Pipit Rochijat's subversive mythologies: the Suharto era and beyond

This article examines Indonesian émigré Pipit Rochijat's attempts to adapt and renew the tales of the traditional shadow theatre, the wayang. The significance of Pipit's subversive mythologies lies in the historical context in which these reinterpretations occurred: at the height of Suharto's New Order regime in the mid 1980s. At a time when censorship and self-censorship had virtually crippled the critical impulse of Indonesian cultural expression, the return to mythology was in a significant sense an attempt to evade, critique, and undermine the authorities. By appropriating the very same symbols and language in which the New Order authoritarian regime had manipulated so effectively, Indonesian dissidents such as Pipit discovered the perfect symbolic weapon with which to radicalize their opposition.

Subversive jewellery : challenges to conservative power from the Victorian goldfields

 This paper analyses a small group of pieces of gold jewellery in order to explore the digger challenge to the colonial culture of conservative deference in 1850s gold rush Victoria. In spending on lavish gold ornaments, lucky diggers asserted the value of their hard, manual labour to subvert the hegemonic respectability of the colonial elite. The brooches offer evidence of values that informed the digger population in its transformation from optimistic transnational transients into civilians who originated the modern form of the Australian middle class.

Drawing and the subjectivity of the 'other'

Scenes of the Aboriginal family sitting around a table in the film The Fringe Dwellers present the boy quietly drawing, while other members of the family are engaged in discussion. The boy is less visible, more passive and contemplative, and his subjectivity is suggested rather than explored in the film. He repeats the same activity and the same inward concentration. My hypothesis is that the boy's subjectivity and agency are projected elsewhere, towards an imaginary field beyond the film's structure and beyond the social reality of the film's outside. What is the aboriginal boy drawing? In one scene, is a glimpse of his 'projection', he draws a house. The boy is mesmerised and pre-occupied by his drawing. We have seen the mystery of this preoccupation in images of heroic modernist architects (Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, Oscar Niemeyer come to mind) presenting a connection between the hand of the architect and his sketch as an essential gift in the making of a 'master architect'. Through this visual association, the 'Aboriginal boy drawing' is associated with the field of 'a universal human subject' and the essay investigates how his practice might participate in new subjective positions across disciplines. Through his inscriptions, the Aboriginal boy expresses more than a wish: he articulates and inhabits another dwelling, an imaginary dwelling of a subjectivity and 'identity' beyond the black and white divide. The boy, however, is not a 'master', making his drawing a subversive and risky practice.

Mapping the Australian archaic: reflections on black medea

Wesley Enoch’s Black Medea is explicit about what is, and what is not, its project: the chorus implores the audience not to read the narrative of its infanticidal heroine as one that demonises black women. Instead, the play affirms that its narrative can be understood differently and in a way that has a wider social significance. Taking my cue from the claim that the story is somehow ‘about everyone,’ I would like to begin unravelling the play’s relevance to contemporary contentions of Australian and indeed ‘Unaustralian’ subjectivity, particularly in relation to the discourses that seek to construct ‘Australian’ identity through an appeal to antiquity and what I describe as ‘the archaic.’ It seems to me that Black Medea presents an opportunity for thinking about the ways in which the discourses of aboriginal and classical antiquity operate to inform contemporary, contesting definitions of Australian identity. Regardless of whether these discourses of antiquity are claimed as ‘Australian’ or abjected as Other or ‘Unaustralian’ – and they have been used in both ways – they remain, I argue, formative to current conceptions of Australian identity and are positioned in the economy of discourses that comprise that arena. As will be seen, the mixed reception or ambivalence with which these complementary discourses of antiquity are treated in Australian culture gives Black Medea the potential to be situated among them in subversive and questioning ways, and in ways that may highlight the reasons for their ambivalent status.

Animating grandma : the indices of age and agency in contemporary children

Analysis of three animated children's films, each with heroic grandmothers motivating their plotlines, suggests a shift in the representational politics mediating older women to child audiences. The films function as critiques, reflections, and mechanisms of contemporary capitalism's available sociocultural locations for older women, modelled through varying degrees of subversive performance. Interrogating the agency potential of housework, nurture and extreme sports, this article assesses the role and function of the “Granny trope” in contemporary children's media.

Secrecy and illusion : Second Life and the construction of unreality

This paper analyses the main Second Life Grid-an Internet-based business platform with dynamic social, techno-economic, sensual-aesthetic, and psychological complexities-as an example of public relations. It argues that Second Life is a more subversive, politically oriented, and powerful form of public relations, because it invisibly exploits and invades the process of the formation of public opinion. The paper argues that Australian organisations such as Telstra, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), and the Australian Film Television and Radio School (AFTRS), which lend Second Life credibility through their recruitment, need to ask critical questions about the ethical implications of promoting this market-driven cyber-illusion. The paper begins by defining public relations (Habermas, 1995, 1984, 1989; Gramsci in Storey, 2006) and investigating any links between public relations and Second Life. In particular, it investigates Second Life's defining claim that it is 'imagined, created and owned by its residents', and concludes with a series of questions that organisations seeking involvement in Second Life should consider as part of their decision-making.

Only thin smoke without flame

Hardy's short stories have been relatively neglected by critics. This thesis argues for their reconsideration and proper recognition as essential components of Hardy's achievement. Examines his creation of a fictional "Wessex" with himself as conservator, but suggests that their subversive ideologies touching on modern themes, make him a "proto-modern" writer.

Adorno reframed

Dismissed as a miserable elitist who condemned popular culture in the name of ‘high art’, Theodor W. Adorno (1903–1969) is one of the most provocative and important yet least understood of contemporary thinkers. This book challenges this popular image and re-examines Adorno as a utopian philosopher who believed authentic art could save the world. Adorno Reframed is not only a comprehensive introduction to the reader coming to Adorno for the first time, but also an important re-evaluation of this founder of the Frankfurt School. Using a wealth of concrete illustrations from popular culture, Geoff Boucher recasts Adorno as a revolutionary whose subversive irony and profoundly historical aesthetics defended the integrity of the individual against social totality.

The performing frame

This project explores the ways that creative practices—improvised movement, choreographed dance, and digital video—produce new knowledge about the sociability of public space. In other words, it uses various theoretical concepts and practical strategies to document and analyse the ways people inhabit and sometimes subvert public spaces — such as plazas, malls and piazzas — as part of their everyday experience. Drawing on concepts developed within the fields of performance theory, spatial history, cultural geography and social theory, the project will build a methodological toolbox for understanding the relationships between the diverse groups that use public spaces in Melbourne, Australia. This ‘toolbox’ will subsequently be used to understand analogous public spaces in other parts of the world to generate comparative data about spatial sociability. The research will enable an innovative way of mapping social, civic and political relations in space through a series of creative interventions, and will reveal the politics of everyday movement while exposing tensions between the spaces of public culture — those framed and legitimated by state institutions — and what Michael Warner calls ‘Counter-Publics.’ That is, those oppositional groups who actively seek to use public space in subversive or unauthorised ways.

This project documents a series of performative interventions designed to harness the untapped potential of various forms of street performance genres to function as tools that can produce new ways of understanding the politics of movement in public space. These ‘interventions’ will be generated through a series of practical performance and movement workshops that will draw on street theatre techniques, contact improvisation, Laban movement analysis and contemporary dance choreography. The project will focus on a series of dyadic relationships: self and other, inside and outside, centre and periphery that are relevant to human interaction in public space.
Street performers — musicians, acrobats, jugglers, magicians, mimes and so on — seek public spaces with high volumes of pedestrian traffic in order to maximise their ability to draw an audience and make a living. These performers who create temporary performance zones alter the flow and intensity of movement around them, thereby transforming the plazas, piazzas, town squares and subways favoured by buskers. Some of these performers interact with their audience more than others, and are potentially capable of telling us something about the politics of space. The practice of ‘shadowing’ the movements of passers-by is an increasingly popular form of public entertainment around the world.

Polyamorous ventriloquy: loiterature as textual cruising

I would like to address the potential of a critical project for the generation of creative work, deploying Ross Chambers’ concept of ‘loiterature’ as a mode of textual cruising, and to consider the kind of polyamorous ventriloquy which this practice can catalyse. While the paper draws on my own recent experience of this dialogue between critical and creative enquiries I hope that it works as an argument for the nurturing space the academy can offer for experimentation and for new creative departures. I also hope it challenges the romance of the ‘creator’ as individual; implicit throughout this paper is the idea of ‘creativity’ as polyamorous receptivity.

Trajectories of desire in Genet and Wittig

At their most extreme Jean Genet and Monique Wittig stage revolutionary desire through their practice of language as material, embodied productivity in scenographies that decentre the ‘human' through a volatile mix of semiotic violence and iconoclastic eroticism. In fact, both writers strategically universalise homoerotic desire, plotting its trajectories to disrupt, deconstruct, or explode in parodic hilarity the cultural practices subtending patriarchal imperialism. This paper will be looking at the ceaseless productivity of desire in their texts as it moves through abjection and animal-becoming and finds serial ignition throughout its metonymic relay, arousing obstruction itself as its medium. Evidently these tropes and the concept of desire as productive come from Deleuze and Guattari (Deleuze & Gauttari 2008a; 2008b). While these subversive poetics are inseparable from the project to storm and overthrow what Timothy Mathews (Mathews 2000) calls the ‘image-fortresses' of patriarchal imperialism, they are less about utopian arrival than about the endlessly renewed performance of desire as metamorphic.

Poetic revolutionaries: intertextuality and subversion

Poetic Revolutionaries is an exploration of the relationship between radical textual practice, social critique and subversion. From an introduction considering recent debates regarding the cultural politics of intertextuality allied to avant-garde practice, the study proceeds to an exploration of texts by a range of writers for whom formal and poetic experimentation is allied to a subversive politics: Jean Genet, Monique Wittig, Angela Carter, Kathy Acker, Kathleen Mary Fallon, Kim Scott and Brian Castro. Drawing on theories of avant-garde practice, intertextuality, parody, representation, and performance such as those of Mikhaïl Bakhtin, Julia Kristeva, Gérard Genette, Margaret A. Rose, Linda Hutcheon, Fredric Jameson, Ross Chambers and Judith Butler, these readings explore how a confluence of writing strategies – covering the structural, narratological, stylistic and scenographic – can work to boost a text’s subversive power.

24 tweets per second: a dialogue on Jorge Lorenzo’s On the Road by Jack Kerouac

Jorge Lorenzo Flores Garza’s On the Road by Jack Kerouac had its Australian premiere in July this year at the Walker Street Gallery in Melbourne. It screened as part of the ‘Outside the Outside’ series curated by Dirk de Bruyn and Glenn D’Cruz, and was introduced by Steven McIntyre.

On the Road by Jack Kerouac is the most recent work by Mexican filmmaker Jorge Lorenzo, whose previous 1/48” (2008) was listed in Cahiers du Cinéma’s top 10 most subversive films of all time. Somewhere between a book on a film, and a film of a book, Lorenzo’s work is an exact re-typing of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, made by threading a continuous roll of 35mm negative (like Kerouac’s original scroll) through a Olivetti typewriter.

China in a book: Victorian representations of the 'celestial kingdom' in William Dalton’s 'The wolf boy of China'

Despite the wealth of material related to China in Victorian and Edwardian children’s literature, relatively few scholarly works have been published on the subject. Critics who have discussed the topic have tended to emphasize the negative discourse and stereotypical images of the Chinese in late nineteenth-century children’s literature. I use the case of William Dalton’s The Wolf Boy of China (1857), one of the earliest full-length Victorian children’s novels set in China, to complicate previous generalizations about negative representations of China and the Chinese and to highlight the unpredictable nature of child readers’ reactions to a text. First, in order to trace the complicated process of how information about the country was disseminated, edited, framed, and translated before reaching Victorian and Edwardian readers, I analyse how Dalton wove fragments from his reading of a large archive of texts on China into his novel.
Although Dalton may have preserved and transmitted some ‘factual’ information about China from his sources, he also transformed material that he read in innovative ways. These are reflected in the more subversive and radical parts of the novel, which are discussed in the second part of the essay. In the final section, I provide examples of historical readers of The Wolf Boy of China to challenge the notion that children passively accept the imperialist messages in books of empire.