About Current Issue
NEO: Journal for Higher Degree Research in the Social Sciences and Humanities
Journal Editor’s Note, 2012
The papers in this collection result from the Faculty of Arts Higher Degree Research and Honours Conference, held at Macquarie University in November of 2011. The presentations and ideas on offer across the range of disciplines and eclectic sessions
demonstrated the cutting and timely research being untaken by candidates in the Faculty. The vibrancy and passion with which Honours students stood along side more experienced postgraduates is testament to an enviable collegial environment and
a generation of invested and articulate scholars. From Anthropology to Law, English to History, International Studies to Cultural Studies and Media, and Politics and Sociology to Philosophy and beyond, the work being done, the sessions and presentations of the day, and the selected papers published here as a result capture a unique moment in time – where seemingly disparate disciplines and phenomena dialogue with one another. And such is the case with this edition of NEO, the essays consolidating the arcs of knowledge gathering in various areas of critical endeavour, whilst placing extant theories and historical patterns and artefacts in a relationship with explicitly contemporary concerns.
As convenor of the conference and editor of NEO, I wish to thank the team who helped put the event together: Dona Cayetana, Catherine Hoad, Rachael Gunn, Priscilla Rawiri-Steele, Elle Hrobat and Stephany Yeap. I wish to further thank Priscilla Rawiri-Steele for her efforts in facilitating the NEO reviewing process, and express my sincerest gratitude to Dona Cayetana and Catherine Hoad for their work in organising reviewers and editing a selection of papers for this issue.
Dr Anthony Lambert
Cultural Studies, Macquarie University
August 2012
Editorial for NEO Volume 5, 2012
Anthony Lambert, Macquarie University
Dona Cayetana, University of Melbourne
Catherine Hoad, Macquarie University
In the first article in this edition, ‘Who are we? – Behind the Scenes of Multiculturalism in Australia’, Sandra Blumberg examines ideas of cultural diversity in relation to the changing face of multicultural policy and practice in contemporary Australian society. In doing so, Blumberg challenges the notion that Australia is the multicultural nation it envisions itself to be.
Following this theme, Dona Cayetana’s paper, ‘Desperate Times, Desperate Poetry: (Un)Australian Refugee Poets in a Post-9/11 Australia’, takes a timely and provocative look at the plight of refugees in contemporary Australia through the lens of political ‘poetry of witness’. The paper develops critical understandings of Australianess and unAustralianess and applies them through the analysis of several works of refugee poetry suggesting that for these poets personal reflection is inseparable from their political experience.
In deploying the notion that humans are cyborgic in nature, David-Jack Fletcher’s article ‘Recalibrating the Human’, seeks to disrupt hegemonic narratives of what it means to be human. Fletcher argues that post-human technologies of body modification specifically in regards to disability, gender and sexuality call for ‘recalibration’ of contemporary conceptions of the human.
Notions of 'Australianness' are again investigated in Rebecca Hawkings' article ‘”The Light On The Hill”: Chifley, Keating, and a new interpretation of Australian Labor Party rhetoric’. Hawkings mounts a cross-comparative study of the language of Australian Prime Ministers Chifley and Keating, thus mapping dominant tropes in the history of the Australian Labor Party's rhetoric with a view to asserting the need for cross-generational approaches to Australian political history. Her article operates as an exploration of the remarkably similar - and sometimes divergent - political discourses that infiltrated Australian leadership over the course of the 20th century.
The challenges posed to gendered bodies are re-visited in Rachael Gunn's article ‘Rearticulating gender norms through breakdancing’ offers a new dimension to the politicised bodies explored throughout this journal, wherein breakdancing, as a cultural activity, offers a site within which traditional narratives of gender and leisure are disrupted and renegotiated. In approaching a traditionally 'feminine' domain - that of dance - Gunn's article illustrates the manner in which breakdancing problematises gendered categorisations through embracing masculinity, yet simultaneously enforces challenging depictions of hypergender and the values associated with such bodies.
The question of the 'human' and the hierarchical value granted to such a position is taken up in Catherine Hoad's article ‘”Scream Bloody Gore” - The Abject Body and Posthuman Possibilities in Death Metal’. Hoad investigates the way death metal's fascination with gore and violence offers a means to look beyond the 'horror' of the abject body, and instead approaches the human subject as an essentially organic site. This blurring of the psyche and soma, it is suggested, is potentially enough to allow for a reclaiming of the 'flesh body', which has often been dismissed as separate and Other.
The ‘asymmetries of power’ identified by Jillian Kramer in former Prime Minister Howard’s Northern Territory Emergency Response, are opened up and spoken back to in her paper ‘Protecting White Australia: John Howard’s announcement of the Northern Territory Emergency Response and the ongoing Colonial Project’. Kramer explores Howard’s language through its constructions of ‘white sovereignty’ and the reinforcement on non-indigenous ‘ownership’ of the Australian nation-state. The language and representational violence it symbolizes is tied to continuing discourses of invasion and dispossession, as evidenced by the suspension of the Racial Discrimination Act and the series of motifs and gestures that legitimate inequity.
Lynette Ryan, in her paper ‘Respect for Elderly Australians: A Literature Review’, explores the notion of ‘respect’ as it is applied to older Australians in order to understand the cultural basis of its social performances and practices. In synthesising studies on ageing, issues of respect are at once noticeable against the larger narratives of maltreatment, abuse and violence levelled against older and frail Australians. At the same time, Ryan draws an important relationship between respect and associated concepts such as disrespect, ageism and the infantilisation which inform contemporary discourses regarding theories and identities of senior citizens.
‘Conceptualising Manteis in Greek Tragedy: Rethinking Translation and Definition’, by John W. Shannahan, proposes a new method for conceptualising manteis of Classical Greece, utilising Greek Tragedy of the fifth century BCE as a case study. Shanahan finds that educators may more easily convey scholarly understanding of these figures through a series of expressions that move outside of the limitations and restrictions of available categories, definitions and the associated analytical processes that produce them. By conceptualising manteis with the terms ‘Holy Man’, ‘Seer’, and ‘Peddler’, English connotations can fit more appropriately with that of the Greek, helping to locate the purpose of these figures in different contexts.