161 resultados para Stars: white dwarfs
Resumo:
The Government of India never publicly criticised the White Australia policy. Nonetheless it was a subject of constant reporting to New Delhi by the Indian High Commission in Canberra. The Australian High Commission in New Delhi regularly reported criticism of the policy in the Indian press and in elite opinion. It urged the introduction of a quota for Indian immigration to Australia, but ministers remained unwilling to modify the policy in any substantial way, in the period under study. South Africa's apartheid policy was a far more serious problem in race relations for the Indian Government. The existence of the White Australia policy when countries such as Canada had introduced quotas for Indian immigration, suggested an Australia mired in attitudes irrelevant to a decolonising world. The Australian High Commissioner thought that although Nehru made no public comments on the policy, he must have felt insulted by its existence.
Resumo:
Since the publication of Fiske, Hodge and Turner’s Myths of Oz: Reading Australian Popular Culture (1987), Australian Cultural Studies has turned to the beach as a primary site for examining national identity and the myths of Australian culture. In the text the beach is read as a liminal site between ‘culture’ and ‘nature’, represented respectively by lifesaver and surfer. The meanings of anti-authoritarianism attached to the surfer are significant to the reading. And yet Fiske, Hodge and Turner also locate a heritage of authoritarianism, discipline and civic duty in the figure of the lifesaver:
'Lifesavers have drills, march-pasts and patrol squads, while exercising a conservative pastoral interest in their members’ moral health. They are agents of social control. Further, they see themselves as servants of the community, sacrificing their weekends for others—a tradition of sacrifice dear to a nation which twice voted no to conscription in the Great War.' (Fiske et al. 1987, 64–65)
The last sentence distils the bifocal meanings not only of the ‘culture’ of the beach but of Australian cultural identity more broadly, framed by contested norms of civic participation and moral values. This binary frame has been a productive starting point for analyses of national identity in Australian Cultural Studies since the 1980s. These have dropped off the radar in recent years owing to a shift away from the national field and the privileging of a transnational cultural agenda. And yet recent events in Australian politics and culture have unexpectedly re-centred national identity as an urgent issue for Cultural Studies, particularly in its use as a form of exclusion to targeted populations within the national community.
In light of these developments this article revisits Myths of Oz and its construction of surfer and lifesaver c.1987 to focus on the reordering and re-assemblage of these figures on Sydney’s beaches 20 years on. It also acknowledges that this is a process which cannot be understood in isolation from broader shifts in Australian political culture, and particularly the current obsession with national ‘values’ hinging on a strategic shift away from multicultural policies and the redefinition of the ‘fringe’ as an ethnic position.
Reflecting on these issues, this article locates a slippage between the binary framing of the surfer and lifesaver in Myths of Oz and their complex ‘relationality’ on the beach today. Specifically, it examines how the surfer has recently become co-opted into the Australian mainstream and imbued with a form of ‘governmental belonging’ (Hage 1998) once attributed to the lifesaver alone. This slippage has been enabled by the overlap betweenlocal surfie cultures and exclusivist national cultures assembled by State and federal governments; particularly as both draw upon a normative frame that opposes the meanings of white belonging to Muslim groupings within the nation.
Resumo:
Review of Lilies and Stars by Rebecca Law, Picaro Press, 2013.
