Exposing The Myths: Organizing Women Around the World

[Excerpt] Myths about organizing women, and women of color in particular, prevent the labor movement from hearing and acting on the real opportunities to work together on issues that affect everyone. This article contributes to the burgeoning effort to listen to what women around the world are saying about their role in the labor movement. The article includes stories of women from the African country of Uganda and the Asian countries of Sri Lanka, South Korea, and Nepal. These stories are not isolated incidents; they represent the growing participation of women in labor movements around the world. Gaining an appreciation for this growing participation will help lay to rest some of the widelyheld myths about organizing women - myths that still persist after years of effort to combat them

Black and white and re(a)d all over again: Indigenous minstrelsy in contemporary Canadian and Australian theatre

This essay considers processes by which community identities are challenged by discussing the use of whiteface as an activist strategy in recent indigenous theatre in Canada and Australia. To understand whiteface, I employ Susan Gubar's notion of racechange, processes that test and even transgress racial borders. I also situate whiteface in relation to the history of blackface minstrelsy. Noting the ways these racial performances affirm the hierarchies of color and how power becomes invested in such color codings, the essay highlights indigenous employment of whiteface as a potential form of critical historiography. I then analyze how whiteface functions in two productions, Daniel David Moses's Almighty Voice and His Wife (1991) in Canada and the Queensland Theatre Company's 2000 revival of George Landen Dann's Fountains Beyond in Australia. My analysis posits that such indigenous performances of whiteface can affirm the identity of the marginalized other even as they destabilize the fixity of race and its meanings

Ecotourism: A Colonial Legacy?

The argument that modern tourism frequently functions as a form of neo-colonial enterprise is by now commonplace. John Frow has explored the ways in which tourism sells a commodified relation to an ontological Other - be it a natural environment, a species of wildlife, or a foreign culture. This relationship, often manifest in ritualised practices such as sight-seeing and souvenir-collecting, is secured via the aestheticisation of various physical and cultural features of a tourist destination and by the commercialisation of immaterial resources such as hospitality. The tourist's position as consumer assumes a priori access to sufficient capital to purchase an encounter with Otherness; hence, it follows that most tourists come from relatively affluent societies while it is the Others of Western modernity who are often called upon to supply the requisite quotient of exotica for the collective tourist gaze. As a relatively new form of leisure activity - at least under its current nomenclature - ecotourism has sought to define itself in opposition to the kind of mass tourism that Frow's analysis implicitly decries. In its purer forms, ecotourism is even premised on behaviours and subject-object relations which are designed to break the relentless cycle of inequality that commoditisation perpetuates. This paper examines the discursive tensions between ecotourism's stated claim to environmental responsibility and its simultaneous imperative to provide predominantly Western clients with an authentic wilderness experience. By reading some of the key visual images and narrative tropes associated with ecotourism alongside their counterparts in colonial discourses such as travel writing, I hope to establish connections that might historicise the current rhetorical purchase of ecotourism as well as provide the basis for an anti-colonial critique of the field

A line of distinction: Orangutan farces and questions of interpretation

In 2004, the American Academy of Television Arts and Sciences ruled that Bam Bam, an orangutan starring as a hospital nurse in the long-running sitcom Passions, could not be nominated for an Emmy Award on the grounds that ‘a line of distinction’ had to be drawn ‘between animal characters that aren’t capable of speaking parts and human actors whose personal interpretation in character portrayal creates nuance and audience engagement’ (Anon 2008 [my emphasis])

Bodies in Focus: Photography and Performativity in Post-Colonial Theatre

The paper examines the interaction of photography and theatre performance as two forms of visual spectacle with particular possibilities for fringe interference

A Game of Angles

She prefers to play with women. Men at this level have never learned the art of subtlety; they drive the ball without thinking of deflection, of actions and reactions, of balance and counter-balance. They win because they hit hard and fast and because they believe they are invincible, especially against nipple and thighs. She can imagine what such men would be like in bed