Yoko Ono's Magical Thinking

In this piece I analyse Yoko Ono's recent artwork Mended Cups and link this to other creative works concerned with grief and mourning

Doris Salcedo’s Melancholy Objects

This article takes Doris Salcedo's work 'Atrabiliarios' (held in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art) as the starting point for a discussion of the mechanisms of melancholy and fetishism. This is linked to a discussion of the politics of looking, museum displays and memory

Shanghai dancers: gender, coloniality and the modern girl

In 1924, the artist Yamamura K6ka (1885-1942) produced a colour woodcut depicting the dance hall of the New Carlton Hotel in Shanghai. In this print, two women are seated at a round table. One has bobbed hair; the other wears a red hat. Both wear western dress, but the embroidered jacket draped on one of the chairs suggests the fashion for Chinoiserie. Two cocktail glasses on the table contain red cherries. Several couples dance in the background of the picture, the women all with similar bobbed hair. The male dancing partners are barely visible and the women are seen from behind, giving them a sense of anonymity. The lack of individual features of the women dancing in the background also suggests a degree of interchangeability between the women. They are most likely taxi dancers , who dance with the male patrons for a fee paid to the dance hall. The ethnicised and racialised positioning of the dancing women is unclear, but at least one of the seated women appears to be of European appearance. The women in the dance hall, with their bobbed hair, western dress and cocktails clearly reference the style of the modern girl

Doris Salcedo\u27s Melancholy Objects

Doris Salcedo’s work ‘Atrabiliarios’ (Defiant) (1992-2004) refers to the women who have been disappeared in her homeland of Colombia.1 Over forty boxes are recessed in the walls of the gallery. Each box contains one or two shoes, sometimes a single shoe, sometimes a pair, sometimes a mismatched pair. Each recessed box is covered with a membrane, described as a layer of cow bladder, bordered with black stitches of surgical thread. The backlit cow bladder evokes human skin. The black, white, brown and ivory shoes are visible through the skin-like surface. On the floor of the gallery are stacked a series of empty boxes, made of the same cow bladder which covers the gallery niches. A version of this work, which Salcedo has developed over several years, is now held in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA).2 This is where I encountered the work, and where I started to try to make sense of the power of these particular objects. After my visit to SFMOMA, shoes came to be a recurrent theme in my encounters in museums and art galleries, suggesting to me that there was an archetypal element to this display which was worthy of further exploration

How to be a girl: mainstream media portrayals of transgendered lives in Japan

Just before the turn of the twenty-first century changes to Japanese laws concerning the modification of reproductive capacity resulted in the removal of some legal barriers to the surgical modification of sexed bodies. These operations are variously known as sex change , sex adjustment , or sex reassignment , operations. Medical facilities that perform such surgery usually do so ony after the client has spent a substantial period of time living as a member of the gender they wish to acquire. Now there is a significant number of individuals in Japan who have undergone such surgery or are planning to do so

Yoko Ono\u27s Magical Thinking

In this piece I analyse Yoko Ono's recent artwork Mended Cups and link this to other creative works concerned with grief and mourning

Working in the Space Between

All of the contributors to this special issue have reflected on the stakes involved in negotiating differences in language and culture. In their research and professional practice they inhabit the ‘space between’: the space between languages, the space between cultures, and the space between academic disciplines. While many of our contributors are located in the Australian university system, we also have contributors from outside that system, as well as contributors who are theorising disparate sites for the negotiation of difference. The most exciting aspect of the papers presented here is the ability to move between the spheres of cultural theory and the everyday. Analytical techniques originally developed for literary and cultural analysis are brought to bear on the texts and practices of everyday life. The loci for these investigations include the classroom, the police station, the streets, local government and the university itself. The practices examined include translating and interpreting, language teaching, academic writing, literary production and critique, language planning and small business and shadow economies. The academic disciplines drawn on include theoretical and applied linguistics, discourse analysis, language teaching pedagogy, policy studies, cultural studies, literary studies, political science, gender studies and postcolonial theory

Transcultural Memory and the Troostmeisjes/Comfort Women Photographic Project

In 2008 and 2009, a Dutch photographer, Jan Banning, and an anthropologist, Hilde Janssen, traveled around Indonesia to document, with photographs and testimonies, survivors of militarized sexual abuse by the Japanese military during the three-year occupation (1942-1945) of the former Dutch colony, the Netherlands East Indies. We argue that the resultant photographic project can best be understood within the framework of the politics of pity and the associated genres of representation. The project creators anticipated a cosmopolitan audience that might be moved to action to support the survivors. Yet, as the project was exhibited in different sites, the women\u27s memories were interpreted through local knowledge systems and mnemonic practices. We analyze the reception of these photographs in diverse local contexts

Book extract: ‘Preserving their own memory: constitutional suffragism and the Fawcett Society’ from remembering women’s activism by Sharon Crozier De-Rosa and Vera Mackie

2018 marks the centenary of partial suffrage in Britain, when property-owning women over the age of 30 won the right to vote in parliamentary elections in the UK. To commemorate the historical link between LSE and the campaign for women’s suffrage, on 23 November 2018 the Towers at Clement’s Inn on LSE campus are being renamed Pankhurst House, Fawcett House and Pethick-Lawrence House after three important suffrage campaigners with specific connections to the School. To celebrate the occasion, this feature offers an edited extract from the new book Remembering Women’s Activism (Routledge 2018, pages 22-24), by Sharon Crozier De-Rosa and Vera Mackie, in which they discuss the memorialisation of the non-militant and militant branches of the British suffrage movement, the establishment of The Women’s Library and the physical spaces of LSE that link these histories

Putting a Face to a Name: Visualising Human Rights

In this essay, I focus on a text which attempts to deal with human rights issues in an accessible media format, Kälin, Müller and Wyttenbach’s book, The Face of Human Rights. I am interested in this text as an attempt to translate between different modes of communicating about human rights, which we might call the academic mode, the bureaucratic mode, the activist mode and the popular media mode. There are significant gaps between the academic debates on human rights, the actual language and protocols of the bodies devoted to ensuring the achievement of basic human rights, the language of activists, and the ways in which these issues are discussed in the media. These issues are compounded in a transnational frame where people must find ways of communicating across differences of language and culture. These problems of communicating across difference are inherent to the contemporary machinery of the international human rights system, where global institutions of governance are implicated in the claims of individuals who are located in diverse national contexts. Several commentators have noted the importance of narrative in human rights advocacy, while others have explored the role of art. I am interested in analysing narrative and representational strategies, from a consciousness that texts work not only through vocabulary and propositional content, but also through discursive positioning. It is necessary to look at the structure of texts, the contents of texts, and the narrative strategies and discursive frameworks which inform them. Similar points can be made about photography, which must be analysed in terms of the specific representational possibilities of visual culture