'Nothing good ever came out of Japan': Race-mixing and the limits of diaspora

This paper argues that postcolonial notions of diaspora are premised on immigrant subjectivities and standpoints which do not fully apprehend the mixed-race / bi-racial experience and the local effect of cultural hybridity in Western settings. The paper was prompted by a recent conversation with Dee, the daughter of a Japanese warbride. As a child Dee recalled being told by her friend's mother that 'nothing good ever came out of Japan'. The significance of constant interpolations into 'Asianness' by statements such as these; by the 'where do you come from?' question and by more blatant discriminations are inadequately addressed by traditional and postcolonial notions of diaspora. 'Roots' and 'routes' imagery feature prominently in discussions of diaspora and hybridity which aim to decolonise culture and identity in deconstructive moves that highlight their flexible, multiple, contractedness. While it has been argued that even these conceptualisations are problematic because they privilege orders of explanation, theory and standpoint that are forced back into line with traditional notions of discrete 'races', cultures, ethnicities and identities, cultural studies and postcolonial theorists do not appear to find this contradiction overly troubling. Lodged in bodies that do not easily conflate to neat either/or cultures, politics and genetics, race-mixing also defies and yet return us to culture and biology. However, I argue that their refractions though the same tired old orders of racial, ethnic, cultural and national differentiation prevent us from disregarding the discursive effects of racism and racialisation.

Biopolitics meets Terrapolitics: Political Ontologies and Governance in Settler-Colonial Australia

Crises persist in Australian Indigenous affairs because current policy approaches do not address the intersection of Indigenous and European political worlds. This paper responds to this challenge by providing a heuristic device for delineating Settler and Indigenous Australian political ontologies and considering their interaction. It first evokes Settler and Aboriginal ontologies as respectively biopolitical (focused through life) and terrapolitical (focused through land). These ideal types help to identify important differences that inform current governance challenges. The paper discusses the entwinement of these traditions as a story of biopolitical dominance wherein Aboriginal people are governed as an “included-exclusion” within the Australian political community. Despite the overall pattern of dominance, this same entwinement offers possibilities for exchange between biopolitics and terrapolitics, and hence for breaking the recurrent crises of Indigenous affairs.

Isolation of genotype- and chromosome-specific DNA markers in a biotype of Colletotrichum gloeosporioides using random amplified polymorphic DNA analysis

Genetic markers that distinguish fungal genotypes are important tools for genetic analysis of heterokaryosis and parasexual recombination in fungi. Random amplified polymorphic DNA (RAPD) markers that distinguish two races of biotype B of Colletotrichum gloeosporioides infecting the legume Stylosanthes guianensis were sought. Eighty-five arbitrary oligonucleotide primers were used to generate 895 RAPD bands but only two bands were found to be specifically amplified from DNA of the race 3 isolate. These two RAPD bands were used as DNA probes and hybridised only to DNA of the race 3 isolate. Both RAPD bands hybridised to a dispensable 1.2 Mb chromosome of the race 3 isolate. No other genotype-specific chromosomes or DNA sequences were identified in either the race 2 or race 3 isolates. The RAPD markers hybridised to a 2 Mb chromosome in all races of the genetically distinct biotype A pathogen which infects other species of Stylosanthes as well as S. guianensis. The experiments indicate that RAPD analysis is a potentially useful tool for obtaining genotype-and chromosome-specific DNA probes in closely related isolates of one biotype of this fungal pathogen.

Changes in the racial composition of Phytophthora sojae in Australia between 1979 and 1996

Surveys of commercial soybean fields, disease nurseries, and trial plots of soybean were conducted throughout eastern Australia between 1979 and 1996, and 694 isolates of Phytophthora sojae were collected and classified into races. Fourteen races, 1, 2, 4, 10, 15, and 25, and eight new races, 46 to 53, were identified, but only races 1, 4, 15, 25, 46, and 53 were found in commercial fields. Races 1 and 15 were the only races found in commercial fields in the soybean-growing areas of Australia up until 1989, with race 1 being the dominant race. Race 4 was found in central New South Wales in 1989 on cultivars with the Rps1a gene, and it is now the dominant race in central and southern New South Wales. Races 46 and 53 have only been found once, in southern New South Wales, and race 25 was identified in the same region in 1994 on a cultivar with the Rps1k gene. Only races 1 and 15 have been found in the northern soybean-growing regions, with the latter dominating, which coincides with the widespread use of cultivars with the Rps2 gene. Changes in the race structure of the P. sojae population from commercial fields in Australia follow the deployment of specific resistance genes.

Good readers and good citizens: Literature, media and the nation

IN recent decades nationalism has sometimes been classed in the same category of immoral behaviours as racism and sexism. Reading from the historical and literary record, nationalism often appears to have been little other than racism and sexism. Race was the very basis of the national settlement in early twentieth-century Australia; how profoundly, I think, is something we still have to learn. How far are we from thinking in terms of First Nations as a way of acknowledging Indigenous Australia? Our easy familiarity with and moral superiority to' pre- I967 Australia and the White Australia Policy means that there are many degrees of Australian racism that remain hidden from commonplace historical knowledge·:' Australians still tend to think of South Africa as belonging to-another time and place altogether, another moral universe and historical trajectory. This was not a mistake that colonial Australians made. The parallels will become less and less resistible.

Characterisation of Australian isolates of Fusarium oxysporum f. sp cubense by DNA fingerprinting analysis

Genetic variation among Australian isolates of the fungus Fusarium oxysporum f. sp. cubense (Foc), which causes Fusarium wilt in banana, was examined using DNA amplification fingerprinting (DAF). Ninety-four isolates which represented Races 1, 2, 3, and 4, and vegetative compatibility groups (VCGs) 0120, 0124, 0125, 0128, 0129, 01211, 01213/16, and 01220 were analysed. The genetic relatedness among isolates within each VCG, and between the 8 different VCGs of Foc present in Australia was determined. The DNA fingerprint patterns were VCG-specific, with each VCG representing a unique genotype. The genetic similarity among isolates within each VCG ranged from 97% to 100%. Among the different VCGs of Foc, 3 major clusters were distinguished which corresponded with race. All Race 1 and 2 isolates (VCGs 0124, 0125, 0128, and 01220) were closely related and clustered together, the Race 3 isolates from Heliconia clustered separately, and all Race 4 isolates (VCGs 0120, 0129, 01211, and 01213/16) clustered together. Fifteen isolates from Alstonville, NSW, were characterised because although they were classified as Race 2 based on their recovery from cooking banana cultivars, they belonged in VCG 0124, which had previously contained only Race 1 isolates. The occurrence of more than one race within a VCG means that vegetative compatibility grouping cannot be used to assign pathotype to pathogenic race as previously thought. It was possible to distinguish the Race 1 and Race 2 isolates within VCG 0124 using DNA fingerprinting, as each race produced a unique DNA fingerprint pattern. Among the Australian isolates, DNA fingerprinting analysis identified 9 different VCGs and genotypes of Foc.