Sponsored by the Graduate School, College of Arts



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ASSEMBLINGGGggGgG

IDENTITIES

University of Glasgow

23rd-24th May 2013
Sponsored by the Graduate School, College of Arts

Abstracts


Panel 1 – Female Experience: Hearth and Home
Grady Hancock, ‘(Dis)assembling maternal identities in Ana Kokkinos’ Blessed’

Keywords: film, social realism, motherhood


A seated woman stares into the middle distance, her face expressionless. The camera moves down the length of her torso revealing one hand resting on a pregnant belly, a cigarette wedged between two fingers, the other hand clutching a large box of Horizon Blues. Behind the woman a noticeboard, plastered with pamphlets and fliers in patchwork pattern; positioned in the eye line of the woman’s vacant stare a flyer reads in bold green print ‘Managing on a low income’.

Through an analysis of Ana Kokkinos’ 2009 film Blessed, this paper explores the role of social realist film in the (dis)assembling of maternal identities. Following a day in the life of five women and their children, Blessed explores those women found on the margins of society and the ways in which this impacts their identities as mothers. Social realism as a mode of expression has done much for the reconsideration of marginal identities; in giving voice to mothers whose maternal identities are severely impacted by social and economic hardship, this paper will investigate the ways in which social realism can challenge or reconsider normative constructions of the maternal identity.


Guari Bharat, ‘Bound to Hearth and Home’, or ‘What it is Like to be a Santal Woman’

Keywords: women, movement, India


Drawing from ongoing doctoral fieldwork on perceptions and practices of built environments among Santals in Singhbhum, India, this paper builds a narrative of what it is like to be a Santal woman. By chronicling daily activities and movements of women in three villages, ‘Bound to Hearth and Home’ suggests that Santal women are largely bound to the house and its immediate surroundings. While this fact is in itself not new, the ethnography reveals three particularities of limited movement of Santal women: first, it does not correspond to the multivalent sense of interiority in the dwelling where private-public or male-female domains are not clearly observed. Second, given the interactions documented, limited movement does not appear to stem from a desire to protect the female body from outside gaze. Third, women do need to move about the settlement for basic necessities such as grazing cattle, bathing at the pond or collecting firewood. Yet, the house-bound nature of their movements is revealed in their near complete lack of knowledge of events and things even at the end of the street. This paper develops these ideas through a nuanced ethnography in order to raise questions about women and their position in Santal settlements and societies.
Nisha Ramayya (practice-as-research paper), video-poem ‘Home’ and presentation

Keywords: women, home, family, British-Indian identity

‘Home’ explores the ways identity can be understood as an assemblage of family background and social status, geographic and historical location, and cultural context. When identity is separated according to these various parts, its vulnerability and uncertainty become evident. Through experimentations with language and video composition, this paper investigates this notion of identity as assemblage, working with different facets of identity in order to understand how it is constructed and how easily it may be destabilised.

‘Home’ is filtered through Ramayya’s grandmother’s identity as an Indian woman and her own identity as a second-generation British-Indian woman – it demonstrates the transitions between her grandmother’s experiences and her own, the contrasting instances of identification and disconnect. The variety of source materials used – including photographs, home videos, comic books, television programmes, dictionary definitions, oral history transcriptions, recordings of chanting and other religious practices – is intended to convey identity as intricate and multi-layered assemblage. By means of creative exercises involving family history, memory, translation and lexicographical procedures, Hindu mythology, and feminist theory, multiple identities are assembled and disassembled throughout the video.

With reference to the post-colonial writings of Trinh T. Minh-Ha and the experimental feminist poetics propounded by Joan Retallack, this paper considers identity politics in relation to experimental creative practices towards an understanding of contemporary identity formation.


Panel 2 – Multicultural Britain? Migration and Identity Politics
Nikolay Mintchev, ‘The British Immigration Debate and East-European Nationalism: Identity, Misunderstanding, Desire’

Keywords: emigration/immigration, nationalist rhetoric, UK, Bulgaria, Romania


Recently there have been debates in the UK about a potential wave of migrants coming from Bulgaria and Romania when the working restrictions for citizens of these countries are lifted in 2014. The debates raise a number of issues about migrants' exploitation of the British social benefits system, and also about shortages of housing and unemployment in the UK. This paper examines the structure of Bulgarian nationalist rhetoric and its relation to the idea of emigration, and considers some of the effects that the current British debates may have on Bulgarian national identity. Its claim is that while it is important to have public debate about the problems of migration, the discussion so far has been dominated by populist rhetoric that ignores the reasons why Bulgarians may want to migrate, as well as the cultural representations, anxieties, and desires that underpin the process of migration. The poses not only a danger of creating boundaries of cultural exclusion between Bulgaria and the rest of Europe, but also of creating a vicious cycle where acute defensive Bulgarian nationalism and the negative stereotypes of East Europeans circulating in Western countries feed into each other.
Jed Fazakarley, ‘The War in East Bengal and the Discovery of Bangladeshis in Britain’

Keywords: political protest, immigration, national identity (Pakistani, Bangladeshi, British)


In responding to the migration of Commonwealth subjects to the metropole during the 1950s, 60s and 70s, British institutions perceived little distinction within this population. The category of ‘immigrant’ was regarded as having social and political significance by many national and local authorities and community relations organisations, even when generalised distinctions between ‘West Indians’ and ‘Asians’ were perceived.
In 1971, following disputed elections, civil war broke out in Pakistan. Aware of anger in East Bengal at decades of marginalisation and under-investment, the Pakistani government initiated a crackdown on Bangladeshi pro-independence activists. A wider conflict followed. East Bengalis in Britain soon reacted -- by lobbying, fundraising, protesting and publicising. British institutions had previously subsumed East Bengalis into the blithe category of ‘Pakistani’ but, in the face of visible and popular political activism and, in some cases, inter-communal violence on British streets, belief in the significance of this category was difficult to sustain. Britain was presented abruptly with the emergence of a new, politically active and socially distinct, community of Bangladeshis.

This paper offers a case study in the ‘appearance’ of apparently new identities within specific social contexts. It examines the conditions under which these identities appear, interrogating their potential political and social significance.


Claudio Beghelli, ‘Gastronomy as intercultural performance: the clash of identities’

Keywords: gastronomy, modernism, multiculturalism, postcolonialism, Tikka Masala


Gastronomy is nowadays a cultural practice that also mirrors how social actors are cohabiting within any given social structure. Current social structures are determined by their own historical circumstances, but whatever the degree of their structures, modernisation has shaped the social design on to a more hybrid interpretation of the world by the social actors. The practice of making food is shaped by this current hyper reality where different gastronomies are meeting in a new global network, either practically (in multicultural society), or virtually (through the virtual/network exchange of receipts). The aesthetic of the dish is now influenced by these exchanges. But in this ever-increasing fast moving world how can now the social actor identify himself/herself? This research paper aims to identify how post-colonial discourses (particularly through reference to the case of the chicken Tikka Masala and British imperialism) have helped to illuminate the current identity struggles in these newly-formed network societies.
Panel 3 – Space, Place and Architecture
Alan MacPherson, ‘“Architecture as Autobiography”: Lived Space in Heinz Emigholz’s Loos Ornamental (2009)’

Keywords: auto/biography, Heinz Emigholz, cinema, urban space


This paper considers Heinz Emigholz’s attempt to construct a biography of Austrian architect Adolf Loos through a minimally mediated encounter between architecture and cinema in his film, Loos Ornamental (2009). The film is part of Emigholz’s on-going series ‘Architecture as Autobiography’.

With no voiceover, Emigholz documents Loos’s buildings in chronological order using a montage of long-duration shots filmed with static cameras. The film opens with the site of Loos’s birth, now a hotel bearing a plaque in his honour, and closes with a sequence at his grave-site. Structurally speaking, in this way, the film embodies the life. However, by paying particular consideration to Emigholz’s documentation of the Müller Haus, this paper argues that the film’s aesthetic maps directly onto the two predominant theoretical underpinnings of the architect’s work: a departure from ‘ornament’; and the principle of ‘lived space’ which informed the design of his interiors. Drawing on the criticism of Beatriz Colomina and Andrew Benjamin, and invoking Giuliana Bruno’s writing on haptic cinema, ‘Architecture as Autobiography’ explores how, through attention to surface and depth, the film reproduces architectural space and thus embodies a Loosian identity.


Ruxandra Berinde, ‘Tarkovsky’s Houses: Identity Beyond the Moving Images of Moving Homes’

Keywords: cinema, autobiography, home


This paper is part of broader research in which autobiographical film is deconstructed as a working tool to access intersubjective layers of lived space and architectural memories. This work is performed through an analysis of the films and the "lifeworld" of directors with an autobiographical touch, one of them being Andrei Tarkovsky (1932 - 1986), known for his particularly spatial sensibility and profound interest to convey emotions through film, to recreate and constantly reiterate in evermore minimalistic forms the image of his ‘inner home’, which was becoming lighter and clearer in film, as the sense of physical estrangement from a permanent domicile and his native land was growing.

In this context, following the geographic and artistic trajectory of the Russian artist, from Russia, to Italy and then Sweden, this paper presents the results of fieldwork at physical locations inhabited by the artist, and sets to build a dialogic comparison between the images of the houses he inhabited and the paralleling images of houses in his films at that particular time. Furthermore, the paper will add the imaginative layer of homes in words and homes in lines, gathered from autobiographical reminiscing writings and sketches of dream houses, thus illustrating how his artistic identity transcended the circumstances of dislocation by dwelling within.


Bethan Parkes, ‘Shifting Sounds: atmospheric identities in “Hagar and the Angel” (a soundscape/visual installation)’

Keywords: space, acoustics, ecology, poetry, desert


The practice element of the proposal consists of a link-up with an installation developed by Bethan Parkes, Madeleine Campbell, and Birthe Jorgensen, taking place in the Hunterian Gallery as part of the Hunterian Associates Programme, from 20-27th May. The installation engages with John Runciman’s painting “Hagar and the Angel” and the room in which it is displayed through the development of a soundscape and a visual element that draw on translations, by Madeleine Campbell, from Mohammed Dib’s poetry collection L’Aube Ismaël (Dawn Ismaël, 1996) which features the biblical scenes depicted in the Hunterian exhibition. In contrast with the mute, static and figurative quality of the paintings, movement, sound and the spoken word are also introduced. The movement of suspended plastic dustsheets – suggestive of a desert habitus (while maintaining a margin of ambiguity) – will reveal, conceal and obscure the “rules of the room”, while fragmented recordings of Dib’s poems form sonic “grains” which are sculpted into ephemeral structures. The sense of transient visual and sound shapes will engage with Dib’s nomadic treatment of the themes of identity, exile and migration in L’Aube Ismaël to offer a fluid, diasporic element in contrast to the fixity of the space.

The research paper discusses an ecological approach to spatiality in acousmatic composition, with reference to the methods employed in creating the sonic component of the installation “Hagar and the Angel” (outlined above). This approach is informed by Gernot Böhme’s ecological aesthetic theory outlined in several articles which interrogate the concept of atmosphere. Key to Böhme’s consideration of acoustic atmospheres is the notion of the “I” losing itself in the listening act (Böhme, 2000), through an expansion of corporeal space into the space of affect. Investigating Böhme’s theory further, Henri Bergson’s notion of duration leads to an understanding of the environment articulated by the work as something lived, rather than thought.

This paper discusses the themes raised by Dib’s poetry – including hostile environments, motion/transience, displacement, and place/language relationships – suggesting, with reference to Böhme and Bergson, how they may become a part of the lived space of the installation. ‘Shifting Sounds’ positions the creation of the work as a setting of conditions in which an atmosphere of “desert-ness” may be experienced, discussing the way in which engaging with Dib’s work has influenced approaches to this notion of desert-ness, in particular highlighting the human and cultural aspects of this environmental identity.
Panel 4 – Racial and National Identities
Fernanda Barros, ‘Brazilian race relations from the perspectives of Thales de Azevedo (1904-1995) and Florestan Fernandes (1920-1995)’

Keywords: UNESCO, Brazil, race


This research presents the project Unesco (1950) in Brazil, from the perspectives of sociologists Florestan Fernandes (1920-1995), Roger Bastide (1898-1974) and physician-anthropologist Thales de Azevedo (1904-1995). The first two authors attend to race relations between blacks and whites in São Paulo (Southeast), on the other hand, the latter discusses race relations in Bahia (northeastern Brazil). Both theorists argued dichotomous looks at the subject of "race" in Brazil. It should be noted that the proposed Unesco came amid the backdrop of the First and Second World Wars, (1914-1918) - (1939-1945), as well as content gestated in Nazi Germany. Thus, the aim of the institution was to settle world conflicts created under the imperative of "race", and therefore to conceptualize "race" for humanity, concomitantly seeking a "peaceful example" of race relations. In this context, Brazilian reality contemplating the goals of the institution, in view of the impact of the work, lectures and speeches made ​​by anthropologists Arthur Ramos (1903-1949) and Gilberto Freyre (1900-1987) as the Brazilian racial miscegenation.
Sergio Luis Rolemberg Farias, ‘Post-Slavery Democracy and the Descendants of the Quilombos in Contemporary Brazil’

Keywords: Brazil, slavery, ethnic identity, citizenship, politics


This paper examines the broad question of post-slavery democracy in South America, as experienced by the former slaves. It takes as an example the political mobilization of rural black Brazilian communities in the last twenty years under the label of ‘descendents of the Quilombos’ (fugitive slave communities). Using examples taken from fieldwork with black communities in the North Eastern state of Sergipe, it seeks to understand how the difficulties and opportunities of the last twenty years of political mobilization have influenced the formation of ethnic identities. During this period, the labels of ethnic identity became a way of consolidating fragmented rights and social structures, as well as a way of constructing a fragile sense of citizenship and belonging. This research allows us to formulate a picture of the achievements and position of ethnic minorities in contemporary Brazil. The paper will contribute to an understanding of how the Brazilian democracy has developed over the past two decades, and how the discourse of ethnic identity and community politics have contributed to the political mobilization of its people.

BJ Harpe, ‘Identity Crisis: Culture and Imperialism in Ancient Syria’

Keywords: Syria, linguistics, Imperialism, classical history


This research paper explores the cultural landscape of ancient Syria, a region that was defined by its wide variety of cultural systems and successive occupations by culturally foreign imperial powers. It will examine the nature of the Seleucid, Parthian and Roman periods of Syrian history (roughly 600 years, c. 300 BC until the sack of Dura-Europos in AD 256) focusing on how individuals of various social strata interacted with the imperial powers and how, if at all, that interaction altered their individual sense of identity. The paper begins with a brief historical overview of the Seleucid, Parthian and Roman periods of Syrian history and, drawing upon primarily archaeological, epigraphic and linguistic evidence, will proceed to a discussion of the following questions: What does language choice say about self-identification? How does social status affect engagement with imperial powers? Does engagement with imperial powers necessitate a compromise of identity? Is acculturation a zero-sum game OR does the adoption of a foreign set of cultural indicators necessarily come at the expense of indigenous cultural systems? Were the imperial powers in Syria waging ‘cultural warfare’ in an attempt to supplant indigenous cultural systems with their own?

Panel 5 – Communicating Religious Identity
Marilena Frisone, ‘Connecting identities and connecting people: strategies of identity formation among Nepalese members of a Japanese New Religious Movement in Kathmandu’

Keywords: combining religious identities, Hinduism, Buddhism, Japan, Nepal


This paper explores the politics of identity pursued by a group of Nepalese people adhering to a Japanese New Religious Movement called Tenrikyō (Teachings of the Heavenly Wisdom), currently active in Kathmandu. Founded in 1838, as a consequence of a divine revelation, its headquarters are located in Tenri city, Japan. It counts about two million members in Japan and abroad, and since the last fifty years it has also been actively present in the Nepalese capital, where it counts few hundred members, especially among the local ‘ethnic’ group called Newars.

Based on data collected during a period of fieldwork of about eleven months conducted in Kathmandu in 2011-13, this paper discusses how the process of adopting, learning and practicing this new religious tradition reorganises the everyday religious practices of members alongside more traditionally Hindu or Buddhist affiliations, leading to pluralized forms of identity. ‘Connecting identities and connecting people’ interprets the concept of assembling as a twofold movement enacted by Newar Tenrikyō members involved in a daily enterprise, consisting in (1) ‘drawing together’ traditional caste and religious duties with the new model of identity proposed by this Japanese New Religious Movement (connecting identities), and (2) literally ‘making assembly’, i.e. participating in everyday group-meetings in which their identity as Tenrikyō members is renewed and actively kept (connecting people).


Catherine Porter, ‘The Unheard Voice: Newspapers, the Church, and the Construction of Identity in Colonial Katanga’

Keywords: Protestantism, colonialism, DRC, religious space, national identity


The cry for citizenship in Katanga (southern DRC) is a historically under-researched concept. Much of the history recounts Katangan identity claims as a colonial venture.  New research examines the idea that the Protestant religious sphere was a prominent location for the discussion and formation of an idea in a separate Katangan identity. This occurred years before Congolese independence was discussed at provincial levels.

This paper examines how the population of colonial Katanga found spaces and outlets for discussions of identity in the early 1930s and 1940s. Based on fieldwork conducted between October 2011 and May 2013, this paper highlights the use of religious spaces as an area for the creation of a Katangan identity and support for the local regional authority.  It examines personal dialogue between local citizens, religious leaders, and the local Katangan authority in the formation and development of these conversations.  It examines the debate to maintain this identity and how these ideas became elements in the creation of a local identity and a separate nationalist identity for the 1960s secessionist movement. Finally, the paper analyses the dynamics of pre-constructed and locally reconstructed identity and how various spaces in Katanga helped to produce these ideas.
Iida Saarinen, ‘Before Priestly Identity? Scottish Catholic Seminarians and Freshly-Ordained Priests in Late Nineteenth-Century Photographs’

Keywords: Catholicism, C19th seminary training, photography


Training for Roman Catholic priesthood in nineteenth-century Scotland was not often completed within the country’s borders. The Scots Colleges in Spain, France and Italy provided the Scottish Mission and, after 1787, the Church with hundreds of graduates, sent abroad for expertise and resources. The route to priesthood took several years, and the aim was a very unique career. A priest had a special position in the Catholic hierarchy as well as a certain dignity in his relationship with the laity as a mediator between God and the people. During and after the arduous training, these young men managed to be caught on film in group photographs as well as in studio portraits. Upon their ordination, these young clerics often chose to be photographed to commemorate the moment of transition and these photographs, often in the carte-de-visite format, were then distributed as mementos. This paper will consider the extent to which in these photographs the young seminarians or freshly-ordained priests expressed their professional identity as Roman Catholic priests.


Panel 6 – Identity Construction in the Nineteenth Century
Laura Eastlake, ‘New Neronians: Ancient Rome and the Forging of Decadent Masculine Identities in the Late Nineteenth Century’

Keywords: Rome, Nero, Victorian literature and culture, masculinity


This paper analyses the importance of the ancient Roman past for the construction of masculine identities in late-Victorian literature and culture. It begins by accounting for the divergent reception histories of ‘Imperial Rome’ and the ‘Decadent Rome’ of Nero, Petronius and the later emperors in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. This serves as a route into understanding the anxious, even antagonistic relationship between the acquisitive, frank and physically robust manliness of the Victorian imperialist, and the performative, languid, sensual and even deliberately deviant style of the dandy figure in fin-de-siècle culture. ‘New Neronians’ suggests that aesthetic and decadent manliness, as expressed in the works of Pater, Wilde, Hardy and others, was invested in constructing a counter narrative to the Gibbonian model of ‘decline and fall’, and especially of decline and fall as being catalysed by decadent (and therefore failed or diseased) masculine vigour.

With examples drawn from literature, fine art and the periodical press, this paper demonstrates how decadent Rome is mobilized either as part of a serious and sober defence of aesthetic moral principles or, alternatively, as a script and set of props with which to create and perform more alternative and even deliberately deviant styles of masculinity.


Ruth MacPhail, ‘Feminine Identity at the Fin de Siecle: Women Writers and the Short Form’
The close of the nineteenth-century saw women come under scrutiny as something dynamic, something modern and something which posed a threat to the patriarchal status quo (Ledger, 1997, 02). Writings of the fin de siècle saw feminine identity as increasingly unstable and the term ‘woman’ became an area for investigation (Showalter, 1990, 09). Significantly, many writers turned to the short-story as a means through which these burgeoning identities could be explored. This paper argues that a link between gender and genre can be established and that both formal and contextual attributes of short fiction made it a particularly useful form for women to explore shifting identity positions. Looking at a selection of writers including Sarah Grand, Kate Chopin and George Egerton, this paper considers how ambiguity, ellipsis and plotlessness (all features common to the short form) were used to negotiate understandings of femininity and create a new literary space for female subjectivity. The material circumstances surrounding the publication of these stories will also be examined, coming as they did at a time when the proliferation of women’s magazines meant that women writers, and indeed women readers, were able to engage in the dialogue of feminine identity on a previously unprecedented scale.
Fiona Duncan, ‘The reconstruction of Tory identity under George III’

Keywords: political history, establishment of the Tory party, C19th


Though there is a broad consensus in eighteenth-century scholarship regarding the demise of a Whig/Tory dichotomy during the reigns of George I and George II, and an acknowledgement that this dichotomy had largely re-emerged by the death of George III, in 1820, there has been no overarching investigation regarding the development of a distinct, coherent Tory identity in this period. By focusing on ideas circulated in the public domain, this research paper explores the construction of a Tory identity, increasingly distinguished from opposition Whiggery, and located in a bifurcation of ideas regarding the nature of the constitution in its civil element. In the process, it asks to what extent this identity was underpinned by the controversial doctrines of Toryism’s ideological past, and in what ways traditionally Tory ideological frameworks were renegotiated to suit a new political context. This study tests a growing body of research which has emphasised continuity between historical epochs, particularly in an ideological context. By examining a variety of printed genres this project seeks to elaborate and, in some respects, challenge current perspectives regarding the Tory revival so conspicuous in the early decades of the nineteenth century.
Panel 7 – Body Politics
Tiffany Page, ‘The Provocation of the Vulnerable Self’

Keywords: feminism, vulnerability, ethics


This research paper argues that moves to re-assemble identity through a shared vulnerability and condition of openness must more critically address the ambiguity that presents itself through our capacity to both suffer and inflict harm. The treatment of vulnerability has become a key concern within feminist scholarship in recent years. The challenge has been to invoke a notion of vulnerability that resists being defined solely in the negative through ideas of susceptibility, risk, and weakness. However, claims that an ontological vulnerability grounded in a shared identity of universal exposure can form the basis of normative ethics fail to address the inherent ethical ambiguity that lies within our corporeal vulnerability. This paper argues that the provocation presented by vulnerability within considerations of identity assemblage is due to its relationship to violence. As a vulnerable self the desire for invulnerability and a masterful identity is always present. Vulnerability is therefore problematic within discussions of identity because it forbids reduction and instead spills out beyond categorization, interpretation, and representation. ‘The Provocation of the Vulnerable Self’ considers some of the issues that must be addressed in invoking the vulnerable self as the foundation for ethics.
Maria Portugal, 'What besides my body can resist? - Body Identity of Dissent Actions'

Keywords: bodies, illegitimacy, protest, performance

In western civilizations, body lies at the centre of the political struggles (Turner 1984) over the last three decades. Illegitimate body´s statements have become gradually more crucial to urban and social awareness. The analysis of protest, in terms of its embodiment, could simulate or actually shift the constitutional power to a brand new place of social dominance and to a fresh notion of identity and visibility.

Opposition performance is gradually becoming a territory with a racial, gender, religious, sexual and/or political orientation, illustrating both its physical exposure and anger and transforming identities and emotions (Eyerman 2010). Nowadays, activists, strikers, protesters and marchers turn out to be among the most promising and radical architects designers and artists, bringing out a perfect dialectic between power and vulnerability (Sutton 2003), connecting, disconnecting and mixing new narratives, rituals, discourses and powers.


This research examines the protest through body experience and its effect, evolution and reinforcement during the last 30 years: how dissent actions have attempted to cross social regulation and political barriers to get a better understanding of body/bodies identity and how they generate an open sense of protest culture – concepts, performances and artefacts – that (re) interpreted forms of fighting back.



Megan Ratliff, ‘Bodily and Celestial Cosmologies: Tattooing and Asterisms Amongst the Japanese and Maori’

Keywords: tattooing, bodies, asterisms, performance


"Bodily and Celestial Cosmologies: Tattooing and Asterisms Amongst the Japanese and Maori" looks at how groups and individuals have dealt with placing ideologically imbued patterns onto the body and night sky.  The body and sky are two universal forms which every society has related with as a space to entrust worldviews (communal and individual).  Both tattooing and star grouping (creating asterisms) are means of projection and establishing physical and cultural locality.  This paper juxtaposes culturally-constructed means of creating locality by imposing an invented order on these fields, to make sense of each other and the cosmos.  This research shifts between two case studies, the Maori and Japanese, examining their radically different means of using these blank slates as expressive modes.  The body and the sky are both universally experienced by all people. Regardless of spatial or temporal locality, everyone has had to confront and mediate with the body and sky; they are inescapable and true universals.


Scott Dahlie, ‘Moveable Islands and Disappearing People: (Re)Locations and (Mis)Representations in Pacific Legends

Keywords: literature, music, Rogers and Hammerstein (South Pacific), James Michener (Tales of the South Pacific), misrepresentation


Araki Island was originally located in Hog Harbour, a northeast anchorage of the much larger island of Espiritu Santo in Vanuatu, a Western Pacific archipelago formerly known as the colonial New Hebrides. One night, the men of South Espiritu Santo looped a coconut-fibre rope around Araki Island and began to pull. In the morning, the Araki women woke up to a collective disorientation and alarm. They were surrounded by strange, South Santo men, their island had travelled some 120 kilometres in the night and their fathers, husbands and sons had disappeared.

In the late 1940s an even more incredible feat was accomplished. James Michener, an officer in the American Navy, and Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein, two Broadway theatre writers, looped a collection of stories and a musical around the whole archipelago. Then they began pulling. When Vanuatu awoke it was surrounded by the American imagination. It had moved from the Western Pacific into the South Pacific and all of its indigenous people had disappeared.

This presentation examines (through image, sound, and text) how Michener’s collection Tales of the South Pacific and Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musical South Pacific misrepresent Vanuatu’s indigenous Melanesians.


Panel 8 – Music, Performance and the Development of Identity
Brianna Robertson, ‘Opera identity, the singer, the character or the immortal performer’

Keywords: opera, castrato singers, late C18th, performance


Venenzio Rauzzini (1746 – 1800), castrato singer and influential vocal pedagogue, taught most of the famous prima donnas of the late 18th century/early 19th century. He claimed that the key to the success of his students was that he encouraged them to develop their own singing style. This was at a time when composers wrote music specifically for the leading opera singer cast. However, if the singer did not feel the piece displayed the best of their vocal abilities, they would replace arias with those better suited. At a time when vocal tuition and opera were highly individualised, the singer imposed much of their own identity on the characters they performed, moulding each new character to suit their vocal style. Tracing back the changes to 18th century operatic scores has immortalised parts of these singers ‘vocal sound’. However, individualised performances are an alien concept to 21st century performers, so which performance identity do modern-day singers portray? The character composed or the identity of the singer who originally performed the work? If so, which singer do they embody? This paper explores these questions by examining 18th century and 21st century vocal tuition and changing operatic traditions.
James Felix, ‘Paupers, Poets and Prostitutes: The Evolving Identity of the Fadista’

Keywords: Portuguese/Brazilian folk music, class, national identity


In the back streets of Lisbon, a man sings. His song is not one of joy, but of hardship. In his belt he carries a knife, in his hand a bottle of wine; shunned by society, people cross the street when they see him. A century later, the music remains but the perception has morphed. Today, fado is still sung and retains much of the same subject matter. Lisboettas sing of the difficulties of life, losses suffered, and their enduring love of Portugal, but now people flock to hear these songs; the singers work during the day as bankers, taxi drivers, fishermen and doctors, and in the evening they sing for love of fado.

Embraced as the epitome of Portuguese culture by a society that once rejected them, this paper traces the transformation of the fadista’s identity, one inextricably linked with the musical genre of fado, from its impoverished origins as the song of the lowest in society, through fascist dictatorship to the time of international fado stars. Examining the cause of this change and the impact it has had on the genre and the nation, ‘Paupers, Poets and Prostitutes’ illustrate the way perceptions of subcultural identity evolve independently of musical affiliation.



Mehryar Golestani, ‘Persian Hip-Hop and the Emergence of an Online Iranian Diaspora’

Keywords: hip-hop, online music, censorship, Iranian music

From its emergence, Persian Hip-Hop has been subject to strict government restrictions. The mandatory requirement of a “Mojavez” (seal of approval) from Iran’s Ministry of Islamic Guidance has forced artists to employ alternative methods, centring on innovative usage of the Internet through social media platforms to release music. Originally employed simply to share sounds, technological advancements mean that social media sites can now facilitate transnational collaborations such as ‘virtual’ concerts where artists unable to leave Iran are virtually 'streamed’ onto a stage. These global collaborations challenge the traditional concept of musical boundaries and have resulted in a new, imagined community with no borders. The evolution of music-related social media sites has now enabled artists to sell music, use an Internet poll to determine locations for concerts and even request public funding for projects. Music-sharing social media has led to a phenomenon where what started as a worldwide online community of participants has now blossomed into an “online Diaspora”, a self-sufficient community with its own identity that does not conform to conventional territorial boundaries. This paper will examine this new identity with reference to Stokes’ (2010) work on cultural intimacy.



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