Global Cultural Context Research Articles

Introduction to Special Section: The SLCE Future Directions Project

The Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning (MJCSL) is delighted to invite readers into a project inspired by the 20-year anniversary of our publishing Does Service-Learning Have a Future? (Zlotkowski, 1995). Much of Zlotkowski's envisioned future has been realized in a variety of ways--some anticipated, some unexpected, and some bringing new and exciting challenges--and we are once again at a key moment to think intentionally about the future of our work We are proud to partner in launching the international SLCE Future Directions Project and look forward to seeing where this collaborative exploration takes us in the coming months and years. [JH, Editor] ********** Twenty years ago, having taken a critical look at the state of service-learning (SL) and having thought about what was necessary to move forward, Edward Zlotkowski (1995) issued a warning and a challenge to the movement: Unless we learn soon to respond in a much more differentiated and adequate way to the realities of our institutional and professional contexts, our commitment to social ideals will not generate long-term progress. And without such progress, it is a question if we can--or even should--survive. (p. 15) Many heeded his call, working thoughtfully and collaboratively across campuses and communities to create programs, partnerships, courses, and projects that foregrounded the academic dimensions of the pedagogy. The institutionalization of SL within the academy accelerated, complete with faculty development initiatives, full-time professional positions, internal and external funding, research agendas, and enhanced expectations related to the presence and quality of SL within higher education curricula. Now, in 2015, after the emergence of a plethora of models for community-campus engagement and in light of uncertainty nationally and internationally regarding the nature and goals of higher education in the early 21st century, the movement finds itself at another crossroads. The dedicated leadership of students, community members, faculty, and staff around the world over the last several decades has rendered the earlier question posed by Zlotkowski's title--does SL have a future--largely moot. The richness of what we now understand as service-learning and community engagement (SLCE) and the complexities of how we now position it in local and global social, political, economic, cultural, and ecological contexts give rise to different questions for the coming decades. In general terms: What are our visions now for the future of SLCE, why, and what will it take to get there? With more nuance: How can we best come together around the question of our work's ultimate purposes and focus effectively on what we are trying to achieve? How can we leverage the movement to advance those ends--intentionally, inclusively, and with integrity? What are the points of tension in how we understand and undertake SLCE that we need to hold creatively as we articulate and enact future directions for our work? What fundamental, transformative changes are required to realize our ends and for the associated paradigms and practices to emerge, grow, and be sustained? Such questions prompt us to critically reflect on our practices and their alignment with our goals, on our commitments and the challenges we face in bringing them to fruition, on the possibilities of our partnerships--all with an eye toward deeper understandings of ourselves, our work, and our shared and contested visions for the future and with the intent to build our capacities to work collaboratively as agents of positive change. The nature of the questions themselves as well as the maturation of the movement toward ever-more inclusive generation of knowledge and practice call for the full range of perspectives and experiences to be at the table as we move forward from the current crossroad. The SLCE Future Directions Project is a co-created space for such critical reflection among all who wish to contribute their voices. …

Yorick's Whiskers: The Poetics of T. Tolstaya's Small Prose and its Translations into English

The objective of the study is to educe the particular features of T. Tolstaya's small prose. Her texts are characterized by a high density of literary meanings and great complexity of literary structure. The article explores the correlations between these two phenomena by analyzing the short story “Yorick” and its translation into English. We uncover the literary meanings of the text, which are formed by means of a number of global cultural contexts (biographical, historical, literary, and mythopoetical). We also study the form that they take in Tolstaya's literary discourse and provide a comparative analysis of the discoursive literary techniques used by the author and their rendering by the translator. Both the analysis technique and the materials presented in the article can be used in teaching literary translation to students of Russian or English.

<em>Kawaii meiru</em> and <em>Maroyaka neko</em>: Mobile <em>emoji</em> for relationship maintenance and aesthetic expressions among Japanese teens

Drawing from the results of focus group interviews conducted between 2006 and 2010 in Japan, this paper examines the functions of emoji. Now that emoji have gained global recognition as seen in mobile applications, examining the way Japanese teens use emoji offers some insight into the way emoji use is practiced among teens in the global cultural context. The results highlight two functions of emoji in the context of mobile interactions: emoji allow Japanese teens to manage communication climate as well as to construct and express their aesthetic selves. Further research is needed to investigate to what extent these interaction norms, symbolic meanings, and electronic emotions are applicable to various cultural contexts in the era of smart phones. Such efforts will promote our further understanding of both current and future trends of teens’ mobile emoji use, emotional experiences, sense of the self, and relational concerns.

ASPECTS OF CHILD EVANGELISM AND YOUTH MINISTRY IN SOUTH AFRICA IN THE POSTMODERN CONTEXT OF GLOBALISM, PLURALISM AND CURRENT SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE

After the demise of the Apartheid regime the Religious Instruction syllabus of the Christian National Education system was changed to ’Religious Education’. The new syllabus requires that all religions should be taught in schools. Compounding the difficulties of pluralism, the global postmodernist cultural context has promoted cognitive dissonance in young Christians in that Christianity is now only one option among other religions claiming the same character of truth and demanding the same adherence. Can traditional approaches to child evangelism and youth ministry still be relevant in the context of scientific education and pluralism in South Africa? To explore this question three recent apparently widely-diverging publications are consulted: 1) Jansen (2009), ‘Knowledge in the blood. Confronting race and the Apartheid past’; 2) Claassen & Gaum (2012), ‘God? Gesprekke oor die Oorsprong en Uiteinde van Alles’; 3) Gericke (2013), ‘A philosophical clarification of the axiological assumptions behind the concept of goodness in Genesis 1’.

Introduction: Translation Matters

IntroductionTranslation Matters Marc-Alexandre Reinhardt (bio) and André Habib (bio) Why translation? Doesn’t this theme seem archaic in our present day? Yes, precisely. One could say that translation is an outdated topic but it also embodies an outdated mode of historical inquiry into shifting media environments and constant reconfigurations of values, beliefs and representations. It is outdated in regard to its immemorial relationship to sacred texts and its crucial role in the transnational circulation of ideas and cultural productions in a global cultural context. Yet translation – and the untranslatability it elicits and sometimes implies – has come to embody a relevant ethos for the humanities and operates as a “theoretical fulcrum” (Apter 3) across diverse discursive fields. Furthermore, if it might appear as somewhat archaic and out of phase with more fashionable concepts, the anachronism of this construct becomes the very quality of its contemporariness and foregrounds its epistemological relevance. In other words, translation matters more than ever in comparative intercultural theories and histories. This issue aims to investigate translation’s relevance in current critical thought beyond its disciplinary identity – “Translation Studies” – in order to survey how it operates across different media and how it may function as a heuristic model to reflect changing social, political and aesthetic conditions of our global present. If it still accomplishes an instrumental function as a technical procedure that shapes a wide range of everyday transactions, it has nevertheless become a motif of modernity. A broader conception of translation as a critical practice of intercultural exchange, a compositional procedure, a literary figure, and a model of ethical subjectivity, allows us to be attuned to the dynamic displacements and the modes of relationality that unfold between cultural productions. In this perspective – addressing the aesthetics, politics and ethics of translation – this collection of essays seeks to come to terms with philosophical relativity (Cassin); migration of forms (Despoix); narratives of global circulation (Walkowitz); intertextual cine-poetics (Turquety); political agency (Razlogova); historical testimony (Habib); poïetic remembrance and mediation (Reinhardt); literary production of knowledge (Agnese); and intercultural quagmires (De Gaulejac). [End Page 3] Each text that composes this issue draws a problem of translation from a slanted angle, exposing hidden histories and practices, conceptual convolutions, philosophical inquiries (Cassin, Agnese), unearthing novel ways of considering at first view peripheral phenomena that can go unnoticed, like subtitling (Turquety, Habib), live over-dubbing (Razlogova) or modes of classification, organization and circulations of a particular library (Despoix), but exposing them as significant political, aesthetic and ethical modalities of knowledge production. Others address daunting questions like the inheritance of colonial past (De Gaulejac, Walkowitz) or remembrances of the Holocaust (Reinhardt, Habib) in specific sites and via the concrete, material and sometimes “anecdotal” threads that translation entails in order to illuminate those questions from a new and provocative perspective. It could also be worth noting that a great majority of these texts were translated and/or conceived by authors whose mother tongue is not English. Each text thus bears the trace of negotiations, the imprint of many hands; every article is marred with vertiginous problems of untranslatability, linguistic specificities and issues of migrations that somehow highlight and perform, in the flesh, the matter of translation we were hoping to address. Each text of this issue is speaking through, within, from or toward foreign tongues. They play out and map their own sets of difference, are always-already translated. What is more, we devised the issue by choosing texts whose varied natures translate different modes and forms of access to knowledge: the interview form, formal analysis, artists’ texts, case studies, the analytical-philosophical approach – all these articles are alternate and multifarious ways of showing why translation matters. We are aware that while dealing with the cultural currency of translation and expanding the scope of its object, we also run the risk of turning this critical construct into a trivial expression, a floating signifier that substitutes epistemological insight for abstract equivalence and abstruse speculation. Antoine Berman had hinted at this semantic slippery slope when he warned against the inflation of a general theory of all types of “change” under the umbrella concept of translation (Berman 292). This would make it nothing more than...

Earl Miner: comparative poetics and the construction of world poetics

In current international comparative literature scholarship, Earl Miner’s significant contribution seems to be overlooked, although comparative poetics is still discussed periodically. To the author, Miner is not the first to shift critical attention from a traditional Eurocentric or West-centric mode to East-West comparative literature and theoretical studies. But he should, however, be regarded as having transcended what was achieved by his contemporaries such as Rene Etiemble, Douwe Fokkema and James Liu; and as having reached the level of general literary studies. His practice is close to current studies of world literature, although he seldom used this term. But the present discussion on the issue of world literature lacks the construction of world poetics. Inspired by Miner’s preliminary work, the author tries to continue his incomplete project and offer his own theoretical construction of such a world poetics as crossing the boundary of languages and cultures. To the author, even in today’s global cultural context, Miner’s legacy should still be considered important and pioneering in the construction of world literary theory.

The Bible for children in a postmodern context: How do children form explanatory concepts?

A previous paper on methodological considerations in interpreting the Bible for childrenexplored the problem of the cognitive gap between biblical interpreter and child. Thisresearch is a follow-up as a result of recognition of necessary adjustments in the way that childevangelism is usually approached (via �original sin�). In our current context of postmodernism,the manner and consequences of biblical knowledge transfer between adult and child needto be explored. Recent research suggests that children are sensitive to the underlying causalstructure of the world and seek to form new causal representations at a much earlier age thanwe had previously supposed. �Intellectualists� in the anthropology of religion hold that religionis primarily concerned with providing explanatory theories, thus indicating that childrenneed help to achieve coherence between biblical and scientific views on creation. This articlepresents the rationale for an early intervention to avoid the cognitive dissonance that oftenarises as children grow up and find a lack of coherence between their early evangelisationand the latest scientific discoveries. To test this hypothesis a multilingual illustrated bookletin English, Afrikaans and isiXhosa was designed to be individually read by parents in eachlanguage group to their own 5�8-year-old children. Children�s Bible stories have alwaysbeen �pretexts for passing along values� and this booklet is no different. The purpose of thebooklet was to lay a foundation for children to find Christianity relevant even in the multiculturalcontext of vast scientific and technological advances. The subjects� responsivenesswas recorded by video camera, and afterwards the parents were individually interviewed andasked to assess the child�s level of interest and to comment on the booklet. Results of this pilotstudy indicated that the booklet was well received.Intradisciplinary and/or interdisciplinary implications: In today�s postmodern, globalcultural context children need help to achieve coherence between biblical and scientificversions of creation. This pilot study tests an evangelical booklet designed to lay a foundation for children to find Christianity relevant even in the multi-cultural context of vast scientific and technological advances.

Toward a Political Economy of Regime Values, Ethics, and Institutions in a Context of Globalization and Hypermodernity

In this article, we discuss the recent ascendancy of the market state and its consequences for regime values, ethics, and institutions. Three types of market states—entrepreneurial, managerial, and mercantile—are outlined, along with their primary ethical basis and associated public values. We then turn to a discussion of globalization and hypermodernity, which we argue characterize the current global cultural context. Difficult as it may be to imagine, we suggest that a global response is likely the only way to address worldwide governance challenges and offer three trajectories that—even if vigorously pursued—seem likely only to ameliorate our global challenges at best.

Volunteering and Country-Level Religiosity: Evidence from the European Union

Research on volunteering has emphasized the positive role played by individual religiosity on this type of civic engagement. There are fewer studies on the relation between contextual religiosity and volunteer work. Several of them have concluded that the higher the macro-contextual religiosity, the higher the propensity to get involved in volunteering. Thereby, researchers might be inclined to conclude that secularization is a threat to this social participation. This article shows that such a conclusion is unfounded. From a data set including the 27 countries of the European Union and using a multilevel analysis to control for the compositional effects of the national sample, we obtain a negative correlation between macro-contextual religiosity and volunteering. From these results, we suggest that the relationship between volunteering and contextual religiosity cannot be considered as deterministic but it has to be comprehended in a more global cultural context.

Book Review: Public Relations in Global Cultural Contexts: Multi-Paradigmatic Perspectives, edited by Nilanjana Bardhan and C. Kay Weaver

Public Relations in Global Cultural Contexts: Multi-Paradigmatic Perspectives. Nilanjana Bardhan and C. Kay Weaver, eds. New York and London: Routledge, 2011. 295 pages. $40 pbk.Editors Nilanjana Bardhan and C. Kay Weaver designed the book Public Relations in Global Cultural Contexts as a collection of articles targeting public relations professionals, schools of journalism and international relations specialists, both in the United States and around the world. It is also a noteworthy contribution to the growing body of literature on the impact of globalization on the development of intercultural communication and public relations work. The authors assess these and other issues from a cultural point of view and in the context of what they term a multi-paradigmatic perspective. Thus, the collection of articles brings together contributors from different professional and educational backgrounds, who discuss emerging trends in the PR profession from different angles.Bardhan and Weaver are professors in the Department of Speech Communication at Southern Illinois University and Department of Management Communication at the University of Waikato in New Zealand, respectively. Both specialize in cultural and globalization aspects of public relations. The authors envisioned three main research goals in this book. First, they intended to explore public relations and globalization in a theoretical and unpoliticized way, as they claimed that the phenomenon of globalization has not been addressed in all its complexity. Second, they wanted to explore the concept of culture and its impact on public relations in the context of globalization. Third, they braved questioning dominant models (critical/ cultural models of public glocal strategies, etc.) and beliefs, offering alternative concepts and explanations on the intersection of public relations practice and globalization.In ten chapters, the collective of authors-both scholars and practitioners-discuss the various aspects of public offering a critical perspective in globalization of public identifying intercultural typologies and offering some methodological arguments and directions. The issue of public relations and globalization has been covered quite intensively in Western literature over the past decade (Patricia Curtain and Kenn Gaither, 2007; Anthony Giddens, 2002; Krishnamurthy Sriramesh and Dejan Vercic, 2012, etc.). Yet the authors believe that there is room for shifts within public relations scholarship. They discuss the growth of a critical postmodern paradigm in public relations, including postcolonial scholarship which highlights the western theoretical, methodological and cultural domination in the study of public relations, and they focus on the paradigm in studying the socially constructed nature of knowledge and communication in intercultural interaction in global public relations activity.All chapters in this book represent an attempt to theorize public relations and cultural contexts of globalization using various examples as case studies. For example, Michael Kent and Maureen Taylor argue that ...intercultural public relations is an interpretive communication activity that requires multiple, often simultaneous, frameworks for creating and changing relationships, and review theories of intercultural communication, discussing how different approaches can impact general public and pubic information. …

A Nordic Perspective on Early Childhood Education and Care Policy

The national policies and historical roots of early childhood education (ECE) vary from society to society. In the Nordic countries, early childhood education and care (ECEC) policies have been built in the context of the welfare state. As such, they are closely connected to other welfare policy areas such as social policy, family policy and education policy, in addition to which a close relationship with labour policy is also evident. This article sheds light on the historical roots of Nordic ECEC policies by describing the commonalities and differences between the Nordic countries. The ‘Nordic model’ is commonly described as integrated. Education, teaching and caring form an integrated unit and the term early childhood education and care is therefore typically used when describing the ‘Nordic model’. It is also said to be based on a child‐centred, holistic approach with an emphasis on participation, democracy, autonomy and freedom, while its track record of high quality ECE services is considered to be due in part to the use of a well‐trained workforce.The Nordic countries are, however, developing and redefining their ECEC policies in the global economic and cultural context, in which governments have to choose their priorities. Pressure to standardize ECE services is also apparent, and signs of erosion of the key elements of the Nordic model have been seen in recent policy debates. This paper discusses the current direction of Nordic ECE policy making and the future of the Nordic model.

Book review: Public Relations in Global Cultural Contexts: Multi-Paradigmatic Perspectives

Book review: Public Relations in Global Cultural Contexts: Multi-Paradigmatic Perspectives

An examination of Māori tamariki (child) and taiohi (adolescent) traumatic brain injury within a global cultural context

This paper provides a pragmatic review of the literature to describe the size and shape of Māori tamariki (child) and taiohi (adolescent) traumatic brain injury (TBI) and highlight issues pertinent to psychiatrists. A review of the literature describing cultural aspects of international TBI research further contextualises these findings. Literature searches using the words indigenous, ethnic, culture, native, native American, native Alaskan, native Hawaiian, Māori, aboriginal, traumatic brain injury, rehabilitation, paediatric, disparities and epidemiology were undertaken. Reference lists were also examined. The literature is adult-centric and selected papers are summarised. Significant gaps in the literature were found. Recent local epidemiological studies describe Māori tamariki and taiohi as being significantly over-represented in TBI populations, with poorer outcomes including higher mortality rates. International research shows evidence of 'minority' culture being a risk factor for certain causes of injury and a differential rehabilitation service response. These findings are important for psychiatrists working with Māori. They underscore the importance of asking effectively about possible TBI history. Implications for future research to address literature gaps are evident. Kaupapa Māori rangahau (research) could be used to explore application of tikanga Māori (cultural lore) in prevention, rehabilitation and psychiatric management.

Korean Beauty in a Global Cultural Context*

Korean Beauty in a Global Cultural Context*

Public Relations in Global Cultural Contexts: Multi-Paradigmatic Perspectives

Public Relations in Global Cultural Contexts: Multi-Paradigmatic Perspectives NILANJANA BARDHAN & C. KAY WEAVER (Eds.) New York, NY, Routledge, 2011 298 pp., ISBN: 978-0-415-87286-7 (US$39.95) This...

World Society, Institutional Theories, and the Actor

Much modern social theory depicts society as made up of autonomous and purposive individual and organized actors. In reaction, the new institutional theories build arguments about the wider social conditions supporting stable systems of such agentic actors. Phenomenological versions, which are especially relevant to analyses of modern integrating but stateless world society, treat actor identities as themselves constructed in the wider and now global cultural context. These ideas call attention to the modern collective construction of expansive models of actors, the rapid diffusion and adoption of elaborated models of actor agency and rights, the consequently decoupled character of actor identities and activities in the modern system, and the extraordinary mobilizing potential built into the elaborated models of individual and organizational actors in world society and into the inconsistencies between these models and activity.

Pedagogía Cultural: Paradigma crítico-creativo del saber-hacer referido a la educación

The paradigm of the CULTURAL PEDAGOGYtries to offer an archievement and change the very important perspective into the pedagogical knowledge, as the science of education. We have then to revise the functionalist schedule of the formal, informal and no-formal education. For this, on the one hand, to involve the pedagogical science, concerning to the individual and social, in other model most comprenhensive and easy with the proposal alternatives in the pedagogical action. People musn't learn anything as an individual or social being, although we are willing and able to learn with a gramatical experience in a cultural way. On the other hand, we want to achieve the former purpose, we manage a radical and coherent relation between the educational projection and the global cultural context. The suggestion of learnings, pedagogically projected, is connected with the reading, the interpretation and the change of the cultural environment, as a context of signs, wich builds the whole reality of the world. The psychical development and maturity aren't all learnings of individual being, but they area the references in a constant appeal and inwardness of the whole bio-psycho-social-cultural being, that is an everybody experience, put inside the bio-psychical construction of each person {cultural reality) and put outside the environmental world of experiences and rules {cultural reality

Pedagogía Cultural: Paradigma crítico-creativo del saber-hacer referido a la educación

The paradigm of the CULTURAL PEDAGOGYtries to offer an archievement and change the very important perspective into the pedagogical knowledge, as the science of education. We have then to revise the functionalist schedule of the formal, informal and no-formal education. For this, on the one hand, to involve the pedagogical science, concerning to the individual and social, in other model most comprenhensive and easy with the proposal alternatives in the pedagogical action. People musn't learn anything as an individual or social being, although we are willing and able to learn with a gramatical experience in a cultural way. On the other hand, we want to achieve the former purpose, we manage a radical and coherent relation between the educational projection and the global cultural context. The suggestion of learnings, pedagogically projected, is connected with the reading, the interpretation and the change of the cultural environment, as a context of signs, wich builds the whole reality of the world. The psychical development and maturity aren't all learnings of individual being, but they area the references in a constant appeal and inwardness of the whole bio-psycho-social-cultural being, that is an everybody experience, put inside the bio-psychical construction of each person {cultural reality) and put outside the environmental world of experiences and rules {cultural reality

Performance and Cosmopolitics: Cross-Cultural Transactions in Australasia (review)

Reviewed by: Performance and Cosmopolitics: Cross-Cultural Transactions in Australasia Ric Knowles Performance and Cosmopolitics: Cross-Cultural Transactions in Australasia. By Helen Gilbert and Jacqueline Lo. Studies in International Performance. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007; pp. x + 245. $74.95 cloth. Helen Gilbert and Jacqueline Lo's Performance and Cosmopolitics investigates the relationship between "the new cosmopolitanism" and performance, exploring the mechanics of cosmopolitanism within the social, cultural, and political landscape of Australia. "New cosmopolitanism" attempts to move beyond both the Western, elitist aura of the old cosmopolitan model, and beyond old models of the multi-, inter, and cross-cultural in a number of ways and with a number of investments. On the one hand, there is the sophisticated global cosmopolitanism that is seen as politically necessary to bolster economic globalization, replace multiculturalism as a strategy of "ethnoracial management" (17), and evade multiculturalism's aura of social engineering. As Hugh Mackay says, "cosmopolitanism sounds like something we achieved, not something that was imposed on us" (qtd. on 17). This is old white cosmopolitanism refashioned for the new age, an aesthetic and consumer cosmopolitanism that transcends xenophobic nationalisms, but that, like "white multiculturalism" (Ghassan Hage, qtd. on 87), celebrates the aestheticization, reification, and commodification of cultural difference for the well-heeled. On the other hand, there is a recent array of "critical cosmopolitanism[s]" (Paul Rabinow, qtd. on 4) emerging out of the US academy and intended to address the failures of multiculturalism. Gilbert and Lo cite James Clifford's "discrepant cosmopolitanism," Mitchell Cohen's "rooted cosmopolitanism," Benita Parry's "post-colonial cosmopolitanism," and Pnina Werbner's "working-class cosmopolitanism," all of which carve out "middle-path alternatives between ethnocentric nationalism and particularistic multiculturalism" as cosmopolitanisms "from below" (5). Gilbert and Lo classify these new cosmopolitanisms into three types: moral (rooted in the Kantian idea of a "universal community" and hospitality); political (rooted in transnational governance and notions of cosmopolitan democracy); and cultural (rooted in a disposition of openness to divergent cultures and a practice of navigating across cultural boundaries). Arguing that cosmopolitanism "is increasingly gaining purchase as a form of sociocultural capital" (10), and pointing out "the ways in which specific ideological positions unravel at the point of embodiment" (such as in performance) (12), they set out to examine how, in practice rather than theory, the sociocultural capital of these new cosmopolitanisms circulate within a wide range of Australian performance-cultural practices and sites—both intra- and internationally. Their central contribution is to argue that "there is, inevitably, a politics to the practice of cosmopolitanism—a cosmopolitics that is caught up in hybrid spaces, entangled histories, and complex human corporeographies" (11, emphasis in original). The book can be divided into two parts. The first, in four chapters, functions as a survey of Australian cross-cultural performance, focusing on representations of and by Aboriginal and Asian experience and performance forms, and analyzing the central motifs and problematics of cross-cultural praxis in Australasia. Gilbert and Lo begin, in chapter 1, with familiar postcolonial analyses of representations of, and very occasionally by but rarely for, Aboriginals and Asians in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century performances, which were largely "anti-cosmopolitan" in their support of a white settler invader nation in the making. The best parts of this chapter are those where cracks and anxieties show through, as in the 1909 "Asian invasion" play White Australia, where excessive focus on "extreme whiteness" is seen to betray whiteness as a construct, unconsciously making it visible, marked, and therefore vulnerable. But the book comes into its own when it surveys the contemporary scene in chapters 2–4: "Indigenizing Australian Theatre," "Asianizing Australian Theatre," and "Marketing Difference at the Adelaide Festival." These chapters expose many of the hypocrisies of political and economic opportunism in Australia's new turn to its Aboriginal cultures and to Asia. They also celebrate many of the successes of evolving Aboriginal, Asian, and cross-cultural performance cultures. But they are most effective because they locate the analyses within specific national and global social, cultural, and political contexts, and because they offer nuanced analyses of complex negotiations across different stakes and scripts as assimilation, co-optation, codification, and exoticization trade off against new...

Memories of sound and light: musical discourse in the films of Wong Kar-wai

This essay promotes an investigation into the musical discourse in the films of Hong Kong auteur Wong Kar-wai, focusing primarily on the way that music is applied to disrupt narrative time, thus creating what Gilles Deleuze called ‘pure optical and sonorous situations’. It also considers the use of popular and pre-existing music and the cultural relations established by them, raising the questions of what it means to use songs that are recognizable in a global cultural context, and what they can add to the filmic experience.