SOUTHPAW # 1

You are invited to the launch of a new literary journal
Southpaw: writing from the global south

To be launched by
Professor Stephen Knight
Wednesday 14th December
Arena Project Space
2 Kerr Street Fitzroy
6.30 pm

Refreshments

All welcome

Southpaw # 1 features writing from and about Australia, Africa, China, Philippines, South America and the Pacific around the theme of displacement. It includes essays on the idea of South, power shifts in East Arnhem Land, change and development in Philippines, UFOS in South America and displacement in Colombia fiction and creative non-fiction from Angola, Australia, China, New Zealand, South Africa and Suriname; reviews of Tamil pulp fiction, Indigenous graphic novels and documentaries from the Pacific. There’s an Ainu fable re-told, a radio play and poetry from many places in the global South, much of it in new translation.

Further information: 9416 0232 or 0418 304 500.

FESTIVAL OPENING @ North Melbourne Town Hall,  Tuesday 7th June, from 6pm
Music by Little John (duo)
2011 Thesis  Eleven Annual Lecture with Ron Jacobs and Eleanor Townsley Media,  Intellectuals and the Public Sphere
Opening Dinner @ The Institute of  Postcolonial Studies 8:40pm (RSVP essential, by 30th May, contact details  below)
PRINT AND VISUAL CULTURES WORKSHOP @ La Trobe  University, Bundoora campus, Wednesday 8th June –Friday 10th, 9:30am –  4/6pm
A 3 day series of lectures, invited papers, plenaries, film  screening, art exhibition, artists discussion, and live performance from punk  art band ‘This Histrionics’.
WIKILEAKS FORUM @ The Wheeler  Centre, Monday 13th June 3-5pm
Does Wikileaks Matter? A forum on  Wikileaks with Robert Manne, Guy Rundle, Peter Vale and Eleanor  Townsley

BAUMAN FORUM AND DOCUMENTARY WORLD PREMIERE @ State  Library of Victoria, Experimedia Room, Tuesday 14th June, 4-8pm
Half-day  public forum on the work of Zygmunt Bauman with speakers from The Bauman  Institute, Leeds and The Thesis Eleven Centre; followed by world premiere  screening of ‘The Trouble with Being Human These days’ by Director Bartek  Dziadosz. Concludes with reflections on ‘The Trouble with Being Human These  days’ from Zygmunt Bauman in conversation with Keith Tester
trailer: http://www.beinghumanthesedays.com

PUBLIC LECTURES  
Christopher Pinney Impressions of Hell: Printing and Punishment in  India @North Melbourne Church Hall, Saturday 11th June, 7:30pm hosted by  The Institute of Postcolonial Studies
Ron Jacobs The Media Narrative in  the Global Financial Crisis @Melbourne University, Monday 13th June,  6:30pm, followed by dinner and drinks, hosted by the TASA Cultural Sociology  Group
Anders Michelsen Atrocious imagination: the paradox of affect –  the imagination of violence Keynote for Violence and the Imagination  Colloquium@Monash University, Caulfield Campus, Wednesday 15th June, 9  -10:30 am Program: http://arts.monash.edu.au/ecps/conferences/violence-imagination/
PUBLIC FILM SCREENING @State Library of  Victoria, Experimedia Space, Wednesday 8th June, 6 – 8pm
Public screening  of Robert Nery’s documentary ‘In 1966 the Beatles came to Manila’  

ART EXHIBITION: VERNACULAR CULTURES AND CONTEMPORARY ART FROM  AUSTRALIA, INDIA AND THE PHILIPPINES@LUMA, Glenn College La Trobe  University, Bundoora, Friday, 10th June 4-6pm
Asks how contemporary artists  remobilise vernacular cultures to interrogate and mediate the cultural ethics  of globalisation, as they engage themes including surf culture, tattoo  designs, informal architecture and colloquial language.
Curators Lecture  by Ryan Johnston, and discussion with local artists
With Punk Performance  Band ‘The Histrionics’ and the Boombox Burgers Taco Truck
FILM  AND VIDEO EXHIBITION: A POST BOOM BEIJING @Bendigo Visual Arts Centre,  View Street, Sunday 12th June 12:30 -4pm
Day trip to the Bendigo Visual  Arts Centre, including viewing of Arena: A post boom Beijing, film and  video exhibition.
Curators lecture by Laurens Tan.
WALKING  TOUR: LANEWAYS, STREET ART AND PUBLIC INSTALLATIONS@ Melbourne CBD,  Saturday 11th June, 2-4pm
Walking tour of Melbourne laneways, street art  and installations as well as local art and moving image museums (limited  places available, booking essential. Contact details below)  

MASTERCLASS INTENSIVES FOR POSTGRADUATES @ La Trobe University  Bundoora, Wednesday 15th June, 10am – 5:30pm
Settler Societies And Popular Culture Various  speakers, including Marilyn Lake, Peter Vale, Patrick Wolfe and Anthony Moran  will discuss the popular cultures of settler societies, exploring issues of  race particularly, and looking comparatively across the experiences of  different settler societies.
Keywords Masterclass   Inspired by Raymond Williams Keywords (1983), thirteen thinkers will talk each about their chosen or nominated keyword, approaching  their topics in terms of traditional keywords (socialism, liberalism); 20th  century innovations (such as the postmodern and schemata); or exploring the  currency of other words (such as utopia, the migrant, regions, urbanism, walking and metanoia).


CONTACT:
Festival of  Ideas Project
Thesis Eleven Centre for Cultural Sociology
La Trobe  University
ph: +613 9479 2700
fax: +613 9479 2705
email: thesis11@latrobe.edu.au <outbind://95/thesis11@latrobe.edu.au>

A conversation between Tony Birch and Ross Gibson

Two figures from the early days of the Australian colony that have fresh relevance today – an English scientist at the founding of Sydney and an indigenous leader at the birth of Melbourne.

image William Dawes arrived on the First Fleet as the official astronomer. After arriving, he developed a close relation with the Eora people and learned their language. In the South, Dawes experienced a kind of intellectual upheaval whereby he began to understand the world in a non-hierarchical, fluid and relational way that contradicted most of the rectitude that he’d been trained in.

image William Barak was a Wurundjeri man and member of the party that met John Batman in the ‘purchase’ of the Melbourne area. During subsequent colonisation, Barak fought to protect Coranderrk, a self-sufficient Aboriginal reserve. This defence included three major walks to Parliament House.

During the early days of British settlement in Australia, the relationship between Indigenous peoples and Europeans was potentially quite open. Out of the many possible relationships explored at that time, a particular colonial paradigm emerged of squatters, missionaries and miners. Is it worthwhile delving back into the start of the colony for alternative paradigms that can inform our understanding of biculturalism today? Are there resonances with other colonial beginnings across the South?

Tony Birch writes short fiction, poetry, essays and art criticism. He also works as a curator and teaches creative writing at the University of Melbourne. His books include Shadowboxing and Father’s Day. He has recently been collaborating with artist Tom Nicholson including Camp Pell Lecture (2010) at Artspace.

Ross Gibson is Professor of Contemporary Arts at Sydney College of the Arts. He makes books, films and art installations. He is particularly interested in art and communication in cross-cultural situations, especially in Australia and the Southwest Pacific. His recent works include the books Seven Versions of an Australian Badland and Remembrance + The Moving Image (editor), the video installation Street X-Rays, the interactive audiovisual environment BYSTANDER (a collaboration with Kate Richards) and the durational work ‘Conversations II’ for the 2008 Biennale of Sydney.

Institute of Postcolonial Studies
78-80 Curzon Street
North Melbourne
Victoria 3051 Australia (map)
Tel: 03 9329 6381
Admission – $5 for waged, $3 for unwaged, and free for members.

How might a concept of the ‘South’ be understood in terms of a pattern of (international) legal relations? 

‘The South’ is commonly understood as a political rather than a purely geographical  designation, broadly to indicate the ‘have-nots’ in a world riven with material  inequalities. The term is meant to overcome the hierarchical implications of other  designations, and attempts not to accept the epistemological privileges granted by  concepts such as ‘developing’ and ‘developed’.  

Critics of contemporary international legal orders  have pointed out that the grid of  international law has locked in a particular vision and distribution of political and  economic relations that perpetuates the history of  the colonisation of the South. It is  from here that many of the North-South and South-South debates gain their legal  focus. In these accounts the South emerges as a domain in constant need of  recuperation of and by the laws, politics, economies, and cultures of the North. At the  same time South-South relations have emerged in resistance and relation to the  dynamics of North-South relations.

However, if this rendering of accounts of imperial and post-colonial law is let rest a  while, there are other patterns of law that can be  understood to shape the South.  These laws, articulated for example, in terms of indigenous jurisprudences or the  commons, pattern the South according to different cosmologies, laws of relationship,  responsibilities, and protocols of engagement. Respond to these laws – as many  contemporary debates that link the places, peoples, and histories of the South do -  and a different patterning of legal relations emerge.   

The workshop invites consideration of the many ways in which the South is patterned  by indigenous, national, international and other laws – some providing parallel  accounts of law(s) of the South, others that intersect and conflict. The aim of this  workshop is to develop the repertoires of thinking  through the laws that position the  South in the domains of international laws.

Themes might include:

• The South as a ‘lawful’ rather than lawless place,  engaging questions of plural legalities and intersections of laws
• The South as a political-legal entity
• The South as an object of International law and administration
• Alternative traditions of ‘international’ legality

Specific debates addressed might include:

• Trade, development
• Security
• Environment
• North-South Justice
• Transnational (and private) engagements of laws
• Indigenous jurisprudence and formulations of the international

The Workshop

The symposium is designed to take advantage of the  visit to Melbourne of three
outstanding scholars:

Dr Fleur Johns (University of Sydney), Dr Catriona Drewe (SOAS, London); and Professor Ruth Buchanan (Osgoode Hall, Toronto)
Ruth, Catriona and Fleur research, teach and write  in areas including international law, development, legal theory, human rights, globalisation and self determination.  Each works from a perspective interested in questions of global justice and critical thinking.  The workshop is being organised by four Melbourne scholars with complementary  interests; Luis Eslava, Shaun McVeigh, Sundhya Pahuja and Gerry Simpson.

Applications to participate:

Everyone is welcome to apply to participate, though we particularly encourage  papers from advanced graduate students, young scholars and junior members of  faculty. There are three ways to participate: 

1. Paper Presentation (6)
Three sessions will be held as intensive engagements with each other’s work.  In  each session, there will be a presentation by one of our guests and 2 papers  selected from applicants’ papers.  The chair and our guest scholars will read the  papers in advance. The authors will each present the paper orally for around 20  minutes.  The Chair will offer a short commentary on each before opening the floor to  discussion.  If you are selected to present, you will need to provide a written draft of your paper
two weeks before the workshop.   

2. Reading Group Discussant (3)
We will also include a reading group at the workshop for which the text will be distributed shortly. One of the organisers will lead the discussion.  All workshop participants are strongly  encouraged to do the reading beforehand, but we also seek three discussants to  engage closely with the text and to be key participants in the discussion. 

3. Non-Presenting Participant (15-20)
The whole workshop will be held in plenary.  Places will be limited to 35 participants.

Because we wish to build an ongoing discussion, we  envisage that everyone will attend the whole conference and will come prepared  to participate in the reading group.  

Fees / Conference Support

There is no charge for those selected to participate in the workshop, but you must be  registered to attend.  Dinners are not included. We have no travel funding, but if you  wish to attend but need accommodation, please get in touch with us and we will try to  assist you however we can (such as finding you a place to stay). 

How to Apply

Everyone: send an email with the subject line:  South Of International Law  to leslava@unimelb.edu.au by 22 April with your:

• Name
• Institutional Affiliation

And if relevant:

• Position
• Course and stage of study 
• Citation of one or two representative publications

Reading Group Discussants

The above, plus… an indication that you would like to be a Reading  Group discussant in your email.

Paper Presentation

The above, plus…

• a short abstract (max 500 words) of your paper; and
• some information about whether it is part of a larger project.  

If you would like to be considered to be a reading group discussant in the alternative, please say so.

Deadline for applications:  22 April 2010

Notifications by 3 May whether you have been selected. Papers will be selected by the Melbourne organisers. 

image

Date: Thursday 25th March, 2010
Venue: Royal Society of Victoria
9 Victoria Street Corner of Victoria St. and Exhibition St.  Melbourne 3000

Monash University Faculty of Arts and School of Geography and Environmental Science invite you to public lectures by two leading scholars of Africa’s social and environmental history

Professor Edwin Wilmsen Centre for African Studies University of Edinburgh

• Globalization before the globe was known: Asian-African interactions in the 1st century CE
• Professor Wilmsen will discuss the extension of biological and cultural exchanges between south-central Africa and the Indian Ocean region from ca. BCE 100 – CE 1000.

Professor Judith Carney Department of Geography University of California, Los Angeles

• Seeds of Memory: Africa’s Botanical Legacy in the Atlantic World
• Professor Carney will examine the inter-continental plant exchanges that took place as a consequence of the transatlantic slave trade and the presence of enslaved Africans in the Americas

RSVP is required by Monday 21st March at: rsvpges@arts.monash.edu.au, or Sharon Harvey on  (03) 9902 0398

• Tuesday, 16 February 2010 6:00 PM
• The Carrillo Gantner Theatre, Sidney Myer Asia Centre
  Cnr Swanston Street and Monash Road, The University of Melbourne
• Website

Panellists including Peter Singer and Tim Costello consider the status of ‘white man’s burden’ in a changed world. Questions include:

How do ‘Southern’ countries perceive the issue of responsibilities and obligations? Do they see it as just Western paternalism mixed with liberal guilt and some hypocrisy? Do they see such obligations as necessary to identify and then insist on?

10 June FORUM Has the world changed?

• Has the Kyoto Protocol changed how rich and poor countries relate to each other?
• Is Australia moving away from the Anglosphere?
• Is the Global Financial Crisis a time to look at alternative economic models?
• Is ethical the new black?
• Have artists changed in how they relate to the world around them?

You are invited to join a discussion in real time with live people in the same space. These people will include contributors to the ‘After the Missionaries’ issue of Artlink. With luck, there will also be some copies, hot of the press.

TIME: 6.00 -8.00 pm Wednesday 10 June
PLACE: Domain House, Birdwood Drive, Royal Botanic Gardens, Melbourne
For more information, click here. To submit a question, email here. This event itself occurs in the context of Evolution – the Festival and the Amnesty of Ideas program of Southern Perspectives.

18 June OPENING World of Small Things: An exhibition of craft diplomacy
Craft Victoria, 31 Flinders Lane, Melbourne, opening 18 June 6-8, show open until 25 July
To be opened by Soumitri Varadarajan, Associate Professor of Industrial Design RMIT

20 June LAUNCH After the Missionaries issue of Artlink
The ‘After the Missionaries’ issue of Artlink will be formally launched at Craft Victoria, Saturday 20 June 4pm, by Dr Connie Zheng, senior lecturer in management at RMIT and expert in how Chinese do business. This will be preceded by a forum on working with traditional artisans (for more details, see here).

27 August THEREAFTER After ‘After the Missionaries’
There will be an opportunity to reflect on the questions raised by After the Missionaries at the Institute of Postcolonial Studies, 78-80 Curzon Street North Melbourne.

Copies of Artlink will be on sale from 15 June.

What role does South play in contemporary thinking?

The idea of the South has a long history. In the recent past it has been revived as a possible frame for representing the cultural context of not just regions that are geographically located in the South, but also those that share a common post colonial heritage. In this essay I explore the affinities and tensions between the south and parallel terms such as third world, antipodes. I argue that the South can extend the existing debates on cross cultural exchange, and provide a useful perspective for representing what I call a ‘spherical consciousness’ in contemporary art.

How does the current flow of ideas around South connect with the post-colonial discourse fostered by journals like Third Text?

From the outset in 1987 the art theory and art historical journal Third Text contested the terms, questioned the structures and challenged the history of western art. The tone of writing has varied from the academic, poetic to the polemical. While the journal was founded to develop a third world perspective on contemporary art and give voice to artists who have worked in a postcolonial context, and despite the shift in editorial policy which is more sceptical of post-colonial theory,[1] the journal continues to provide an invaluable documentary function that recovers and repositions the artistic practices that was either ignored or marginalised by the dominant art historical institutions. It also plays a leading role in presenting new methods for measuring the value and meaning of art. Art history is more than capable of discovering new entrants into its own canon, but the capacity to re-think the terms of entry and the field of relations that constitutes art is not generated from within, but through an interplay with different theoretical and cultural perspectives. The postcolonial critiques of Orientalism, hybridity and the subaltern that were first developed in literary and historical accounts provided vital stepping stones in this reconfiguration of art historical methodologies. A key challenge that confronted this discourse was to develop new ways of seeing and interpreting the differences between and within cultures. For instance, the introduction of the Derridean concept of supplementarity and Homi Bhabha’s interpretation of the process of cultural translation provided new means for understanding both the tensions that arise from the interaction between different cultural practices, and the emergence of novel forms of expressions. In short, this approach not only provided more evidence of emergent practices and the historical legacies of art from the South, but it also prompted the invention of critical tools for overcoming the classification of the South as exotica, periphery and primitivism.

What do you see as the relation between the geographic South and the Global South? Is it purely coincidental?

I understand the concept of the South as a loose hemispheric term that refers to a series of places that share similar patterns of colonization, migration and cultural mixture. For me the South is also expressive of a cultural imaginary that looks outward from its own national base and against the grain of its colonial past. This appeal to a more open-ended identity is, in one critic’s eye, a betrayal of a deep imperial history.[2] In other words, any use of the language that draws from metaphoric associations with the cardinal points of cartography risks being embedded in the naturalistic discourse of magnetic polarities.

In my mind the South is a more ambivalent concept.  It oscillates between a clarion call for antipodean rebelliousness and the stigmatic expression of the cultural cringe. Throughout Australia’s incomplete pursuit of republicanism the image of the Southern Cross has been a recurring symbol of resistance. It has been the trump card against the cultural imperialism of the North. Refusing to be defined by a measure that favours the North the Southern cultural chauvinist inverts this logic and declares that everything of value is already and always in the South. Peter Beiharz notes that the choices are not confined to the bad options of superior recognition according to metropolitan exclusivity or the provincial self-identification through splendid isolationism. He takes inspiration from the fact, and not just hollow boast, that distance from the North has enabled Australia to figure as the ‘world’s social laboratory of policy experiment.’ Indeed throughout the twentieth century Australia has been at the forefront of reforms and innovations in the three pillars of social welfare—wage arbitration, women’s right and multiculturalism. However, Beilharz’s narrative of the emergence of Antipodean civilizational tropes is bittersweet. While he duly notes that earlier achievements were influential in the Fabian social democratic debates, he is also painfully aware that Paul Keating’s realignment of the Labour Party with neo-liberalism paved the way for Tony Blair’s ‘third way’.[3] Keating’s own southern cultural imaginary that promised to take shape through a nascent republicanism and closer integration with Asia, was soon transformed into the target of populist scorn for the successive generations of political leaders.

In Central and Latin America a similar pattern of ambivalent identification is expressed in examples that stretch from Borges short story of the South as a frontier metaphor, Joaquim Torres Garcia’s corrective claim that the ‘North looks South’, to the analysis of cultural inferiority complexes in the writings of Octavio Paz, Gilberto Freyre and Eduardo Galeano, and more recently, the speech by Hugo Chavez in which he quoted Mario Benedetti’s poem ‘The South also Exists’.[4] Such enduring pathos for regional solidarity alongside the persistent failure to build a common cultural framework prompts a number of questions. Is the concept of the South the best frame or point from which to start, once again, as if for the first time, the endless task of collective identification? Is there any point at which the path of identity splits from the imperial past? Can such a wide spherical concept inflect the debates on planetary and cosmopolitan identity with a different historical texture and geo-political valency?[5]

How does living in Melbourne influence the way you think about the South?

I grew up in Middle Park. My strongest childhood memory is looking down the street and seeing an open horizon—the sea. My idea of the spherical consciousness starts from that view.

How can Australian universities connect with the South?

Less greed and more curiosity. Alan Davies made the call a long time ago. More than two decades ago the Australian political scientists Alan Davies suggested that ‘we should spend less time in awed upward contemplation of the great metropolitan centres and a good deal more looking sideways at the experience of like small nations, whose solutions should be better scaled to our problems, and whose definition of their problems are more likely to help us understand our own’.[6] He imagined a form of cultural exchange that would reveal insights and develop skills that would be more worthy of emulation because their fit would be closer to our own experiences. The transferability of knowledge would not be a form of adopting and applying models, but in the grasping of what Davies called the ‘nuances of likeness’.

[1] Rasheed Araeen, ‘Re–thinking History and some other things’, Third Text, Spring 2001, No 54, p 93

[2] Margaret Jolly, “The South in Southern Theory: Antipodean Reflections on the Pacific”, Australian Humanities Review, Issue 44, 2008, 79

[3] Peter Beilharz ‘Rewriting Australia’ Journal of Sociology 40, 2004

[4] Kevin Murray ‘Uruguay also Exists’ http://ideaofsouth.net/idea/idea-zero/uruguay-also-exists

[5] See Paul Gilroy After Empire London, Routledge, 2004, and Ulrich Beck ‘The Cosmopolitan Manifesto’ World Risk Society, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1999

[6] Alan Davies, ‘Small Country Blues’ Meanjin Volume 44, Number 2, 1985, p 248

image

Paul Carter’s new book is a protest against the dumbing down of imaginative thinking. It champions a common reader who resists being patronised, and who is hungry for a deeper understanding of the places we live in – how they came into being, and how, if their creative origins are remembered, they can be changed for the better.

Carter has a long-term interest in the poetic mechanisms of colonialism – mapping, naming, marking – and in this book he presents a critical philosophy of placemaking that recognises the historical burden of our ‘designs’ on the world. He transforms this into a new language of drawing, writing, and choreographing places into being. This, unlike its colonial predecessors, preserves the possibility of meeting, of something un-prescribed happening.

The key to this is what he calls ‘dark writing’: the elemental marks, historical traces, place associations, and other phenomena that shadow our positivist history of placemaking. But to take agency over our places, we must also relocate our thinking, as this will determine where and how we arrive. The place of Carter’s own thinking – situated, poetic, dynamic, opportunistic, and evolving in the laboratory of professional collaboration – complements his notion of ‘material thinking’. This approach respects the intelligence of circumstances and performs in relation to them.

Disregarding the disciplinary stand-offs that endure in our institutions, Dark Writing moves with ease between historical geography, continental phenomenology, major public artworks he has co-designed, a radical reappraisal of the Western Desert Painting Movement, and a survey of ‘dark writing’ in tomb art, photography and handwriting. But Carter’s goal is clear: to free our senses to occupy public space differently, not as passive spectators but as mobile bodies creatively endowing our environment with meaning.

Paul Carter’s many books include the acclaimed The Road to Botany Bay, The Lie of the Land and Repressed Spaces. He is Creative Director of Material Thinking, a placemaking research and design studio, and is currently designing a public space project in Darwin.

My planned research includes a co-written book on the life and work of the founding mother of Australian sociology, Jean Martin; a book on the peculiarities of Australian modernity across the twentieth century; a shared book on the history of rock music in Australia; and a study of the work of Robert Hughes, to follow on my book on the work of Bernard Smith, Imagining the Antipodes. All this work is animated by the idea of thinking about the antipodes, rather than the south; and by the idea that culture works through cultural traffic . These concerns cross over with some of the agendas of our journal, Thesis Eleven. The Thesis Eleven Centre pursues some of these interests with collaborators in India, the Philippines, Thailand, and New Zealand. We would be very pleased to take them into South America. In addition, I have cause to consider my own location in all this – Australia and el Norte – as we construct the hundredth issue of Thesis Eleven, and begin to narrate our own stories, and as I work with Sian Supski , who is writing about my own work in its antipodean inflexions .

I find Bernard Smith’s thinking both interesting and innovative. Innovation often happens on the edges, and goes unnoticed . For Smith, the antipodes matters as a relationship rather than a place: wherever we are, we are always here and there at the same time. And then, culture is best understood not as emanation of place  but as the negotiation of these relationships .

I can see the effectivity of the idea of the South as a political slogan, but it has limits that cause me to have reservations. Culture does not map neatly onto geography . Much of the south is in the north culturally, and the other way round. What interests me is the traffic between peoples, cities and regions. We have a great deal to learn by looking sideways. I would like to see more dialogue on a southern axis, across Australia, New Zealand, South America, South Africa. But all these worlds are co-constituted by other worlds, and cannot be separated out from these entanglements any more than el Norte can be understood without reference to us. In this context I do not have especial priorities – everything should be open for discussion, where stories can be told in a comparative way, and actors can feel comfortable talking about experience or intellect in ways that get the sparks of imagination flying.