Scenes of reading: Australia-Canada-Australia

panel presentatio

The multiple lives of affect: a case study of commercial surrogacy

This article intervenes into contemporary scholarship on affect by bringing different affect theories into the same analytical frame. Analysing commercial surrogacy in India through three different conceptualizations of affect found in the work of Michael Hardt, Sara Ahmed and Brian Massumi reveals how affect emerges as a malleable state in the practice of, as a circulatory force in the debates around, and as an ephemeral intensity in the spontaneous resistance to surrogacy. Based on this analysis, I suggest that integrating different theories of affect enables more holistic examinations of corporeal regulation by opening our understanding to the multiple lives of affect that operate on the level of political economy, cultural signification and material intensity simultaneously

(Not) being at home: Hsu Ming Teo's Behind the Moon (2005) and Michelle de Kretser's Questions of Travel (2012)

This article examines some interventions of Asian Australian writing into the debate over multiculturalism, and the shift from negative stereotyping of Asian migrants, to reification of racial divisions and propagation of a masked racism, to the creation of new alignments and the revival of pre-existing affiliations by migrant and second generation subjects. It compares the practices of not-at-homeness by Asian migrants and their descendants and white Australians in Hsu Ming Teo’s Behind the Moon with those of a Sri Lankan refugee and a white Australian traveller in Michelle de Kretser’s Questions of Travel. The changing concepts of belonging in the novels show a realignment of core and periphery relations within the nation state under the pressures of multiculturalism and globalization: where home is and how it is configured are questions as important for white Australians whose sense of territory is challenged as they are for Asian migrants who seek to establish a new belonging

Migrant Writing: promising territory

Kristeva is referring in this essay to the entry of the child into language and, as a consequence, to control over its environment. It may be valid to ask in which instances migrants, who are often positioned as children, are permitted to grow up? When may they gain their cultural franchise? What space may migrants name and hence claim? Professor Kiernan’s paper this morning referred to Australian culture as one composed of‘the outcasts and the rejected’. In that case, what should those groups construct who have so far, in turn, been excluded even from such a territory? Is ‘culture’ indeed predicated upon the process of exclusion

Hsu-Ming Teo’s Post-Multicultural Affective Improvisations on Love

This essay juxtaposes the academic writings of the Chinese Malaysian Australian writer Hsu-Ming Teo with two or her novels. The essay traces how the cultural politics of multiculturalism have changed over the past decades in Australia. Using the framework of Jean-François Lyotard’s future anterior, in which post-multiculturalism is imagined as going back to find elements left out of the current historicizing of multiculturalism, Gunew situates Teo’s work in a critically astute “uncomfortable cosmopolitanism” pervaded by her interest in the affective charge contained in contemporary popular romance writing that deals with intercultural relationships

Feminist cultural literacy: translating differences, cannibal options

In trying to write this paper over several months last year for a collection of essays examining the current state of feminism and women’s studies I was mystified by my internal resistance to the project. After all, feminism and Women’s Studies have been part of my life for over two decades

Inflexões subalternas nos cosmopolitismos vernaculares

O conceito sobre o termo relativamentre novo, “cosmopolitismos vernaculares”, identifica as responsabilidades e os contextos globais ao mesmo tempo que reconhece que eles estão sempre enraizados e enredados em interesses locais, os quais incluem os grupos minoritários que competem dentro da nação. Este artigo examina o termo “europeu” com o objetivo de desnudar os debates revisionistas sobre o cosmopolitismo, especialmente em relação aos “cosmopolitismos vernaculares” que funcionam como uma maneira de incluir os “cosmopolitismos subalternos” por meio da desagregação do cosmopolitismo, num movimento análogo à noção de “processo democrático agnóstico” de Stuart Hall. O paradoxo da frase acima reflete o movimento duplo desses debates: no termo cunhado por Homi Bhabha o “doméstico” ou “nativo” vernacular está sempre em uma relação dialógica com a “ação a distância” do cosmopolitismo global. Exploro essa dinâmica ao focalizar os significados discrepantes de “europeu” e dos termos a ele associados. Neste artigo, meu argumento central é: os termos “oeste” e “europeu” devem ser desconstruídos para que não possam mais ser invocados, nos debates pós-coloniais, como incontestáveis categorias heurísticas como, por exemplo, o “oeste e o resto.” Os novos debates sobre cosmopolitismo abrem caminho para se reconhecer, como estados-nação e como parte da União Europeia, a heterogeneidade cultural de tais entidades geopolíticas. Reconhecer o cosmopolitismo dos grupos subalternos facilita esse empreendimento e ajuda a restabelecer uma perspectiva “planetária.