luring powers of the operatic fabrication. One of the scenes which foregrounds the opera’s charm is when Antonio watches the dancers led by Cristina rehearse some flamenco movements. While watching their bodies reflected in the mirror, Antonio is dissatisfied with their appearance—he doesn’t see any of them as Carmen. The scene ends with an explosion of Bizet’s music heard from off-screen—probably as Antonio keeps hearing it in his head—dramatically symbolising the great distance between flamenco dance and opera music. One of the rehearsal scenes in which Bizet’s music is heard as an accompaniment to the dance is the scene in which the operatic Carmen performs the castaňet dance for Don José. In the Antonio-Carmen interpretation the music that we hear is the Habaňera and not the seductive song that Bizet’s Carmen is singing at this point in the opera. According to Mary Blackwood Collier, the Habaňera song in the opera has the function to define Carmen’s personality as strong, independent, free and enthralling at the same time (119). The purely instrumental Habaňera, combined with the lyrical and tender dance duo of Antonio/José and Carmen in Saura’s film, transforms the former into a sweet love theme. In the opera, this is one of the arias that centralise the image of Carmen in our perception. The dance transposition as a love pas de deux diminishes the impression of freedom and independence connoted by the song’s words and displaces the centrality of Carmen. Our perception of the opera’s music is significantly reshaped by the film camera too. In her book The Hollywood Musical Jane Feuer contends that the use of multiple diegesis in the backstage musical has the function to “mirror within the film the relationship of the spectator to the film. Multiple diegesis in this sense parallels the use of an internal audience” (68). Carlos Saura’s movie preserves and foregrounds this function. The mirrors in which the dancers often reflect themselves hint to an external plane of observation (the audience). The artificial collapse of the boundaries between off-stage and on-stage scenes acts as a reminder of the film’s capacity to compress and distort temporality and chronology. Saura’s film makes full use of its capacity to cut and edit the image and the soundtracks. This allows for the mise-en-scène of meaningful displacements of Bizet’s music, which can be given new significations by the association with unexpected images. One of the sections of Bizet’s opera in the movie is the entr’acte music at the beginning of Act III. Whereas in the opera this part acts as a filler, in Saura’s Carmen it becomes a love motif and is heard several times in the movie. The choice of this particular part as a musical leitmotif in the movie is interesting if we consider the minimal use of Bizet’s music in Saura’s Carmen. Quite significantly however, this tune appears both in association with the rehearsal scenes and the off-stage scenes. It appears at the end of the Tabacalera rehearsal, when Antonio/Don José comes to arrest Carmen; we can hear it again when Carmen arrives at Antonio’s house the night when they make love for the first time and also after the second off-stage love scene, when Antonio gives money to Carmen. In general, this song is used to connote Antonio’s love for Carmen, both on and off stage. This musical bit, which had no particular significance in the opera, is now highlighted and made significant in its association with specific film images. Another one of the operatic themes that recur in the movie is the fate motif which is heard in the opening scene and also at the moment of Carmen’s death. We can also hear it when Carmen visits her husband in prison, immediately after she accepts the money Antonio offers her and when Antonio finds her making love to Tauro. This re-contextualisation alters the significance of the theme. As Mary Blackwood Collier remarks, this motif highlights Carmen’s infidelity rather than her fatality in the movie (120). The repetition of this motif also foregrounds the music’s artificiality in the context of the adaptation; the filmmaker, we are reminded, can cut and edit the soundtrack as he pleases, putting music in the service of his own artistic designs. In Saura’s Carmen, Bizet’s opera appears in the context of flamenco music and dance. This leads to the deconstruction and demystification of the opera’s pretense of exoticism and authenticity. The adaptation of opera to flamenco music and dance also implies a number of necessary alterations in the musical structure that the adapter has to perform so that the music will harmonise with flamenco dance. Saura’s Carmen, if read as an adaptation in the making, foregrounds many of the technical difficulties of translating opera to dance. The second dimension of music re-interpretation is added by the film camera. The embedded camera and the film’s self-reflexivity displace music from its original contexts, thus adding or creating new meanings to the ways in which we perceive it. This way of reframing the music from Bizet’s Carmen adds new dimensions to our perception of the opera. In many of the off-stage scenes, the music seems to appear from nowhere and, then, to inform other sequences than the ones with which it is usually associated in the opera. This produces a momentary disruption in the way we hear Bizet’s music. We could say that it is a very rapid process of de-signification and re-signification—that is, of adaptation—that we undergo almost automatically. Carlos Saura’s adaptation of Carmen self-reflexively puts into play the changes that Bizet’s music has to go through in order to become a flamenco dance and movie. In this process, dance and the film image make us aware of new meanings that we come to associate with Bizet’s score. References Arnheim, Rudolf. “On Duplication”. New Essays on the Psychology of Art. Berkeley: U of California P, 1986: 274-85. Blackwood Collier, Mary. La Carmen Essentielle et sa Réalisation au Spectacle. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 1994. D’Lugo, Marvin. The Films of Carlos Saura: The Practice of Seeing. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1991. Feuer, Jane. “Dream Worlds and Dream Stages”. The Hollywood Musical. Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1993: 67-87. Leicester, Marshall H. Jr. “Discourse and the Film Text: Four Readings of ‘Carmen’”. Cambridge Opera Journal 4.3 (1994): 245-82. McClary, Susan. “Carlos Saura: A Flamenco Carmen”. Georges Bizet: Carmen. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992: 135-7. Willem, Linda M. “Metafictional Mise en Abyme in Saura’s Carmen”. Literature/Film Quarterly 24.3 (1996): 267-73. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Furnica, Ioana. "Subverting the “Good, Old Tune”: Carlos Saura’s Carmen." M/C Journal 10.2 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/10-furnica.php>. APA Style Furnica, I. (May 2007) "Subverting the “Good, Old Tune”: Carlos Saura’s Carmen," M/C Journal, 10(2). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/10-furnica.php>.