Uncanny Australia

Uncanny Australia PDF

Author: Ken Gelder

Publisher: Melbourne University Publish

Published: 1998

Total Pages: 186

ISBN-13: 9780522848168

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Aboriginal claims for sacredness in modern Australia may seem like minor events, but they have radically disturbed the nation's image of itself. Minorities appear to have too much influence; majorities suddenly feel embattled. What once seemed familiar can now seem disconcertingly unfamiliar, a condition Ken Gelder and Jane M. Jacobs diagnose as 'uncanny'. In Uncanny Australia Gelder and Jacobs show how Aboriginal claims for sacredness radiate out to affect the fortunes, and misfortunes, of the modern nation. They look at Coronation Hill, Hindmarsh Island, Uluru and the repatriation of sacred objects; they examine secret business in public places, promiscuous sacred sites, ghosts and bunyips, cartographic nostalgia, reconciliation and democracy, postcolonial racism and New Age enchantments. Uncanny Australia is a challenging and thought-provoking work that offers a new way of understanding how the Aboriginal sacred inhabits the modern nation.

Australia

Australia PDF

Author: Anthony Moran

Publisher: Psychology Press

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 9780415944977

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First Published in 2005. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Apocalypse in Australian Fiction and Film

Apocalypse in Australian Fiction and Film PDF

Author: Roslyn Weaver

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2014-01-10

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 0786484659

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Australia has been a frequent choice of location for narratives about the end of the world in science fiction and speculative works, ranging from pre-colonial apocalyptic maps to key literary works from the last fifty years. This critical work explores the role of Australia in both apocalyptic literature and film. Works and genres covered include Nevil Shute's popular novel On the Beach, Mad Max, children's literature, Indigenous writing, and cyberpunk. The text examines ways in which apocalypse is used to undermine complacency, foretell environmental disasters, critique colonization, and to serve as a means of protest for minority groups. Australian apocalypse imagines Australia at the ends of the world, geographically and psychologically, but also proposes spaces of hope for the future.

Australia as the Antipodal Utopia

Australia as the Antipodal Utopia PDF

Author: Daniel Hempel

Publisher: Anthem Press

Published: 2019-10-31

Total Pages: 210

ISBN-13: 1785271415

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Australia has a fascinating history of visions. As the antipode to Europe, the continent provided a radically different and uniquely fertile ground for envisioning places, spaces and societies. Australia as the Antipodal Utopia evaluates this complex intellectual history by mapping out how Western visions of Australia evolved from antiquity to the modern period. It argues that because of its antipodal relationship with Europe, Australia is imagined as a particular form of utopia – but since one person’s utopia is, more often than not, another’s dystopia, Australia’s utopian quality is both complex and highly ambiguous. Drawing on the rich field of utopian studies, Australia as the Antipodal Utopia provides an original and insightful study of Australia’s place in the Western imagination.

Imagined Landscapes

Imagined Landscapes PDF

Author: Jane Stadler

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2015-12-21

Total Pages: 239

ISBN-13: 0253018498

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An analysis of the depiction of Australia’s landscape in its films and literature. Imagined Landscapes teams geocritical analysis with digital visualization techniques to map and interrogate films, novels, and plays in which space and place figure prominently. Drawing upon A Cultural Atlas of Australia, a database-driven interactive digital map that can be used to identify patterns of representation in Australia’s cultural landscape, the book presents an integrated perspective on the translation of space across narrative forms and pioneers new ways of seeing and understanding landscape. It offers fresh insights on cultural topography and spatial history by examining the technical and conceptual challenges of georeferencing fictional and fictionalized places in narratives. Among the items discussed are Wake in Fright, a novel by Kenneth Cook, adapted iconically to the screen and recently onto the stage; the Australian North as a mythic space; spatial and temporal narrative shifts in retellings of the story of Alexander Pearce, a convict who gained notoriety for resorting to cannibalism after escaping from a remote Tasmanian penal colony; travel narratives and road movies set in Western Australia; and the challenges and spatial politics of mapping spaces for which there are no coordinates. “It will likely be the indispensable touchstone for any future work in these areas with respect to Australian cultural studies.” —Robert T. Tally, Texas State University “Definitely original in its approach, since it combines a conceptual approach with a more applied one. The book is a serious contribution to the field of mapping spatial narratives and to a better understanding of the production and spatial structure of fictional places.” —Sébastien Caquard, Concordia University

Feminist Poetics of the Sacred

Feminist Poetics of the Sacred PDF

Author: Frances Devlin-Glass

Publisher: American Academy of Religion

Published: 2001-06-28

Total Pages: 283

ISBN-13: 0195349326

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This book is an interdisciplinary and multicultural study of ancient and contemporary texts that encode women's spirituality. The contributors, using modern critical methods such as feminist theory, poststructuralism, and the new historicisms, examine how the ideas in these texts are being reworked in different religious traditions. The volume encompasses both contemporary and historical contexts, tracing the roles, actions, writings, and beliefs of women in pre-Christian, Christian, Islamic, indigenous, and neo-pagan contexts. The book builds on three decades of feminist research into such areas as goddess worship, indigenous spiritualities, eco-feminism, biblical hermeneutics, Christian and Islamic mysticism, subversive poetics, and mythological systems inside and outside the mainstream.

Globaletics and Radicant Aesthetics in Australian Fiction

Globaletics and Radicant Aesthetics in Australian Fiction PDF

Author: Salhia Ben-Messahel

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2018-01-23

Total Pages: 217

ISBN-13: 1527506975

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This book focuses on the issues of space, culture and identity in recent Australian fiction. It discusses the work of 15 authors to show that, in Australia, the meaning of “country” remains critical and cultural belonging is still a difficult process. Interrogating the definition of Australia as a “post-colonial nation” and its underlying extension from Britain, it applies Nicolas Bourriaud’s concept of the Radicant to examine Australian writing beyond the “post” of “post-colonialism”. The book shows that some authors are engaged in writing about the country and the time in which they live, but that they also share common critical views on the definition of multiculturalism, the belonging to place, and integration in the nation. The volume suggests that theories of cultural hybridism presented as a decolonising methodology in fact dissolve singularity in the same way that globalisation creates standardisation. It argues that 21st century Australian fiction depicts the subject as a radicant and that Australian culture constitutes a mobile entity unconnected to any soil.

Transnational Australian Cinema

Transnational Australian Cinema PDF

Author: Olivia Khoo

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 217

ISBN-13: 0739173243

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To date, there has been little sustained attention given to the historical cinema relations between Australia and Asia. This is a significant omission given Australia's geo-political position and the place Asia has held in the national imaginary, oscillating between threat and opportunity. Many accounts of Australian cinema begin with the 1970s film revival, placing "Asian-Australian cinema" within a post-revival schema of multicultural or diasporic cinema and ignoring Asian-Australian connections prior to the revival. Transnational Australian Cinema charts a history of Asian-Australian cinema, encompassing the work of diasporic Asian filmmakers, films featuring images of Asia and Asians, films produced by Australians working in Asia's film industries or addressed at Asian audiences, and Asian films that use Australian resources, including locations and personnel. Utilizing an interdisciplinary approach, the book considers diasporic Asian histories, the impact of government immigration and film policies on representation, and the new aesthetic styles and production regimes created by filmmakers who have forged links, both through roots and routes, with Asia. This expanded history of Asian-Australian cinema allows for a renewed discussion of so-called dormant periods in the nation's film history. In this respect, the mapping of an expanded history of cinema practices contributes to our broader aim to rethink the transnationalism of Australian cinema.

Gender, Madness, and Colonial Paranoia in Australian Literature

Gender, Madness, and Colonial Paranoia in Australian Literature PDF

Author: Laura Deane

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2017-05-31

Total Pages: 215

ISBN-13: 1498547338

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This book offers an original and compelling analysis of women’s madness, gender and the Australian family. Taking up Anne McClintock’s call for critical works that psychoanalyze colonialism, this radical re-assessment of novels by Christina Stead and Kate Grenville provides a sustained account of women’s madness and masculine colonial psychosis from a feminist postcolonial perspective. This book rethinks women’s madness in the context of Australian colonialism. Taking novels of madness by Christina Stead and Kate Grenville as its point of critical departure, it applies a post-Reconciliation lens to the study of Australia’s gender and racial codes, to place Australian sexism and misogyny in their proper colonial context. Employing madness as a frame to rethink postcolonial theorizing in Australia, Gender, Madness, and Colonial Paranoia in Australian Literature psychoanalyses colonialism to argue that Australia suffers from a cultural pathology based in the strategic forgetting of colonial violence. This pathology takes the form of colonial paranoia about ‘race’ and gender, producing distorted gender codes and ways of being Australian. This book maps the contours of Australian colonial paranoia, weaving feminist literary theory, psychoanalysis and postcolonial theory with poststructuralist approaches to reassess the traditional canon of critical madness scholarship, and the place of women’s writing within it. This provocative work marks a radical departure from much recent feminist, cultural, and postcolonial criticism, and will be essential reading for students of Australian literature, cultural studies and gender studies wanting a new insight into how the Australian psyche is shaped by settler colonialism.

Mediating Multiculturalism

Mediating Multiculturalism PDF

Author: Daniella Trimboli

Publisher: Anthem Press

Published: 2020-08-04

Total Pages: 347

ISBN-13: 1785273922

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Using digital storytelling—a new media genre that began in California in the late 1990s and that proliferated across ‘the West’ in the 2000s—as a site of analysis, this book asks, ‘What is done in the name of the everyday?’ Like everyday multiculturalism, digital storytelling is promoted as an accessible, enabling, and ordinary phenomenon that represents cultural experience more accurately than official sites. As such, the genre frequently houses stories of migration, community, and ethnic and racial differences. In turn, digital story collections often act as digital monuments or repositories of multiculturalism, giving a digital life to narratives of migration, cultural difference, and national belonging. This is evidenced in one of the world’s largest public collections of digital stories, found in the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) and referenced throughout this book. Using examples from this collection and pointing to comparable ones in the UK and North America, this book investigates how notions of the everyday become a channel through which certain long-standing discourses of race get redeployed in multicultural nations. What can digital storytelling teach us about the status and future of multiculturalism in these societies? Can digital storytelling re-mediate multiculturalism in new, progressive ways?