From Cultural Studies to Cultural Research: Engaged Scholarship in the Twenty-first Century

Is, or should cultural studies be, a discipline or not? What exactly is its object? Should cultural studies be focused on influencing policy or be an agent of critique? What is the role of theory? What kind of theory? Should textual analysis or ethnography predominate? The regular reiteration of such questions reveals an ongoing sense of crisis, a general apprehensiveness over the question whether cultural studies is able to live up to its own self-declared aspirations, both intellectually and politically

Asian Australian Writing

This special issue of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, the result of a collaboration with the South Asian Diaspora International Research Network (SADIRN) at Monash University, Australia, engages with Asian Australian writing, a phenomenon that has been staking out a place in the Australian literary landscape since the 1950s and 1960s. It has now burgeoned into an influential area of cultural production, known for its ethnic diversity and stylistic innovativeness and demanding new forms of critical engagement involving transnational and transcultural frameworks. As Wenche Ommundsen and Huang Zhong point out in their article in this issue, the very term “Asian Australian” signals a heterogeneity that rivals that of the dominant Anglo Australian culture; just as white Australian writing displays the lineaments of its complex European heritage, so hybridised works by multicultural writers from mainland China, Vietnam, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Indonesia, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Singapore and Malaysia can be read in terms of their specific national, ethnic, linguistic and cultural traditions. Nevertheless, this category’s primary location within the space of the host or Australian nation has determined its reception and interpretation. Marked by controversial representations of historical and present-day encounters with white Australian culture, debates on alterity, representational inequality, and consciousness of its minority status, Asian Australian writing has become a force field of critical enquiry in its own right (Ommundsen 2012, 2)

Culture and Communication : Towards an Ethnographie Critique of Media Consumption in the Transnational Media System

The irresistible march of transnational media has given rise to widely experienced problems concerning cultural autonomy and identity. The research tradition of "cultural studies" offers a very appropriate and distinctive way of analysing these questions, especially by means of a critical ethnography of reception. The tendency in some recent reception research to celebrate "the popular" as a source of resistance to "the hegemonic" is criticized.Le développement irrésistible des médias transnationaux a provoqué un peu partout des problèmes d'autonomie et d'identité culturelles. Les « études culturelles » permettent d'analyser ces problèmes dans le cadre d'une ethnographie critique de la réception. Cet article met en question la tendance de certaines études récentes sur la réception à célébrer le « populaire » comme source de résistance

A ficção televisiva no mundo: melodrama e ironia em perspectiva global

O livro Watching Dallas, publicado na década de 1980 estuda as discussões sobre a recepção da novela norte-americana Dallas. Décadas depois, parece adequado olhar para esses anos que separam o lançamento do livro e o momento atual e pensar sobre o que mudou na cultura televisiva, especialmente no que se refere à série televisiva dramática. A ironia com que os telespectadores veem as novelas desde então nos Estados Unidos e alguns melodramas produzidos e veiculados na Ásia são alguns dos pontos analisados

Pleasure and meaningful discourse: an overview of research issues

The concept of pleasure has emerged as a multi-faceted social and cultural phenomenon in studies of media audiences since the 1980s. In these studies different forms of pleasure have been identified as explaining audience activity and commitment. In the diverse studies pleasure has emerged as a multi-faceted social and cultural concept that needs to be contextualized carefully. Genre and genre variations, class, gender, (sub-)cultural identity and generation all seem to be instrumental in determining the kind and variety of pleasures experienced in the act of viewing. This body of research has undoubtedly contributed to a better understanding of the complexity of audience activities, but it is exactly the diversity of the concept that is puzzling and poses a challenge to its further use. If pleasure is maintained as a key concept in audience analysis that holds much explanatory power, it needs a stronger theoretical foundation. The article maps the ways in which the concept of pleasure has been used by cultural theorists, who have paved the way for its application in reception analysis, and it goes on to explore the ways in which the concept has been used in empirical studies. Central to our discussion is the division between the ‘public knowledge’ and the ‘popular culture’ projects in reception analysis which, we argue, have major implications for the way in which pleasure has come to be understood as divorced from politics, power and ideology. Finally, we suggest ways of bridging the gap between these two projects in an effort to link pleasure to the concepts of hegemony and ideology

Literature Review : The Contribution of Social and Cultural Infrastructure to Liveability

This literature review was commissioned to support the Northern Sydney Regional Organisation of Councils (NSROC) in obtaining a better understanding of the role of social and cultural infrastructure in enhancing regional liveability. The review of research and policy initiatives is across 15 Australian and 6 international reports which discuss the value of social and cultural infrastructure, and its relationship with liveability. From this review, it was clear that not only is there no single, definitive understanding of social and cultural infrastructure, but social infrastructure often embraces cultural infrastructure in conceptual terms. For this reason, the report proposes that the synthetic notions of culturally-focused social infrastructure and/or socially-focused cultural infrastructure are used in the interests of flexibility and feasibility

Creative Production Synergies in Penrith and the Blue Mountains

Regional leadership in arts and cultural production is evident in Penrith and the Blue Mountains through the different yet complementary approaches of the City Councils. This research project began in August 2019, the interview phase was completed in early December 2019, and this report was completed in June 2020. Therefore, the research spanned a very challenging period of drought and severe bushfires over the summer across New South Wales, followed almost immediately by the COVID-19 pandemic. Businesses in arts and recreation services were among the first and most severely affected by the need to enforce Government social distancing restrictions, with 94 per cent of the sector reporting an adverse impact of the Government restrictions in the March Business COVID-19 survey (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2020). This report has shown the need for investment in creative production capacity building – a need which has now significantly increased

Writing in London. Home and Languaging in the Work of London Poets of Chinese Descent

This essay discusses literary works produced in London by poets of Chinese descent who are foreign-born or London native. Some of these works are written in English, and some in Chinese. The aim is to discuss poetry that has emphatically or reluctantly embraced the identity narrative, talking of home and belonging in substantially different ways from each other, according to each poet’s individual relationship with movement, migration, and stability. Therefore, through the use of the phrase ‘London poets of Chinese descent’, I do not aim at tracing a shared sense of identity, but instead I am interested in using London as a method for an oblique reading that recognises the variety of angles and approaches in these poets’ individual experience, history and circumstances that can range from occasional travel to political exile

(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