This conference has now taken place. This is an ARCHIVED SITE ONLY.
The Body Politic
24-26 November 2004
University of
Queensland-St Lucia, Qld, Australia
CONFERENCE INFORMATION
The Body Politic: Racialised Political Cultures in Australia
24-26 November 2004
The focus of "The Body Politic" on multiculturalism and race
politics in Australia, given global developments and pressing
debates about multiracial societies, is timely and aims to
generate engagement and networks for research into these
formations of racialised, politicised cultures.
This conference concentrates on the cultural and political, welcoming in particular comparative research between
Australian and other contexts. With increasing representation
and activism from racial minority individuals on a range of
issues and in a variety of forums, it is an apt moment to
examine the politics of 'post-multicultural' Australia. How
have racial minority groups participated in political and
cultural debates and development? What forms of activism and
engagement take place in these communities? How are these
social and cultural formations informed by issues of gender,
race, and class?
Major conference themes include:
Conference convenor
Dr Tseen Khoo
National Centre for Australian Studies
Monash University Vic 3800
tseen.khoo@arts.monash.edu.au
To know more about Tseen,
click here.
CONFERENCE REGISTRATION
TO REGISTER ONLINE:
1. Go to http://asc.uq.edu.au
2. Run mouse over "News and Events" and click on "Event registration".
3. Choose the conference.
For an email attachment of the registration form, please contact the convenor.
KEYNOTE SPEAKERS
Dr DEAN CHAN (Edith Cowan U, Western Australia) is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the School of Communications and Multimedia, and the School of Contemporary Arts, Edith Cowan U. His research encompasses intra-Asian cultural flows, diasporic cultural production and hybrid cultural citizenship, and makes particular reference to the Asian-Australian context. Dean has published in Alter/Asians, Diaspora: Negotiating Asian-Australia, Art Monthly Australia and Meanjin; and contributed catalogue essays to exhibitions such as Australiens held at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts in 2003. In addition, he has co-authored essays on cross-cultural pedagogy and the ethically reflexive arts practitioner in Disrupting Preconceptions: Postcolonialism and Education and Australian Art Education. Dean’s current fellowship project is on the cultural politics of East Asian video games, including the production and circulation of these games within Asian contexts, and their reception by diasporic Asian gamers. READ ABSTRACT
Prof SNEJA GUNEW (U of British Columbia, Vancouver) has taught in England, Australia and Canada. She has published widely on multicultural, postcolonial and feminist critical theory and is currently Professor of English and Women's Studies at the University of British Columbia, Canada. She is also Director of the Centre for Research in Women's Studies and Gender Relations (July 2002-7). Sneja has edited (with Anna Yeatman) Feminism and the Politics of Difference and (with Fazal Rizvi) Culture, Difference and the Arts. Her most recent book is Framing Marginality: Multicultural Literary Studies, and forthcoming from Routledge is Postcolonial Multiculturalisms: Bodies, Communities, Nations. Her current work is in comparative multiculturalism and in diasporic literatures and their intersections with national and global cultural formations using theoretical frameworks deriving from feminist, postcolonial, and critical multicultural theory. She is one of six directors of the three-year “Transculturalisms / Métissage” project co-ordinated by the International Council for Canadian Studies. READ ABSTRACT
Mr FRANCIS MARAVILLAS (U of Technology - Sydney, NSW) teaches in the cultural studies and interdisciplinary design studies program at the U of Technology, Sydney, where he is also currently completing his PhD. His thesis examines the critical and curatorial reception of the work of artists who migrated from China to Australia in the late 1980s and early 1990s. His research interests are in the areas of contemporary art and visual culture in Asia, curatorial practice and international art exhibitions. He has written reviews and catalogue essays for a number of exhibitions including the Shanghai Star exhibition, Sydney 2001, the 50th Venice Biennale 2003, and the Asian Traffic exhibition, Sydney 2004. He is a member of the Board of Directors of the Asia-Australia Arts Centre (Gallery 4a), Sydney. READ ABSTRACT
Dr AILEEN MORETON-ROBINSON (U of Queensland) is a Geonpul woman from Quandamooka (Moreton Bay). Previous to her appointment as Australian Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow she taught Indigenous studies at Griffith University in Brisbane and Women’s Studies at Flinders University in Adelaide. She has been involved in the struggle for Indigenous rights at local, state and national levels and has worked for a number of Indigenous organisations. Her writing in the area of native title, whiteness, race and feminism has been published in anthologies and journals here and abroad. Her current research investigates Indigenous social constructions of whiteness and she is President of the Australian Critical Race and Whiteness Studies Association. READ ABSTRACT
Dr SUVENDRINI PERERA (Curtin U of Technology, Western Australia) is based in the Faculty of Media, Society and Culture at Curtin U of Technology, WA. She has published widely on a range of issues of race, ethnicity and multiculturalism. Her essays have appeared in a wide range of key international journals and she has contributed to a number of major anthologies of cultural studies. She is author of Reaches of Empire (Columbia UP) and editor of Asian and Pacific Inscriptions: Identities/ Ethnicities/ Nationalities (Meridian). Most recently, she coedited (with Anthony Burke) a special issue of the electronic journal Borderlands, titled Borderphobias: The Politics of Insecurity post 9/11. Her essay "A line in the sea," on the Tampa refugees in Australia, was published in both Cultural Studies Review and Race & Class in 2002. She has been invited to speak on refugee issues at a number of international forums. Her current research interests are in histories of coexistence in multiracial societies. READ ABSTRACT
DRAFT CONFERENCE TIMETABLE:
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Download
conference program *
[Please check regularly for updates to the schedule]
All conference sessions take place at the Forgan-Smith Building, University of Queensland, St Lucia campus, BRISBANE, unless otherwise stated.
KEYNOTE ABSTRACTS
Dr DEAN CHAN, Edith Cowan U
"The Institutionalisation of Hybridity"
The
fetishistic abstraction of cultural spaces in on-going discussions about
diasporic hybridity – especially those in the form of ‘de-materialised’
rhetorical celebrations of the transgressive liminality and emancipatory
potential implicit in diasporic cultural production – invariably risks
obscuring the social and economic relations of power. In this paper, I
propose an analysis of the ways in which hybrid identity is mobilised,
defined, represented, and regulated in the art institution. My discussion
of the Chinese-Australian visual arts context highlights the nuanced
processes of collaboration and cooptation in the institutionalisation of
diasporic art and hybrid ‘Chineseness’. These new representational
contexts might well challenge conventional understandings and practices,
but they may also risk reiterating hegemonic racialised paradigms of
inclusion, visibility and legitimacy. At issue here is the institutional
framing of the category of ‘diaspora art’ and the apparent prescribed role
for diasporic artists, as well as the circumscribed discursive function of
hybrid ‘in-betweenness’ in an art institutional context. My concern is
that, without an attendant critique of correlated institutional paradigms
and practices, Chinese-Australian art potentially becomes enshrined as a
socially autonomous transgressive artefact. In the end, questions of
hybridity and the aesthetics of diasporic hybridity, as well as the
modulations of hybrid cultural citizenship and agency cannot be divorced
from the broader contexts that produce and govern these phenomena.
Prof SNEJA
GUNEW, U of British Columbia
"Comparing?"
The central argument in my recent book Haunted Nations is that
'multiculturalism' is a term that acquires very different meanings depending on
the local and national contexts and histories within which it circulates.
Convening a recent interdisciplinary three-year project 'Transculturalisms'
involved a focus on multiculturalisms encountering globalization and, once
again, clarified the very different ways in which key terms traveled and
acquired meaning. As someone who spent several decades working on and in
'multiculturalism' in Australia, the past ten years in Canada seemed to flow
'naturally' into doing comparative work; it seemed to be an obvious path for me
to follow. This paper will look at some of the issues, pitfalls and difficulties
of 'comparing.' What concepts are useful for comparing race, ethnicity,
indigeneity in very different geo-political contexts? What kinds of
contextualizing are both possible and not? The paper will draw on the 'Transculturalisms'
project.
Mr FRANCIS MARAVILLAS, U of Technology - Sydney
"The Asia-Pacific Triennials and the Cartographies of Exhibition"
Over the past fifteen years or so, the increased recognition and visibility of
contemporary art from outside Euro-America has coincided with the massive
ecumenical expansion of the international art world. Since its inauguration in
Brisbane in 1993 (with subsequent exhibitions in 1996, 1999, and 2002), the
Asia-Pacific Triennial has sought to challenge the dominance of Euro-American
discourses of art through strategies of centrifuge and regional dialogue.
Significantly, by positioning themselves as cultural nodes or conduits for
dialogue and exchange between the diverse artistic cultures of Asia and the
Pacific, these exhibitions offered a powerful and proleptic image of Australia’s
place in the region, one that accented Australia’s desire for such a place. Yet,
at the same time, these exhibitions also reiterated the Triennial’s originary
yet unacknowledged assumption about Australia’s position as a privileged
(curatorial) subject, actively defining the terms and conditions of regional
dialogue and exchange, and its place at the centre of it.
This paper critically interrogates this assumption by bringing into relief the cartographic dispositions and representational logic underlying the Asia-Pacific Triennial’s curatorial imaginary. I argue that the Triennial’s strategies of projection and self-positioning renders invisible the power and privilege of the Australian (curatorial) subject to produce and legitimise particular kinds of knowledge and histories about the contemporary art-making practices of the region. Moreover, it is precisely the invisibility of this subject that also enables it to assume the role of an ostensibly neutral and unencumbered facilitator of dialogue and exchange, and to do so in ways that obscures the divergent, yet partially overlapping, (post)colonial histories of both Australia and the Asia-Pacific region.
Dr AILEEN
MORETON-ROBINSON, U of Queensland
"Indigenous Sovereignty and the Politics of Race: A possessive Investment in
Patriarchal White Sovereignty"
Race has been crucial to the formation of nation states and the development of
national identity. As such it was instrumental in the assertion and assumption
of patriarchal white sovereignty and the making of the Australian nation state.
Race is determinative of resource allocation, benefits and privileges as well as
oppression, subjugation and the displacement of Indigenous sovereignty. In this
paper I will examine the way Indigenous sovereignty continues to shape the
possessive investment in patriarchal white sovereignty through race politics
deployed by John Howard. I argue that the legitimacy of patriarchal white
sovereignty works discursively through the presumption that the nation is a
white possession. When analysing Australian politics most scholars who invoke
'race' in their analyses do so when the non white 'other' is visible in the
political landscape. That is the analysis of 'race' is made through the presence
of the non white 'other' and this form of race politics is rarely perceived as
being shaped by the relationship between Indigenous sovereignty and patriarchal
white sovereignty.
Dr
SUVENDRINI PERERA, Curtin U of Technology
"'They Give Evidence': Bodies, Borders and the Disappeared"
Since 2001, Australia's surrounding waters have seemed awash with bodies: the
phantom bodies of children who were not thrown in the water; the unknown bodies
lost in the SIEV X disaster; the bodies symbolically set afloat a year later on
Kuta Beach. In this paper I am interested in exploring certain relations between
bodies and borders as threshold spaces marking both separation and connection,
and functioning as the bearers of political meanings. My title refers to Dadang
Christanto's installation "They
Give Evidence", a series of standing, naked figures, bearing in their
outstretched arms the remnants of burnings, drownings, beatings and other
mutilations that leave their subjects stripped of any markers of identity. These
nameless bodies, an image of contemporary political violence, invite exploration
of the relations between the bodies of the dead and the living, between
practices of bearing witness and giving evidence. Beginning with the disappeared
of the SIEV X sinking, euphemistically referred to in the recent Senate Inquiry
as "A Certain Maritime Incident," this paper examines ways in which nameless
bodies of the dead and disappeared are made present in contemporary Australia as
evidence, as political bodies.
NOTES FOR CONFERENCE PRESENTERS
VENUES
All conference
sessions take place at Forgan-Smith (Building #1), University of
Queensland, St Lucia campus, BRISBANE. See UQ St Lucia MAP
Public
Lecture venue: The Eleanor Room is located in the
UQ Staff Club (Building
#41). The Staff Club is only a short walk away from the other conference
rooms.
ACCOMMODATION
UQ college
accommodation as well as local hotels/motels in locations convenient
to the University of Queensland
OTHER HOTELS and/or MOTELS LOCAL to the University of Queensland: (mostly lower to mid-range, close to Toowong Village [trains/City Cat networks], as well as buses to the university):
1. Benson Court Hotel/Motel
2.
Toowong Central Motel
Apartments
3. Toowong
Villas
FOR INFORMATION ABOUT THE CITY OF BRISBANE, AND MORE ACCOMMODATION OPTIONS, see "Our Brisbane" cityguide. This site's accommodation information covers many other Brisbane hotel options (e.g. inner-city).
** NOTE: All accommodation arrangements are the responsibility of delegates. **
"THE BODY POLITIC" CONFERENCE SUPPORTERS
*
National Centre for
Australian Studies, MONASH UNIVERSITY, Vic
*
Faculty of Arts "Asian
Identities Research Concentration", UQ
*
Asian Studies Centre,
School of Languages & Comparative Cultural Studies, UQ