Cultural Contestation Research Articles

The Mark of the Beast is the Glory of the Pariah: AIDS Apocalypticism of Diamanda Galás and David Wojnarowicz

The Mark of the Beast is the Glory of the Pariah: AIDS Apocalypticism of Diamanda Galás and David Wojnarowicz

Singapore's Cultural Experimentation: Gay Rights, Stem Cells, Casinos and the Evangelical Response

Since the early 1990s the Singapore government has been taking a more liberal stance on controversial issues such as gay rights, embryonic stem cell research and the gaming industry. My paper analyses the Singapore state's utilitarian justification and its authoritarian enactment of these liberal policies. The first part looks at the underlying motivation for the cultural makeover. I frame my analysis around the reaction of the Singapore Christian community to these developments. I focus on the criticisms of the state's ‘liberal’ agenda made by Evangelicals, and describe how the People's Action Party (PAP) regime has defended these policies on utilitarian grounds. The first part ends with a comparative analysis of how the ‘cultural war’ debate was played out in Singapore and the USA. In the second part I examine the procedural aspects of this cultural experimentation. I start with a review of Singapore's political reform. I show that civil society in Singapore has attained a new openness. Yet there remain constraints, leading critics to label the PAP-led government as a ‘soft-authoritarian’ democracy. Singapore's cultural policies, I explain, are essentially an ‘elitist’ state-engineered top-down development. This is in contrast to the experience in the USA, where grassroots activists exercise tangible bottom-up influence on how cultural contests are resolved. My main thesis is to argue that Singapore's recent cultural liberalisation is guided by social–economic expediency notwithstanding the alleged moral risks, and that these are state-commanded liberal experimentations, imposed by the ruling elite upon a constituency that is still largely conservative in moral outlook.

Ecology, Ontology, and Pedagogy at Camp Coorong

Ecology, Ontology, and Pedagogy at Camp Coorong

The Cosmopolitan Absurdity of Ligeti's Late Works

As Esa-Pekka Salonen notes, György Ligeti ‘was the most cosmopolitan of composers, but, paradoxically, remained clearly defined in terms of his roots and language’. As a ‘rooted’ cosmopolitan and survivor of Nazi and Soviet occupations, Ligeti retained an inherent idealism that reached back to Kant's notion of a cosmopolitan, universal future, albeit one tempered by nostalgia and fatalism. In their incorporation of disparate cultural influences, the late works in particular exemplify a form of cultural contestation—distinct from mere pluralism or hybridity—known as the ‘cosmopolitan imagination’. This paper focuses on one manifestation of this cosmopolitan impulse in four vocal and instrumental compositions. Each work manifests a comic absurdity that neither mimics nor merges the music and text which inspire it, and which binds Ligeti's music to larger modernist themes.

The Prometheus Myth in the Sculptures of Sami Mohammad and the Plays of Aeschylus and Shelley

The Prometheus Myth in the Sculptures of Sami Mohammad and the Plays of Aeschylus and Shelley

Re-imagining youth justice: Cultural contestation in the Kimberley region of Australia since the 1991 Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody

Twenty years on from the 1991 Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody in Australia the picture appears bleaker than in the early 1990s. This article adopts a post-colonial stance to examine emerging Aboriginal strategies on youth justice in Western Australia that focus on building forms of Aboriginal ‘cultural capital’ and ‘community owned’ justice mechanisms on Aboriginal country as an alternative to failed strategies of incarceration and ‘community based’ justice. Aboriginal contestation, or what I call, after Edward Said, ‘contrapuntality’ increasingly takes place through subtle ‘inter-cultural’ work in various ‘engagement spaces’ in-between Aboriginal and mainstream cultures. These practices challenge mainstream government to practise what it preaches in relation to its claimed respect for Aboriginal cultural rights. The article reports on Aboriginal owned and controlled cultural processes in the Kimberley region of Western Australia that are contrapuntally challenging established ideas about the meaning of justice for Aboriginal youth.

The Role of International Law in Intrastate Natural Resource Allocation

State natural resource development projects have become sites of intense political, social, and cultural contestation among a diversity of actors. In particular, such projects often lead to detrimental consequences for the empowerment, livelihood, and cultural and economic development of historically marginalized communities. In the period of colonial dissolution, international doctrines of natural resource allocation were developed, interpreted, and applied with respect to interstate disputes between colonizing states and newly independent colonies. Specifically, the doctrine of permanent sovereignty over natural resources developed, in part, with the aim of protecting newly independent states from economic re-colonization resulting from the appropriation of their natural resource base by foreign actors. (1) In more recent debates, the doctrine of permanent sovereignty over natural resources has been alluded to in the context of interstate disputes between developed and developing states pursuant to the same rationale: protecting a developing state's ability to seek economic growth through the economic benefits gained from an entitlement to commercialize its natural resource base. (2) Nevertheless, natural resource development projects have given rise to complex intrastate disputes involving the interests of multiple marginalized communities, including indigenous peoples, racial and ethnic minorities, and the rural poor. At the core of intrastate struggles for land and natural resources is a distributional concern regarding the potentially legitimate interests of multiple marginalized communities vis-a-vis each other, the broader national polity, and the state. How has international law evolved to address the allocation of land and natural resources to historically marginalized communities in the context of natural resource development projects? What are the consequences of this evolution? It appears that international law has infiltrated what has been deemed a sacred prerogative of states--sovereignty over their natural resources--and thereby ultimate decisionmaking authority regarding the course of development. Specifically, there are three emerging approaches under international law that impact the intrastate allocation of land and natural resources to historically marginalized communities, and thus, carve away at states' top-down decisionmaking authority over development. Each of the three emerging approaches--grounded in distinct discourses of sovereignty, human rights, and good governance--has distributional implications. They each address, from an international law perspective, who is vested with the authority to freely dispose of land and natural resources within the territorial boundaries of a state, and derivatively, who is entitled to decide upon a particular development strategy. One emerging approach is grounded in the discourse of permanent sovereignty over natural resources. This approach draws a distinction between the and the of a state. It interprets the doctrine of permanent sovereignty over natural resources as properly imbuing of a state with sovereignty to freely dispose of natural resources. (3) Nevertheless, this interpretation is more commensurate with the retention of ultimate decisionmaking power in the state alongside the imposition of government duties to execute such authority for the wellbeing of the national polity. A second approach is grounded in the discourse of human rights. This approach acknowledges the procedural and substantive land and resource rights of identity groups, such as indigenous peoples, who can demonstrate a cultural attachment to the land and resources at issue. Under human rights jurisprudence, indigenous peoples enjoy a procedural right to informed consultation or consent prior to the state's engagement in a natural resource or large-scale infrastructure project that may impact their way of life. (4) They also possess substantive rights to ownership, occupancy, use, and control of their ancestral land and resources. …

‘Generation X Games’, Action Sports and the Olympic Movement: Understanding the Cultural Politics of Incorporation

An important and mounting issue for the contemporary Olympic Movement is how to remain relevant to younger generations. Cognizant of the diminishing numbers of youth viewers, and the growing success of the X Games – the ‘Olympics’ of action sport – the International Olympic Committee (IOC) set about adding a selection of youth-oriented action sports into the Olympic programme. In this article we offer the first in-depth discussion of the cultural politics of action sports Olympic incorporation via case studies of windsurfing, snowboarding, and bicycle motocross (BMX). Adopting a post-subcultural theoretical approach, our analysis reveals that the incorporation process, and forms of (sub)cultural contestation, is in each case unique, based on a complex and shifting set of intra- and inter-politics between key agents, namely the IOC and associated sporting bodies, media conglomerates, and the action sport cultures and industries. In so doing, our article illustrates some of the complex power struggles involved in modernizing the Olympic Games in the 21st century.

Contesting Pisco: Chile, Peru, And The Politics Of Trade*

This article examines the geography of pisco, a South American brandy claimed as the national drink of both Peru and Chile. The historic tension between these two nations—based notably on the nineteenth‐century War of the Pacific—is used as a backdrop to understanding the cultural and political contestation over the “ownership” of this beverage. Although both countries see exportation of pisco as a means of agricultural development, much of the animosity of this trade dispute is couched in cultural and historical terms. International trade policies, including the use of geographical indications (labels of geographical origin) for the purposes of trademarking, and the physical geography that makes pisco production possible are discussed.

Translation, resistance, activism

More than merely linguistic transposition, translation is a vector of power, resistance, rebellion, and even revolution. Exploring these facets of the ideology of translation, the contributors to this volume focus on the agency of translators and their activism. Spanning two centuries and reaching across the globe, the essays examine the varied activist strategies of key translators and translation movements. From silence to radical manipulation of texts, translation strategies are instrumental in significant historical interventions and cultural change. Translation plays a pivotal role in ideological dialogue and struggle, including resistance to oppression and cultural straitjackets of all types, from sexual puritanism to military dictatorships. Situated in their own space, time, history, and political contexts, translators promote ideological agendas by creating new cultural narratives, pragmatically adjusting tactics so as to maximize the social and political impact.The essays in this volume explore ways to read translations as records of cultural contestation and ideological struggle; as means of fighting censorship, physical coercion, cultural repression, and political dominance; and as texts that foster a wide variety of goals from cultural nationalism to armed confrontation. Translations are set in relief as central cultural documents rather than derivative, peripheral, or marginalized productions. They are seen as forms of ethical, political, and ideological activity rather than as mere communicative transactions or creative literary exercises. The contributors demonstrate that engaged and activist translations are performative acts within broader political and ideological contexts. The essays detail the initiative, resourcefulness, and courage of individual translators, whose willingness to put themselves on the line for social change can sometimes move the world.In addition to Maria Tymoczko, contributors include Pua'ala'okalani D. Aiu, Brian James Baer, Mona Baker, Paul F. Bandia, Georges L. Bastin, Nitsa Ben-Ari, Angela Campo, Antonia Carcelen-Estrada, Alvaro Echeverri, Denise Merkle, John Milton, and Else R.P. Vieira.

Managing culture in post-conflict societies

An extensive literature has paid attention to the role of cultural identity and symbols as markers of ethnic conflict. Yet we do not understand fully whether cultural expressions at the heart of the conflict are transformed into a new post-conflict symbolic landscape or whether they remain the source of ongoing cultural contestation. I explore this question by investigating cultural contestation in post-Agreement Macedonia and Northern Ireland. Theoretically, I consider the importance of cultural differences in the integration versus accommodation debate on constitutional design in divided societies. Empirically, I draw on original research from the two cases whereby the respective peace agreements were designed to manage a self-determination dispute. First, I argue that symbolic controversies relating to cultural emblems, flags and insignia pose a particular kind of test for the stability of power-sharing systems. In such instances ethnic elites are faced with the wider legacy and competing narratives of the conflict. In accommodationist systems, where the groups' cultural identity is to be promoted in both private and public spheres, instances of cultural contestation will likely trigger considerable political wrangling between ethnic parties in the search for compromise.

Understanding the prime mover

•As a pervasive historical construct that is both foreign and familiar, the USA has a looming presence in Swedish media discourse. Swedish journalists’ views of the USA can best be described as ambivalent — critical of a unilateral or too passive US foreign policy, while at the same time being heavily influenced by many aspects of the American economic model and culture. This article presents the results of an analysis of Swedish editorials, debate, commentary and cultural articles about the USA in time periods between 1984 and 2009. During these three decades USA actions are broadly framed against the backdrop of Cold War, globalization and cultural contestation paradigms respectively. The USA is seen as a formidable power, one that should be checked by others on the international stage. Cultural symbols based on historical European narratives about the US are called upon to illustrate reckless unilateralism (‘Space Cowboy’ Reagan) or the future-oriented entrepreneur as a role model for Sweden (during the Clinton years). The final decade under the cultural contestation paradigm is also ambivalent — the role of religion in the USA appears foreign to Swedish eyes, whereas the USA’s cultural misunderstandings with others appear familiar. •

Catching Wrangham: On the Mythology and the Science of Fire, Cooking, and Becoming Human

Myth and science sometimes converge—nowhere more so than in scenarios concerning the domestication of fire and its consequences for human social life. I examine this claim through an analysis of bioanthropologist Richard Wrangham’s recent book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made us Human , comparing his claims and findings with those of mythologist/anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss in The Raw and the Cooked . I examine myth-science convergences around the following topics: parochialism, narrative speculation, transformations attributed to cooking and fire, temporality in science and myth, and the human fascination with fire as a substance. As part of my analysis of temporality, I look at the projection, in both myth and science, of contemporary cultural contestations (such as gender issues and food debates) into an idealized species-formative moment set in the past. Challenging the rhetorical tendency to invoke science and myth as opposites, I consider possible factors leading to convergence and suggest that science can enrich its perspective through a sympathetic attitude toward myth and other forms of traditional wisdom.

Governing the Face Veil: Quebec’s Bill 94 and the Transnational Politics of Women’s Identity

During the last decade, a new pattern of cultural contestation has emerged in a range of “Western” contexts where there has been significant Muslim immigration. From Belgium and France to Quebec, Canada, anxieties concerning the integration and acculturation of Muslim minority communities have led to increased preoccupation with symbols associated with extremism and with practices deemed threatening to women’s rights. Muslim face veils such as the niqab and burqa now figure prominently in political debates, and are the subject of campaigns to reassert fundamental values by defining appropriate as well as inappropriate ways for women to construct and express their identities. Using Quebec’s Bill 94 as a case study that illustrates patterns also evident in other countries, this article explores the transnational politics of women’s identity behind current efforts to “govern” the face veil. Attention will be given to international precedents that have inspired proponents of legislation denying face-veil wearers essential government services (including public employment, educational opportunities, and health care), as well as to surprising anti-Bill 94 coalitions that have emerged within Quebec and in the larger Canadian context.

Los Angeles before Hollywood: Journalism and American Film Culture, 1905 to 1915. By Jan Olsson. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009. 479 pp. $35.00, ISBN 978-9188468-06-2.)

Jan Olsson has produced an important book that reconceptualizes the early cultural history of the cinema in the United States. Los Angeles before Hollywood delineates the mutually constitutive relationship of cinema and popular urban journalism as cultural phenomena. Breaking from film historians' traditional reliance on trade papers as source material and their focus on New York in their studies of early film, Olsson draws on mainstream Los Angeles newspapers to examine the development of film culture in Los Angeles and the role of the popular press in defining the social experience of film. Newspaper coverage validated the emerging medium and mediated the cinema's relationships with different publics, from movie audiences to social reformers. In negotiating debates over the role of the cinema in urban life, the popular press became a public forum for cultural contests over modernity. The press not only commented on films and actors but the practices of spectatorship as well. The press policed the cinema and the rituals of cinemagoing by subjecting them to a critical gaze. Olsson describes several successive stages of press interaction with the cinema, each characterized by a different angle of vision. During the first stage, the press reported on the movies as an oddity and spectacle. Later stages were “flaneurian”—reporters sauntering on city streets commented on the practices of nickelodeon spectatorship. There were also regulatory interventions, as when the press turned on the cinema the searching and systematic gaze of the social reformer. The final stage in this period was marked by the emergence of mutually profitable ties between the motion picture industry and the press. Olsson outlines several collaborations between the press and the motion picture industry, including newspapers' distribution of coupons for film showings and a newsreel series that was a joint venture between a film company and the Hearst newspaper chain.

Religion, nation and mother-love: The Malay Peninsula past and present

Synopsis This paper explores cultural contests around parental custody, religion and ethnonationalism in Singapore and Malaysia through the examination of some key episodes both past and present, in particular the famous case of Maria Hertogh, or Nadra. Political battles around this 1950 child custody case at the heights of the institutions of religion and state led to large-scale rioting in Singapore, which has reverberated to the present. The paper then analyses the later high-profile Jacqueline Gillespie case in the 1990s and some recent cases involving religious freedoms within Malaysia in which child custody became key issues. A core interest is the ways in which women, mothering – and children – are at the epicentres of important intersections of religion and nation; yet the gendered – and ‘childed’ – dimensions of these cultural contests appear to be regularly downplayed in scholarly and official history accounts, with most emphasis on the macro level of nationalist and /or ethnonationalist politics. It is argued that paying attention to the ways that ‘family’, the ‘domestic’, ‘intimate’ and structures of feeling can be seen to configure these events and operate as drenched symbolic structures can greatly enrich understandings of the forces at work.

A Poet of Our Own: The Struggle for Os Lusíadas in the Afterlife of Camões

Few works in the cultural history of early modern Europe have been so steadily regarded as canonical summits of national literary traditions as Luis de Camoes's Os Lusiadas (1572). Many have considered Camoes's epic about Vasco da Gama's voyage to India to be the nation's greatest literary achievement and the poem has come to represent Portugal better than any other cultural product of the past. The poet himself has become an icon, the unmatched singer of the glorious history of the Portuguese nation and its overseas empire. This quintessentially Portuguese canonicity, however, has not always been so evident.Immediately after his death in 1580, Camoes was repeatedly resurrected to fight in battles very different from those initially involved in the writing and publication of his poem in 1572. In this essay, I explore the struggle over the meaning and ownership of Os Lusiadas in relation to two different contexts of imperial competition in early modern Europe: Philip of Spain's annexation of Portugal in 1580 and Britain's international policies regarding both kingdoms in the mid-seventeenth-century, during the Interregnum and the beginning of the Restoration. The attempts to appropriate Camoes's epic for different political designs become apparent when we approach English and Spanish translations produced at those particular moments. These translations of Os Lusiadas participated in the fierce fight that took place to possess a text that Spanish and English intellectual elites clearly perceived as a desirable cultural and political asset. As we will see, at the Habsburg expansionist peak of 1580, several Spanish translators transformed the Portuguese Camoes into the singer of Philip's global imperial rule from a newly unified peninsula. More than seventy years later, and against a very different international landscape, an English translator would explicitly seize Os Lusiadas from its former Portuguese and Spanish proprietors to transform the poem into a tradable commodity for the enrichment of a nascent British empire, thus participating in the rebalancing of cultural and political power that took place in mid-seventeenth-century Europe.I will focus on the specific ways that the competing Spanish and English translators reworked and determined the distribution and reception of Camoes's epic through the production of historically concrete effects of meaning. I will thus examine how those translations were presented, and how the material production, the social spaces of circulation, and the early judgments about them worked to facilitate different appropriations of Os Lusiadas. Translation can be understood as a practice that allows production, redistribution, and new consumptions of the literary capital accumulated by previous works. In the moments of intense political conflict and cultural contest in Europe that I study here, translation becomes a specifically imperial cultural practice participating in that competition for cultural hegemony and political supremacy. My analysis will seek to provide the grounds for a geopolitics of imperial cultural struggle around Os Lusiadas in early modern Europe.11.In 1578 King Sebastian of Portugal died in the North African battle of Alcazarquibir leaving no direct heir to the kingdom's throne. The dynastic crisis that followed the disaster gave way to an intense legal, diplomatic, theological, and military dispute among the royal candidates who aspired to wear the Portuguese crown. Philip of Spain's final victory over his rivals prompted the union of the two peninsular kingdoms and their overseas territories, which gave birth to a global empire of unprecedented dimensions.2After having been crowned in the Courts of Tomar, Philip of Spain arrived at Lisbon in June 1581 to be acclaimed as the new king of Portugal. As soon as he stepped on the streets of the Portuguese metropolis, he eagerly asked for the great Portuguese genius, Luis de Camoes, who had died in the same city one year earlier. …

Jewish Traveling Cultures and the Competing Visions of Modernity

During the nineteenth century, Jews in the German lands received, in exchange for their religious, cultural, and political transformation, civic liberties. Viewing the national as the realm of cultural interaction, production, and contestation has underlined the tortuous and conflicted process of German Jews' integration. Yet, at the dawn of modernity, Jewish communities in Germany grew out of temporal and spatial networks that the emerging nation-state absorbed only in a very limited fashion. As Stuart Hall has observed, for diasporic communities, memories about the past homeland and the interaction between overlapping communities continued to have a decisive impact upon their formation and maintenance. Indeed, the still largely unexplored German Jewish traveling culture acquired a new importance during the first decades of the twentieth century and formed a cultural practice that involved transcending cultural, political, and national boundaries.

Base Cultures: Sex Workers and Servicemen in Occupied Japan

This article examines how the bodies of Japanese women became a key site of political and cultural contestation during the Allied occupation. The sale of sex, once legally recognized and regulated, became a conspicuous symbol of postwar chaos. Ostracizing sex workers who catered to servicemen provided a means to display an abiding nationalism without directly confronting the occupiers. But these women were also indispensable in the economy of military base cities. Journalists and social critics sought to discern or impose order by devising elaborate taxonomies, cartographies, health regimes, and moral codes. Sex workers were active participants in this process, but their personal testimonies show how their lives defied categorization. When the Diet finally intervened with the 1956 Prostitution Prevention Law, it was merely the culmination of a long process involving every segment of Japanese society.

Ghosts of Futures Past: Spiritualism and the Cultural Politics of Nineteenth-Century America. By Molly McGarry

Here comes trouble. It has been twenty years since Ann Braude's Radical Spirits made the academic study of American spiritualism respectable by taking its connection with women's rights seriously. Since the study of religious history has moved from denominational and church history to histories of experience, practice, and meaning, spiritualism has become yet another field to mine for insights into American religious character. Now Molly McGarry, in her richly engaging Ghosts of Futures Past, uses the spiritualist tradition to trouble scholarly assumptions not only about what counts as religion, but also about what is secular and modern and when these categories begin, about what constitutes private and what the public, about the religious and the political, the scientific, the rational, gender, sex, and the past itself. Spiritualists themselves “denied basic categorical binaries: the distinctions between men and women, science and magic, life and afterlife, the past and the present” (19). Their own embodiment—or disembodiment, as it were—of flux over fixity, “connectedness without identity,” gender ambiguity, and an elusive, culturally contested otherness enables McGarry to do what church historians of the past never dreamed could be done: to find in American spiritualism a usable past (173). This is not to say that McGarry herself believes in ghosts, and to be sure, the only time the term “usable past” comes up in the book is when McGarry explains how spiritualists found one in the history of American Quakers, but when she pokes more fun at spiritualists' critics than at the dupes of cunning women who donned white and emerged in slow steps from closets, her delight in how spiritualists absorbed, transformed, and re-broadcast cultural values is contagious (81). McGarry argues that spiritualism—or Spiritualism, to make it look more like a proper religion—“ghosted” everything that mattered in nineteenth-century America (16). By projecting their contemporary cultural contests back into the past through materializing Indians, the transgressively partnered or gendered, the grieving, and the scientific via the new media of mediumship, spiritualists changed the shape of the possible and therefore of the future.