Aesthetic matters: writing and cultural studies

What would it mean to treat Cultural Studies as a project that has had amongst its accomplishments the production of new forms and styles of writing, and a generative approach to aesthetics? An initial answer to this question would be that this would recognise how Cultural Studies interceded in an academic environment not only through its concern with supplying ambitious questions and insisting on a broad range of objects of scrutiny, but also by showing how this often entailed reconfiguring the forms through which intellectual inquiry conveyed its cargo. This article doesn’t seek to provide a taxonomy of Cultural Studies’ forms and styles; what it seeks to do is to encourage a self-reflexive attention to aesthetics within Cultural Studies as a form of practice. It suggests that there are two guiding questions that might frame such an attention: how might Cultural Studies generate forms that are adequate to the complexity of the configurations that it seeks to register; and how might Cultural Studies generate forms that could reach the ear of new audiences not attuned to the cadences of scholarly writing? The tension between these two questions should be seen as an invitation to purposeful experimentation within Cultural Studies

An Introduction in Five Acts

Editors' Introductory chapter to The Creative Critic

Remnants, Outlaws, and Wallows: Practices for Understanding Bison

This dissertation challenges settler-colonial ways of knowing, which attempt to decontextualize, instrumentalize, and isolate beings into taxonomies. It offers as an alternative, a multi-valent approach to understanding plains bison, beings that were strategically extirpated in a genocidal campaign waged by American and Canadian governments against Indigenous peoples. Weaving together discursive writing, storytelling, intermedia artworks, and community-based relational practice, Wilson has produced an unconventional dissertation that conveys the multi-epistemic approach required to understand settlers’ past, present, and decolonized future with bison. These varied approaches are employed to address Wilson’s key research question: How does the patriarchal legacy of settler colonialism affect interspecies relations, and how might we envision new ways of doing and being? She addresses this question in three sections. Part 1 narratively discusses works from Wilson’s thesis exhibition Remnants, Outlaws, and Wallows: Practices for Understanding Bison at the McIntosh Gallery (2021) and her contribution to the GardenShip and State exhibition at Museum London (2021-2022). This section explores the works in these exhibitions through their vital materiality and the methodology of their creation. Part 2 combines audio and written storytelling to layer narratives, theory, and criticism into illustrative vignettes. These vignettes take a creative and critical approach to archival records to trace the forced migration of specific bison, whose descendants populate almost all the plains bison herds in the North American conservation system. Extensive footnotes accompany the main narrative text; within these sub-texts, Wilson explores the theories and concepts enacted in the narratives. Part 3 of this dissertation documents Wilson’s thesis exhibition, its coverage in local media, and her contributions to the GardenShip and State exhibition as part of the larger body of her thesis work. Part 4 documents how she relationally developed and delivered this dissertation’s findings to communities beyond the academy. This dissertation and the connected artworks reflect Wilson’s process of confronting and attempting to unlearn the reductive and isolating taxonomical perspectives that arise from colonialism’s continuing legacy. They suggest ways of knowing through relationships and manifest what happens when we critically reconsider received facts with care, attention, and time. While bison are the centre of this text, Wilson’s multi-valent methodology enacts an enmeshed way of knowing these more-than-human beings and our world

Reading Dorothy Hewett as boundary writer

This thesis locates the writings of Dorothy Hewett in a firm relationship with postmodern thought. The argument focuses on evidence that the dominant aesthetic of Hewett\u27s writing is the feminine sublime which comprises a commitment to uncertainty. In this modality, reason does not foreclose on the action of the imagination in the sublime moment. The revised dynamic is explored with an emphasis on the radical nature of the doubt in question. It reflects a deliberate resistance to certainty, and fol1ows from Hewett\u27s early experience with communism. At a formal level, in Hewett\u27s texts, the commitment to uncertainty is not least apparent in layered operations of the sublime aesthetic within the writing. The feminine sublime also operates in the orientations of Hewett\u27s subject construction, in which a complex sense of identity as processual and divided is clear. It is evident in thematic and political aspects of the writing which are inflected towards uncertainty in various ways and conform to this mode of the sublime. In this regard, the thesis illustrates, Hewett\u27s engagements with the themes of death and the maternal and her admissions of the irrational are exemplary. Such inflections produce moments of ethical tension, contradictions, ambivalences and accommodations of incommensurability, some of which are examined here. Hewett\u27s diverse and wide-ranging engagements with genre provide another instance of the commitment to uncertainty, and this governs the selection of texts addressed in the thesis. The emphasis is on Hewett\u27s prose writings. Their aesthetic diversity is produced, in part, by literary precedents and multiple discourses, which feed into the writing as inclusiveness, both of thought and artistry. The thesis addresses some of these and argues that, combined, these factors position Hewett as a writer with a postmodern sensibility

The Gay Gang murders : illegitimate victims, disposable bodies

This thesis undertakes a discourse analysis of the mainstream and gay media, legal and popular narratives pertaining to a set of gay bashings, murders and disappearances of gay men from the Bondi-Tamarama region in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, during the 1980s and early 1990s. With the exception of one murder, these events - dubbed the 'gay gang murders' - were not properly investigated until more than a decade had passed when a detective noted a number of similarities between the cases. A task force named 'Operation Taradale' was established to examine links between the suspicious deaths - originally dismissed as suicides, accidents or one-off attacks - and Sydney gay hate gangs which existed at the time. Following this investigation a Coronial Inquest was staged and numerous findings and recommendations proposed. A number of key institutions, namely, the law, the judiciary and the media, failed to respond appropriately to these crimes at the time they were committed. This suggested to me that the victims were not held in very high regard by wider social bodies nor were their losses publicly acknowledged. Yet, by the turn of the 21st Century, this situation had shifted dramatically with the New South Wales Police Service and the New South Wales State Coroner's Court investigating these crimes and mainstream and gay media sites providing regular and serious coverage. As a case study of a series of gay hate- crimes, which charts three decades of social and institutional changes, this thesis operates as an example of how gay victims of violent crimes are discursively constructed and institutionally recognized within Australian culture. The shifts in institutional responses and public consciousness towards the victims of the 'gay gang murders' can also be applied, on a more general level and in varying degrees, to other Australian victims of anti-gay violence. Thus, by bringing this particular set of events to prominence, I exemplify wider social trends involving the status and position of gay men in Australian culture from the 1980s to the current day, 2009. This analysis demonstrates how discursive knowledges - the law and the media - and cultural understandings of sexuality and masculinity produce different ways to read and make sense of these crimes

Identifying (with) 'Carlota': myths, metaphors and landscapes of Cuban Africanía, 1974-1980

The thesis expands the field of scholarly enquiry on the Cuban intervention in Angola beyond the frame of geopolitics into the area of cultural politics. It considers the relation between Africa as a cultural and political `territory' in the Cuban imaginary and the epic internationalist mission known as Operation Carlota. By focusing on representations and manifestations of 'Africanness' in discursive practices ranging from culture and the arts to domestic and foreign policy, the enquiry illustrates how the notion of Cuba as Latin-African evolved in relation to changes in revolutionary ideology during the period known as the quinquenio gris, and with regard to the swell of liberation movements throughout the African Diaspora. My approach proceeds from Victor Turner's theory of liminality, which discusses how ritual behaviour and symbolism - rites de passage - may be used as concepts for an understanding of social structure and processes With this view in mind, I construct a theoretical framework that conjoins the notion of ritual in Cuba's Africa derived religious practices with the more general idea of war, or in this case internationalism, as a social ritual. In this way, I demonstrate that the Angolan Experience was essential to the transformation of Cuban collective identity from Latin American to Caribbean by the 1980s. This shift, I claim, was sponsored, on the international level, by the symbolism of the military mission as an epic re-enactment of the West African Diaspora/Caribbean myth of return, and, on the national level, by slave iconology. The methodological technique used combines a critical hermeneutic reading of cultural productions with postcolonial styles of social and cultural analysis

Voice in Screenwriting: Discovering/Recovering an Australian Voice

This creative practice research explores the concept of an identifiable screenwriter’s voice from the perspective of screenwriting as craft, proposing that voice can be understood and described based on its particular characteristics. Voice is understood to be the authorial presence of the screenwriter, whose mind shapes every aspect of the text. This presence is inscribed in the text through the many choices the screenwriter makes. More than this, the research argues that the choices made inflect the text with a cultural-national worldview. This occurs because of the close association between voice and personal (including cultural/national) identity, and because of the power of textual elements to signify broader concepts, ideas and phenomena belonging to the actual world. The thesis includes an original feature film screenplay evidencing a particular Australian voice, and an exegesis which describes voice and national inflection more fully. The practice research began with the interrogation of voice in a previously-existing screenplay which, though an original work written by an Australian screenwriter – myself – was described as having an American voice. Voice and its mechanisms were then further investigated through the practice of writing the original screenplay, Calico Dreams. Theories of voice from within literary theory, and the concept of mind-reading, from cognitive literary theory, acted as departure points in understanding voice in screenwriting. Through such understanding a conceptual framework which can assist practitioners and others to locate aspects of voice within a screenplay, was designed. This framework is a major research outcome and its use is illustrated through the description of voice in the screenplay, Calico Dreams. The research found that screenwriter’s voice serves to unify and cohere the screenplay text as an aesthetic whole through its stylistic continuities and particularities. Through the voice, the screenwriter also defines many of the attributes and characteristics of the film-to-be. A theory of screenwriter’s voice significantly shifts the theoretical landscape for screenwriting at a time when an emerging discourse of screenwriting is developing which can enrich understandings of the relationship between the screenplay and its film