Critical Arts
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Critical Arts: A Journal for Cultural Studies
Negotiating Cultural Boundaries: Africa/Asia/AustraliaIen Ang
This is the first issue of Critical Arts: A Journal for Cultural Studies to be edited from the Centre for Research in Culture and Communication in the School of Humanities at Murdoch University, Perth, Western Australia. For years, Critical Arts, under the editorship of Keyan Tomaselli, has been an important voice for critical cultural and media scholarship in a South Africa where political struggle was dominated by the urgency and acuteness of the desire and the need to bring down the Apartheid regime which isolated the country from the global "international community". With the demise of this regime, a "new" South Africa has emerged - not as a post-Apartheid utopia but as a newly formed democratic nation-state with its own new political challenges, opportunities and problems. In this altered context, a journal such as Critical Arts needs to redefine its focus and scope, and redirect its political and analytical interests to remain relevant and in touch with current social and cultural developments of the day. One opportunity which has opened up in post-Apartheid South Africa is a new orientation towards the outside world, a new outward-lookingness which locks into, and responds to, the late-twentieth century global drive towards transnationalisation, regionalisation, and globalisation.
The recent agreement between the Centre for Cultural and Media Studies at the University of Natal, Durban and the Centre for Research in Culture and Communication at Murdoch University in Perth, Western Australia to jointly edit Critical Arts from this year onwards is one outcome of the new orientation toward cooperation and collaboration across national and regional borders. The two sites - Durban and Perth - have never been completely unrelated to each other: there is, for example, a substantial South African diaspora in Perth and many of these people come from Durban. Furthermore, Durban, on the east coast of the African continent, and Perth, on the west coast of the Australian island-continent, can be imagined as located opposite each other, separated by the vast waters of the Indian Ocean. And as the world's major oceans have served for the powers that be as the geographic organising principles for regional economic and military alignment (the transatlantic cooperation between Western Europe and North America; the Pacific Rim), a vision of an 'Indian Ocean Rim' has recently emerged to bring together nation-states between whom there has not been much sustained contact and exchange before. In this symbolic imagination, the core points in the rim are formed by the triangle of South Africa, India and Australia. Of course, the initiative for the construction of an "Indian Ocean Community" came primarily from government forces - the Australian government, in particular, has been very active in this push, organising a major conference in Perth in 1995 where the aim, as former trade minister Bob McMullan put it, was to discuss "how the Indian Ocean becomes a link not a barrier to further integration and prosperity" -, mostly motivated by the need to secure future avenues for solving the vexed problematic of economic trade and investment facing all individual nation-states in a continuously globalising late capitalism.
It is doubtful how successful the creation of this new imagined community will be given the vast political, social and cultural differences between the countries around the Indian Ocean (Gupta, 1995). The very emergence of such ideas however puts a useful transnational perspective on the South Africa/Australia connection being launched with this issue of Critical Arts. This first Australian issue then introduces some 'Australian' perspectives on issues related to the politics of cultural identity, difference and exchange, but as a whole it embraces an open, regional outlook, aware of the fact that cultural borders and boundaries cannot be taken for granted, and are increasingly being denaturalised, defended and contested.
In contemporary cultural studies, 'the border' has become a chosen metaphor for theorising the complex and contradictory ways in which cultural difference and diversity are articulated in social relations and in political and economic practice. Borders (between places, cultures, identities) are not just dividing lines, but also sites of intercultural and symbolic contact. Borderlands are both meeting grounds and arenas of potential antagonism. As transnational flows of capital, people and information are intensifying in speed and volume, national borders are becoming ever more porous and more difficult to patrol. But as the forces of global capitalism aim to create an increasingly "borderless world", as Japanese economist Kenichi Ohmae (1990) pronounces, local and particular struggles continue to be fought, either to remove old, exploitative cultural boundaries (for example, between self and other, us and them, legitimate and illegitimate) or to invent new boundaries (for identity, culture, or community) deemed necessary for self-empowerment and self-assertion. In a sense, all social and political struggle today involves, and is at least in part constituted by the cultural dimension of negotiating boundaries - territorial or symbolic.
The essays in this issue of Critical Arts can be read in the context of the heightened reshuffling and constestation of cultural boundaries taking place in the contemporary world. Mudrooroo, the wellknown Australian Aboriginal writer, provides a provocative and thoughtful challenge to the borderline between the "real" and the "unreal" as constructed in the dominant Western notion of what he calls "Natural Scientific Reality". Turning assimilationist assumptions on their head, he argues for a revised view of indigenous Aboriginal Reality and of the texts that are often seen as "ineffective" by European standards and, more interestingly, within the received wisdom of Aboriginal oppositional tactics. Raising the notion of a Maban Reality he charts - via a number of challenging close readings -Êa textual field that privileges those works which challenge "Natural Scientific Reality" and provide strong linkages with the Dreaming in their modes of presentation.
In "A Politics of Blood", Jenny de Reuck, a member of the South African diaspora in Perth, reflects on both the historical necessities and the political perils of Afrikaner identity and nationalism. In doing this she emphasises the need to blur the boundaries between the private and the public, the personal and the political: one needs to come to terms with one's own implication in national(ist) desires, dreams and resentments in order to understand and appreciate the political damage exclusive nationalisms - proliferating so widely and disturbingly throughout the world today - can produce.
In "Threshold Procedures", Brett Neilson offers a comparative analysis of the treatment of so-called "boat people" in two very different national and geo-cultural contexts: Western Australia and Florida. Since the mid-1970s, the meaning of the term "boat people" has been transformed from referring to people desparately fleeing a victorious communist regime (Vietnam), a political context which contributed to many Western countries' willingness, including Australia and the United States, to offer them shelter within their national borders, to becoming a code word for people who are perhaps equally desparate, but who are now no longer welcomed as legitimate refugees and are therefore put in "detention camps", awaiting processing through the proper legal procedures. Some of these refugees remain in these "detention camps" for years without any prospect of ever be allowed into the country of destination - turning these spaces (such as the Port Hedland detention centre in the remote Northwest corner of Western Australia) in more or less permanent "borderzones" to where people who no longer belong anywhere are exiled. Neilson's analysis focuses on how the fate of the "boat people" reveals the distinctive preoccupations with racial and ethnic otherness in relation to ideas and policies of "multiculturalism" both implicit and explicit in the two national contexts.
"Multiculturalism", of course, is one of the most pertinent problematics faced by most nation-states in the world today, as the the mass migratory movement of peoples across national borders makes a mockery of the classic idea of nation as a homogeneous racial, ethnic and cultural entity. Singapore provides a very interesting case in this respect, as this city-state has from its beginnings as a British port colony existed as a de facto multicultural society made up of Chinese, Indian and Malay migrants, while the current government has from independence insisted on the official definition of the new Singapore nation as multicultural and multiracial. Yao Souchou offers a fascinating historical-anthropological analysis of the ambivalent construction of "the Chinese" (today the dominant "racial" group in Singapore) in colonial times, while Vijayandran Devadas analyses the contradictions of contemporary Singaporean multicultural policy by looking at the position of the "Indians", the smallest officially recognised ethnic community, who are expected to both remember and forget their "Indian" heritage through the spatial construction of "Little India" as a simulacrum of the "real" India. Both essays illuminate how the process of symbolic boundary construction (around categories of "culture", "race" and "nation") is not just inherently historically contradictory (but historically necessary at the same time), but always implicated in complex and specific relations of power.
Through an analysis of the work of Filipina writer Marian Pastor Roces, Estelle Barrett describes a very different process of negotiating boundaries, here through the performative practice of story-telling. Pastor Roces' passionate narration of the 1980s revolution in the Phillipines, and Barrett's analysis of it, work through an overcoming of the boundaries between subject and object, the symbolic and the affective, the coded and the uncoded. In this way, Pastor Roces' story-telling also manages to overcome the barrier between her Third World setting and her First World audiences.
The papers by T. Muraleedharan and Maria Degabriele both deal with how old colonial boundaries between the West and the Orient are reproduced in contemporary mainstream cultural production: film, television, theatre, and so on. Muraleedharan analyses the British Raj nostalgia as represented in film; Degabriele focuses on the very popular orientalist Madame Butterfly myth which, after more than one hundred years, remains extraordinarily influential and attractive in the Western cultural unconscious. However, the myth in which a strong and enlightened West constructs a weak, pitiful "Asia" can no longer be convincing in a world in which Asian nations such as Singapore are making their mark so strongly in the global economy.
The issue concludes with a critical review essay on the Report of the Commission on Global Governance, Our Global Neighbourhood, by Mark T. Berger. Berger's is a timely reminder of the extremely precarious times we all are facing as the march of global capitalism moves ahead. All the more necessary is it therefore to engage critically with the current obsession with "globalisation" and "global interconnection". Critical Arts will continue to contribute to such a critical engagement, from a distinctive "Southern Hemispheric" perspective which will itself remain under constant critical scrutiny.
Bibliography
Gupta, R. (1995) "Members' diversity creates problems for new trade bloc". The Weekend Australian, 18-19 August.
Ohmae, K. (1990) The borderless world: power and strategy in the interlinked economy. New York: Harper Business.
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