National Global Imaginaries

Subjugated bodies continue to be missing from classrooms, faculty meetings, and educational structures everywhere. Where are the excluded bodies? Where is the untheorized visceral experience of everyday discrimination? Possibilities of inclusiveness must be viscerally felt, not simply disembodiedly spoken. Merely claiming to be a progressive teacher-writer isn't enough to achieve a decolonizing praxis. This claim needs to come from an embodied performance in the classroom, a place where teachers and students alike can perform the scars of oppression on their bodies. Teacher and student bodies, in-between the colonial and postcolonial experience, can then become more present in teaching and praxis.

In February 2008, Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd apologised to Indigenous Australians for past injustices. The apology was presented as a turning point in the history of the nation. According to Rudd, 'there comes a time in the history of a nation when peoples must become fully reconciled to their past if they are to go forward with confidence to embrace their future'. The apology marked a new step in the reconciliation process in Australia, but as this article argues, the treaty issue - another controversial aspect of reconciliation - remains a major challenge to the Australian nation.

The presence of Filipinos as corporeal and discursive subjects within both America and Asian America has long been contested. On one hand, the dynamic juridical status of Filipinos in America has ranged from American colonial subjects and American nationals to naturalized and native-born citizens. On the other hand, the presence of Filipinos in America has provided labor in key industries from agriculture to nursing. Filipino America has always been a transnational social formation whose history, economy, and culture reflect the interrelated histories of the Philippines and the United States. This essay explores Filipino American aesthetic practices that engage with the corporeal and discursive production of the "Filipino" in both America and Filipino America. The essay investigates the implications of Filipino American visual art and artists "returning" to the Philippines and argues that a cultural logic of "fictions of return" forms a central part of the production of Filipino America as a transnational sociospatial formation. The first section discusses the production of Filipino America in the context of America's exhibitionary complex. The article proceeds to trace exhibitionary practices in the transnational art project Galleon Trade Arts Exchange. The article then discusses works by Christine Wong Yap, Stephanie Syjuco, Reanne Estrada, and Gina Osterloh to highlight how Filipino American visual art has critically engaged with the multiple contradictions within Filipino and Filipino American experiences. The article ends with a rumination on the relationship between cultural production and desire to return and belong.

Since their emergence as a novel form of justice, truth commissions have magnetically drawn writers into their orbit. This essay explores one literary response that seems both logical and provocative: the thriller's shadowy world of conspiracy theories, cover-ups, and coups. As a subgenre associated with popular culture, the thriller has rarely been considered a serious player in discussions of literature in the aftermath of atrocity. However, as a space in which the mystifications of conspiracy meet the imperatives of transitional justice, the newly emergent subgenre of the truth commission thriller challenges pervasive assumptions about the necessary gravitas of literature in the aftermath of violence. Looking closely at this genre allows us to ask how its forms may help the novel envision productive alternatives to the narrative of silence so intimately linked to the writing of catastrophe. These representations emerge within the increasing globalization of transitional justice, a context that seeks intensifying degrees of communicability as it turns local legacies of violence into ones with international implications. Gillian Slovo's account of a South African amnesty hearing, Red Dust (2000), imagines itself as a competitor for the production of truth; Canadian novelist Alan Cumyn's Burridge Unbound (2000) serves as an analogue prone to similar forces of fragmentation; and David Park's vision of a fictional commission in Northern Ireland, The Truth Commissioner (2008), decenters the truth commission into a private space of multiple meanings. These novels challenge the ideal of national disclosure before the law but nonetheless hold out the hope of communicability in a global sphere.

This essay supplements a growing body of work on domestic television in China by exploring some histories of the screen outside the home. Rooted in Olympic-era Beijing, this discussion converges around three intermedial contexts: (1) contemporary art and exhibition; (2) nondomestic and unhomely space; (3) contemporary cinema. These disparate assemblages reimagine the space of television and the medium's role as a form of social communication. The primary focus is the intersection of television and the city in articulating the social body in transition. Focusing on artists, audiences, state media, and elided spaces of electronics production, the essay develops the notion of "screen postsocialism" to explore the logic of development in contemporary China. In particular, it argues that the Olympic era consolidates a transitional imaginary around outside television forms. This emphasis on a particular technology of reception, moreover, acts to screen out the broader textures of postsocialist cultural and economic production.

Using the Cronulla Riots as a starting point, this article explores the way in which neoliberal ideology, and the social and economic practices associated with it, have transformed Australia from an inclusive nation-state to one founded on the premise of exclusion. From this foundation, relative inclusion is based on a person's utility to the economic requirements of Australian capitalism. More and more people live outside of Australian citizenship which, previously, marked the limits of the inclusive state. In this new order of relative exclusion, many white Australians, who previously had felt themselves to be entitled members of the Australian state, experience an increasing disenfranchisement. Resorting to nationalism as a way of asserting their membership of the nation-state, the Cronulla riots were a manifestation of the frustrations of many white Australians.

This article critically assesses the role and broader applications of a place-based moving image database and online catalogue in researching film and cities. Unlike the sprawling metropolises of Berlin, London or New York (the archetypical 'cinematic cities'), a medium-sized provincial city such as Liverpool offers a more localized urban landscape conducive to place-based studies of film. The form and structure of the database plays a crucial role in the mapping of historical film and urban geography, allowing for relational forms of spatial analysis. This prompts a wider set of questions: in what ways can the database inform and structure specific spatial narratives of the city over time? What, by extension, are the cultural and historiographical implications for research into film, place and space? Finally, to what extent might a database model of the 'city in film' be extended beyond local and regional boundaries to reshape national discourses of film historiography?

Both of Chimananda Adichie's novels name their relation to Achebe's Things Fall Apart. More important, they form part of a longer tradition of writing by African women, while at the same time, they extend that tradition. Like novels by Nwapa, Emecheta, Bâ, and others, Adichie's novels represent a politics of the family while quietly but clearly telling stories of the nation; this is especially the case with her first novel, Purple Hibiscus. Adichie also tells more explicit tales of the Nigerian national imaginary, especially in her second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun. By appropriating some of the structural elements of Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions, as she did of Achebe's Things Fall Apart, Adichie advances her storytelling in Purple Hibiscus by telling a domestic tale with yet stronger national overtones. By illustrating a crosscontinental set of inspirations and intertexts in Purple Hibiscus I reveal Adichie's exploration of the contemporary Nigerian political crisis.

This article questions the applicability of received theories of the avant-garde to artistic practices in postcolonial Africa. In particular, it looks at the politics of exhibition and reception of two vanguard groupings operating in Senegal, one in the 1970s, another in the present day, that have been presented within major forums celebrating global art in the neoliberal era. As complex mixes of indigenous and global forms and ideas, these practices address multilayered histories of interaction and imbrication of cultures and challenge pat assumptions of the traditional avant-garde's parameters.

What is an avant-garde? In posing such a question, this issue of New Literary History seeks to reexamine a category that often seems all too self-evident. Our aim is not to draw up a fresh list of definitions, specifications, and prescriptions but to explore the conditions and repercussions of the question itself. In the spirit of analogously titled queries-from Kant's "What is Enlightenment?" to Foucault's "What is an Author?"-we hope to spur reflection not only on a particular object of study but also on the frameworks and critical faculties that we bring to bear on it. As Paul Mann notes, every critical text on the avant-garde, whether tacitly or overtly, "has a stake in the avant-garde, in its force or destruction, in its survival or death (or both)." 1 A reassessment of these stakes is one of the priorities of this special issue.

In 1974 Lewis Thomas expressed frustration with cultural criticism's fascination with physics, especially quantum mechanics. "I wish the humanists," he wrote, "would leave physics alone for a while and begin paying more attention to biology." 1 Glen Love echoed Thomas's plea for attention to biology in 2003 when he remarked: "If some humanists have been attracted to some of the most difficult and obscure physics, they have for the most part ignored the life sciences, especially evolutionary biology and ecology." 2 Since its organization from a groundswell of overlapping concerns and ideas into a school of criticism in the 1990s, ecocriticism has visibly countered this tendency, drawing on biology and ecology to critique cultural works. Recently, the scientific roots of ecocritical practice have been a topic of conversation at the conferences of both the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment and the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts (as well as their UK counterparts). 3 This special double-issue focuses on both on the scientific foundation and future of ecocritical thought.

We contend that "waste" is the political other of capitalist "value", repeated with difference as part of capital's spatial histories of surplus accumulation. We trace its work on India through a series of historical cuts, and suggest that the travels and perils of waste give us a "minor" history of capitalist surplus-the things, places and lives that are cast outside the pale of "value" at particular moments as superfluity, excess, or detritus; only to return at times in unexpected ways. The neologism "eviscerating urbanism" becomes our diagnostic tool to investigate both urban transformations in metropolitan India and their associated architectures for managing bodies and spaces designated as "wasteful". In sum, our essay reveals how "waste" begins as civil society's literal and figurative frontier only to become its internal and mobile limit in the contemporary era-a renewing source of jeopardy to urban life and economy, but also, in the banal violence and ironies of fin de millennium urbanism, a fiercely contested frontier of surplus value production.

This special issue arose from a concern with the political logic of the foregrounding of collective culture(s) in the context of changing citizenship regimes.1 Its key focus is the conjuncture in which 'culture' - claims of a collective distinction concerning heritage, location, moralities and values - has become the terrain of political struggles over the subject of rights in national and international politics, the re-allocation of entitlements, definitions of value and new forms of political representation. This appears to be linked to contemporary processes of neoliberalization, the politics of which are often defined in terms of economic policies promoting private accumulation, entrepreneurship and free markets, but which typically also include a project of governance in which not only individuals, but also collective agents - which may be 'cultural' entities - are charged with increasing responsibility for their own regulation, welfare and enterprise, but in a depoliticized and bureaucratized mode (Santos, 2005). Citizenship is central here as the modern political and legal institution which links certain notions of personal rights and duties with the structures of governance and political agency, on the one hand, and with the national and, by extension, transnational economy, on the other.

For 30 years the dominant approach to Aboriginal affairs in Australia has been to support cultural recovery and accommodate cultural difference in the expectation that this will enhance Aborigines' and Torres Strait Islanders' equality as citizens.This approach has been driven by a dialectic of progressivist desire to ameliorate the effects of earlier colonialist policy and Aboriginalist discourse that assumes isolable cultures, unitary identities and uni-directional causes of marginalisation. That discursive formation, once counter to dominant colonialist discourse, has now itself become normative, internally repressive, counter-productive and resistant to change. This is the national misadventure with Aboriginalism. This paper argues that this unexpected development is a product of the national governing attempt to gain control through public policy that is inadequate to Aborigines' contemporary lived reality of interculturality, post-ethnicity and political agency. It uses an indicative case study and an analysis of the national misadventure to propose a deliberative intercultural approach to public policy in respect of Aborigines.

In this paper, the author draws upon an examination of two apparently opposed cyborg locations and technologies to show how, in specific instances, globalization, technology, economics, culture and diasporas intersect. Such intersections produce very specific, situated contexts for productive labor forces to emerge at the interface of technologies 'old' and 'new'. These situated contexts place the individual in relation to market forces and community production logics through which labor and affect are placed in hierarchies of digital globalization. The author does this by looking at how the 'sari' is produced, marketed and worn in two 'cyborg' contexts. One of the cyborg locations this article explores is online, the other is offline. By juxtaposing these 'old' and 'new' contexts of production and marketing a sari the author hopes to allow for issues to be raised that otherwise would be invisible.

Within some significant circles, where hegemonic representations of the idea of 'science' are produced, certain orientations of scientific research are carried out, and science and higher education policies are made and applied, references to the alleged existence of two kinds of knowledge, one of which would have 'universal' validity, and 'the other' (in fact the several others) would not, are frequent and do have crucial effects over our academic work. Although some outstanding authors within the very Western tradition have criticized from varied perspectives such universalist ambitions/assumptions, and although many colleagues have reached convergent conclusions from diverse kinds of practices and experiences, such hegemonic representations of the idea of science are still current. The acknowledgment of this situation calls for a deep debate. This article responds to such a purpose by attempting to integrate into the debate a reflection on the shortcomings of hegemonic academic knowledge to understand social processes profoundly marked by cultural differences, historical conflicts and inequalities, as well as significant perspectives formulated by some outstanding intellectuals who self-identify as indigenous, and the experiences of some indigenous intercultural universities from several Latin American countries.

This paper examines the events commemorating the 400th anniversary of the founding of Qubec City in 2008 and, in particular, the ways in which the Qubec 400 was celebrated in Western France. The author argues that the events provide an instance of trans-Atlantic subject formation. Through analyzing a series of public events that took place in the La Rochelle region of France in 2008, the author argues that this extra-national raciality was constituted through two specific modes: practices of territoriality that signify a 'cartography of origins' and tropes of family that affirm the racialized dimensions of Qubcois belonging in France.

Urban centers across Canada are partitioned by racial geographies that circumvent and circumscribe the movements of aboriginal bodies. This article examines how aboriginal youth experience and engage these racisms that organize Canadian social spaces. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork undertaken at a drop-in recreational centre in the inner city of Edmonton, Alberta, it documents the different ways in which indigenous youth employ hip-hop as a means to contest their subjection to these immobilizing racisms. First, it shows how these youth employ hip-hop as a technology of self-transformation through which they recreate their selves as meaningful, efficacious political actors capable of disrupting their relegation to criminogenic places. Second, it documents how the practice of a distinctly indigenous hip-hop allows these youth to innovate an aesthetic space disruptive of the historicist racisms that otherwise subject aboriginality to anachronistic spaces. Finally, this article shows that, by performing a hybridized, distinctly indigenous breakdance, these practitioners of hip-hop dramatize the physical and cultural motility of aboriginal bodies.

The current 'winds of change' sweeping through North Africa and the Middle East are reminiscent of earlier transformational moments that changed the very political order. As we write this editorial, monumental changes are taking place within Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain and Libya. Indeed, it appears that virtually none of the societies within the region are immune from a new-found 'people power' that demands reformation of the political, economic and social order. The winds of change in the Middle East are long overdue and one must ask the question why they did not sweep though after the collapse of communism in 1989, a time of great political change in many parts of the world including sub-Saharan Africa, that subsequently witnessed the end of apartheid. Why did the 'Third Wave of Democracy' as Samuel Huntington (1991) called it, not sweep the Middle East or North Africa?

Researchers have found a number of economic, technological, and political factors to be associated with the diffusion of information technology in developing countries. But cultural factors generally, and national identity in particular, have almost never been viewed as consequential. Castells and Himanen's 2002 study of the information society in Finland, in which the authors identify Finnish national culture as an impetus to the development of the country's informational welfare state, is the most prominent exception to this pattern. This article provides a critical overview of Castells and Himanen's research and revises their conceptual framework to focus on the specific choices states make in constructing their national identities and the effects of these choices on information policy and information technology diffusion. It demonstrates the value of this revised framework through a comparison of the historical trajectories of Turkey and Malaysia's nation-building projects, the incentives these projects have created for the two countries' social and political elites, and the public information policies and programs that have resulted.