2nd Global Conference
Wednesday 3rd September - Saturday 6th September
2008
Mansfield College, Oxford
Conference Programme, Abstracts and Papers
Session 2: Representations
Chair: Rob Burton
Expatriate Literature and the Problem of Contested Representation: The Case of Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner
Janette Edwards
Defense Language Institute, Monterey, California, USA
Afghanistan’s borders. Little attention has been given to the antagonisms toward the book that exist within the Afghan expatriate communities, even though close examination might yield a deeper understanding of what lies at the core of this so-called “clash of sensibilities.” Such an understanding might, in turn, inform and enrich the exploration of broader but related questions: 1) What are the limits of acceptability in art, particularly when it transgresses the norms of the traditional society from which it has emerged?, and 2) What is the future of expatriate literary production when writers must be ever-mindful of the ways their narratives could offend their neighbours’ sensibilities and perhaps rupture a communal bond?
In pursuing the above questions, this paper sidesteps binaries of liberal vs. non-liberal cultures and focuses instead on the social and cognitive processes occurring within the “boundary-maintaining organisms” (Habermas 1979) that determine a community’s tolerance for art that challenges its self-understanding and self-esteem. The author draws upon data gathered during research conversations with expatriate Afghan Pashtuns who have settled in Fremont, California’s “Little Kabul,” interpreting their perspectives within the framework of Ricoeur’s (1981; 1992) theory of narrative and theory of identity.
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The Challenge of Global Media Technologies to Cultural Representation in Digital Cinematic Productions
Sunny Lam
School of Journalism & Communication,
The Chinese University of Hong Kong,
New Asia College,
Shatin, Hong Kong
Digital media technologies have tremendously affected the trend in digital cinematic productions globally and so many previously unimaginable blockbuster movies like Jurassic Park, The Lord of the Rings and X-men rely on the contributions of digital effects and computer animation for their innovative, cultural representation. In Hong Kong – a highly Westernized capitalist consumer society putting more emphasis on entertainment rather than art and cultural representation, the film industry has continuously followed the traditions of global capitalist organizational culture and digital media technologies from Hollywood. But, according to the concept of ‘glocalization’, different aesthetic and cultural inputs by the local creative managers and symbol creators play critical roles in the process of cultural representations by means of Luhmann’s de-paradoxification. This study aims at revealing the contributions of local cultural producers to some innovative digital cinematic productions like Stephen Chow’s Shaolin Soccer, Kung Fu Hustle and CJ7 by means of integrative economic-symbolic valorization of the local ‘meaningless’ culture and the ‘glocalized’ digital effects and computer animation productions. The resultant multiple layers of cultural representations in the ‘spectrum of cultural representations’ should not be viewed and analyzed separately according to the concept of the ‘aesthetics of seamlessness’.
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Caitlin Nunn
Refugee Health Research Centre, La Trobe University, Australia
In migrant nations, it is largely through the media that culturally diverse communities are represented to the host community. And the conditions under which the media’s interest in these communities is aroused generally involve perceptions that the targeted community have transgressed in some way the accepted standards of the host community. Even where a perceived transgression may be attributable to only one individual, that individual – identified by his/her ethnicity – is held up as representative of their entire community.
In such situations there are very few spaces available for community members to speak up or speak back. And where these do exist, people are recruited to speak within the narrow parameters of their ethnic identity, on behalf of their community, and through the same media that perpetuate the negative attention.
This was the case last year in the aftermath of the murder of a Sudanese youth near a suburban railway station in Melbourne, Australia. Though this young man was the victim and not the culprit, the incident drew attention to the Australian Sudanese community and spawned a spate of negative media reports, spruiking tales of gangs, violence and general incompatibility with the host culture.
Coinciding with these events, a visual anthropology project was being implemented in a secondary school near where the young man was murdered. The project aimed to engage a group of Sudanese young women in an exploration of their everyday experiences growing up in Melbourne. However, the murder and subsequent media furore permeated much of the conversation. For the participants, the project became a space in which to communicate the diverse realities of their lives, and in doing so, to complicate and contradict the media’s essentialist constructions of Sudanese youth.
The resulting DVD captures a group of young women eschewing ethnicity as a sole defining category, revealing their Sudaneseness - with all of its similarities and divergences from the host culture - as one of many facets of their dynamic identities.
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The Power of the Media Then and Now: Representation of the Evacuation of Scottish Children during World War Two versus the Representation of Polish Migrants in Britain in 2008
Mattie Turnbull
Curtin University of Technology, Perth Western Australia
The Evacuation of citizens in Britain during World War Two involved the movement of 3 million people from their homes in the major cities to country areas. This undertaking’s aim was to protect them from the anticipated German heavy bombing raids after declaration of war. Mass evacuation was an integral component of the overall Civil Defence planning prior to the advent of war (declared September 3, 1939).
Although the exercise was voluntary, the media was used to great advantage to persuade parents to allow their children to leave home for distant parts. The media utilised by the government, played a very important and powerful role in the success of the endeavour.
My paper compares the role of the traditional media as the creator and re-creator of the identity of the evacuees in wartime Britain, with the contemporary media as it constructs and re-constructs the Polish community in 2008 Britain. The paper faces the challenge that it is difficult to discern any profound difference between the strategies and ultimate ‘success’ used by these media in the creation of identity and imagined community of evacuated children in 1939 and the migrant Polish community in Britain in 2008.