Journal articles: 'Philosophy, Italian. [from old catalog]' – Grafiati (2024)

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We demonstrate that Old Italian had a three-gender system within which the neuter still qualified as a fully fledged gender value. To substantiate this claim, we adduce evidence showing that (a) Old Italian had three distinct sets of controllers, each of which selected a separate agreement pattern; (b) to each one of those three controller sets, including the neuter, nouns were assigned belonging to different productive inflectional classes and (c) the neuter still selected at least one dedicated agreement formative, thereby still displaying traces of its original status as a target gender. This novel evidence from Old Italian squares well with what is known about past stages of other Romance varieties. Also, we briefly address the consequences of our results both for a reconstruction of the Latin-Romance transition and, more broadly, for the theoretical and methodological approach to the study of the diachronic development of gender systems.

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Abstracttitle SUMMARY /title We present here the letters of the "Fondo Siacci" which was found recently while reorganising some papers from the old seat of the library at the Department of Mathematics "Renato Caccioppoli" of the University "Federico II" of Naples, in Via Mezzocannone 8. Grancing at these letters we discovered their interest to reconstruct various historical events of italian mathematics life in the 2nd half of the 19th century.

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‘I will carry with me the best architect in Europe.’ With these bold words Robert, first Viscount Molesworth, announced to his wife his arrival in Ireland in the company of the young Italian architect and engineer Alessandro Galilei in May 1717. Lord Molesworth could not know that, twenty years later, Galilei would be indeed one of the best-known architects in Europe, after having built in Rome, to the order of Pope Clement XII Corsini (1730–40), the facade of San Giovanni in Laterano (St John Lateran), the Cappella Corsini in the same church and the facade of San Giovanni dei Fiorentini.Galilei was born on 25 August 1691, in Florence, the eldest son of the notary Giuseppe Maria Galilei and his wife Margherita Merlini. The Galilei family could trace their lineage to the Buonaiuti, who in the fourteenth century twice held the post of ‘Gonfaloniere della Giustizia’, then the most important position in the city government. They took the surname Galilei from the last Gonfaloniere in their family, the master of philosophy and medicine, Galileo (early fifteenth century). Even into the sixteenth century, members of the family belonged to the town council. The most famous bearer of the name was without doubt Galileo Galilei (1564–1641), from whom Alessandro was not directly descended but to whom he was remotely related. Although Alessandro’s father, Giuseppe, who in 1707 and 1711 was Proconsul of Notaries, counted himself as one of the nobili, the standing of the old patrician families had been considerably reduced under the Medici Grand Dukes because they did not actually hold a landed title. Financial decline seems also to have damaged the prestige of Alessandro’s branch of the family.

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Starting in 1865, regulations pursuant to public hygiene issued by the Unitary Government provided for administrative and political control of the funerary practice. Specifically, they regulated the management of cemeteries and the burials, increasingly drawing the funeral rituals from the control of the Church and of Catholicism, therefore secularising death for the construction of a new political religion. Hygiene became fundamental in order to promulgate cremation as a system of preserving the integrity of the bodies, preserving the ashes as a tangible and indestructible product of body matter and as a measure to protect public health by eliminating the risk of miasmatic pollution of the air caused by the cadaveric fumes. In the early 1870s, the practice of cremation began to spread, especially in the territories of Lombardy-Veneto and Savoy, as an expression of the progressive policies of the new Italian state, antagonistic to the old Catholic religious traditions. This paper intends to highlight the key aspects of the political significance that the cremation took on during the Risorgimento period, while also illustrating the methods adopted by important authors from that time period regarding incineration techniques and cremation methods.

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The perception of Giotto’s heritage in Russian literature and culture has always been directly linked not only with the concept of the Renaissance and the development of Western culture, but with a special interest in writing practice and in the ambition of the narrative presented as innovative style to create communities. The main topic of the poetic thought was the transition from community to society, in other words, from community to church, so Giotto's status as a genius was always supported with statements about other geniuses who directly, but rather indirectly, made this transition. Despite the scarcity of references to the name Giotto, Russian poetry did not so much reflect the current art history conception, but anticipates or correctsconclusions of art historians. My careful analysis of the statements about Giotto in Russian poetry (V.Komarovsky, S.Soloviev, A.Voznesensky) in comparison with the conclusions of Russian philosophy and humanities (P.Florensky, P.Muratov, P.Bitsilli, V.Lazarev)explains plots of the poems related to picturesque impressions. The technique of chiaroscuro in Giotto, who first began to convey plausible depth through the illusory distribution of light, was understood as a technique primarily of hint and reflection, anegative, in comparison with which later Italian painting looks like a colorful positive. Such concept did not correspond to Giotto's real place in the history of art, but it did make it possible to correlate Giotto with Byzantine and Old Russian art using a golden background, emphasizing in the legacy of the Italian artist not credibility, but ability to create own art project relevant other projects.

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This article examines the siginifcant role that Romeplayed in the life of Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev (1818–1883). The author researches the “Roman” preferences of young Turgenev, who specialized in ancient literature and philosophy in Moscow, St. Petersburgand Berlin. Special attention is paid to the circ*mstances of 21-years-old Turgenev’s stay in the Eternal City in February–April 1840 and his relationship with members of Khovrins’ salon in Rome, espesially with the eldest daughter of Khovrin, Alexandra Nikolaevna, in marriage Bakhmeteva (1823–1903), whо became later a wellknown writer on religious and philosophical topics. The author substantiates the version that it was young “Sashenka” Khovrina who became the prototype of Lisa Kalitina in the novel Home of the Gentry, started in Rome at the end of 1857. The author studies the “Italian traces” in the literary work of Turgenev: in early romantic poem Steno (1834), poem Venus of Medicis (1837), novel On the Eve (1859), etc. The author notes that the “civilizational” contrasts between the “North” and the “South”, abundantly scattered in the works of young Turgenev, suggest that in his work has found a kind of continuation of the tradition of the “Russian Northernship,” deriving in Russian literature from G.R. Derzhavin, N.M. Karamzin, Prince P.A. Vyazemsky.

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Medieval literature, philosophy, medicine, and many other fields cannot be imagined without considering the huge role played by translations. Scholars have worked on this field already for many years, leading among them Jeanette Beer, who here brings together a number of authors who address specific aspects pertinent to translation work mostly in medieval literature. While she herself offers a concise introduction, she rounds off the volume with a study of the work by the anonymous compiler of Li Fet des Romans from the early thirteenth century which represents the earliest extant work of ancient historiography translated into a European medieval vernacular. The translator offers most detailed comments about his motivation and translation strategies, which helps us understand considerably how medieval writers approached their task. But back to the Introduction. Here Beer traces the history of the earliest translations, beginning with the famous Strasbourg Oaths from 842, turning to Eulalia, the Valenciennes Fragment, and Marie de France, among others. Subsequently Beer outlines the major highlights of this collected volume, highlighting that the contributors address vernaculars such as Latin (not really a vernacular), French, Anglo-Norman, Italian, English, Old Norse, German, Arabic, and Hebrew. Indeed, some of the chapters cover those languages, but we do not hear anything about German, Arabic, or Hebrew, apart from some very fleeting references. She correctly notes that the world prior to the printing press was deeply determined by textual mouvance which provided enormous flexibility in the rendering and display of texts in the manuscripts. The Introduction concludes with a bibliography and a bibliographical note about the author. This model is applied throughout the entire volume.

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The past twenty years witnessed a dramatic transformation in Arabic literature studies in the United States. In the early 1990s, the field was still almost exclusively a satellite of area studies and largely bound by Orientalist historical and epistemological paradigms. Graduate students—even those wishing to focus entirely on modern literature—were trained to competence in the entire span of the Arabic literary tradition starting with pre-Islamic times, and secondary research languages were still rooted in the philological tradition of classical scholarship. The standard requirement was German, with Spanish as a distant second for those interested in Andalusia, but rarely French, say, or Italian or Russian. Other Middle Eastern languages were mainly conceived as primary-text languages rather than research languages. Philology, traditional literary history, and New Criticism formed the methodological boundaries of research. “Theory”—even when it purported to speak of the world outside Europe—was something that was generated by departments of English and comparative literature on the other side of campus, and crossings were rare and complicated in both the disciplinary and the institutional sense. Of course, one branch of “theory”—postcolonial studies—made its way into area studies much faster than the more eclectic offshoots of continental philosophy, for obvious reasons. From nationalism studies to subaltern studies, from Benedict Anderson to Gayatri Spivak, the wave of postcolonial critical theory that swept through U.S. academia in the 1980s and 1990s sparked an uprising in area studies at large and particularly in the literature disciplines. One of the first casualties of this uprising was the old historical paradigm itself: narratives of rise and fall, golden ages, and ages of decadence. Slowly but surely, scholars began to question the entire epistemological edifice through which Arabic literary history had been constructed by Orientalism. It was through the postcolonial theory of the 1980s that Arabic literature came to a broader rapprochement with poststructuralism: Foucault, Derrida, Ricoeur, Jameson, and White, to name a few of the major thinkers who began to transform the field in the late 1990s.

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AbstractItaly is one of the European countries with the highest levels of gender inequalities (World Economic Forum 2011). The aims of this paper were to understand to what extent the well-documented gender gap in Italian adult society has an impact on both political and civic actions of younger generations, and whether the process of participation assumes specific features according to gender. 835 Italian participants (49.6% males; 50.4% female, aged from 16 to 26 years old; 20% under voting age) completed a self-administered questionnaire. Analyses confirmed general trends (voting at elections is the most frequently performed political action among Italian youth) and showed the existence of a small gender gap (a major orientation of young women toward civic action, while young men are more engaged in manifest political participation). The results confirmed that family cultural capital and normative support are significant predictors of political participation, in particular for girls and young women.

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This article analyzes Italian research and experimentation on the economic potential of certain plant species in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, also providing insight into beekeeping and honey production. It focuses on continuity of method and progress across regimes and on the invisibility of many of the actors involved in the development of agricultural science and food research. Specifically, “continuity” refers to the continuation of certain threads of Old-Regime experimentation by the scientific apparatus put in place during the Napoleonic era. These threads were reworked and strengthened with the new means available to Frenchified Europe. The concept of “invisibility” derives from an expression by Steven Shapin and refers to actors who contributed to the development of agricultural science while remaining in the shadows. These include various types of technicians and members of rural society who supported the scientific work of scholars without receiving overt recognition. Continuity and invisibility were therefore two fundamental components both in the epistemological development of agricultural science and in the improvement of food research. The article analyzes case studies mainly from northern Italy – or rather, the various geopolitical entities existing in this geographical region – during the late Old Regime and the Napoleonic era, comparing them with examples from all over Europe.

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<p>Most of the inhabitants of northern Italy were woken up during the night of May 20, 2012, by the Mw 6.1 earthquake [QRCMT 2012] that occurred in the eastern Po Plain. The mainshock was preceded a few hours before by a Mw 4.3 shock, and it was followed by a dozen Ml &gt;4 aftershocks in May and June, amongst which 11 had Ml ≥4.5. On May 29, 2012, a second Mw 6.0 mainshock struck roughly the same area [QRCMT 2012], which resulted in further victims, most of whom were caught under the collapse of industrial warehouses. Such earthquakes are an unexpected event in this region, as testified by the lack of local epicenters in the Italian seismic catalog [Rovida et al. 2011: CPTI11 from now] and by the consequent low level of the local seismic classification (seismic zone 3) [DPC 2012]. Apart from the warehouses and hundreds of old, crumbling farmsteads, severe damage was focused on ancient, tall buildings, such as churches, bell towers, castles, towers and palaces. Residential buildings generally suffered only light and/or moderate effects, apart from some exceptional cases. Using the Mercalli–Cancani–Sieberg (MCS) scale [Sieberg 1930], we began a macroseismic survey in the early morning of May 20, 2012, that ultimately included visits to almost 200 localities, 52 of which were carried out before the second mainshock. […]</p><br />

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“We have made Italy, now we must make Italians,” in the (probably apocryphal) words of the Prime Minister, sometime after the unification of the nation in 1860. Perhaps in French, if it was said at all. (The quotation is typically attributed to Massimo D’Azeglio, the prime minister of Piedmont and predecessor of the first Italian prime minister Camillo Cavour. Many have suggested that the phrase was misquoted and misunderstood (see Doyle.) D’Azeglio spoke in Italian when he addressed the newly-formed Italian parliament, but my reference to French is meant to indicate the fragility of the national language in early Italy where much of the ruling class spoke French while the majority of the people in the peninsula still spoke regional dialects.) It was television – more than print media or even radio – that would have the biggest impact in terms of ‘making Italians.’ Writing about Italy in the 1950s, a well-known media critic suggested that television, a game show actually, “was able to succeed where The Divine Comedy failed … it gave Italy a national language” (qtd. in Foot). But these are yesterday’s problems. We have Italy and Italians. Moreover, the emergence of global ways of being and belonging are evidence of the ways in which the present transcends forms of belonging rooted in the old practices and older institutions of the nation-state. But, then again, maybe not. “A country that allows you to vote in its elections must be able to provide you with information about those elections” (Magliaro). This was 2002. The country is still Italy, but this time the Italians are anywhere but Italy. The speaker is referring to the extension of the vote to Italian citizens abroad, represented directly by 18 members of parliament, and the right to information guaranteed the newly enfranchised electorate. What, then, is the relationship between citizenship, the state and global television today? What are the modalities of involvement and participation involved in these transformations of the nation-state into a globally-articulated network of institutions? I want to think through these questions in relation to two ways that RAI International, the ‘global’ network of the Italian public broadcaster, has viewed Italians around the world at different moments in its history: mega-events and return information. Mega-Events Eighteen months after its creation in 1995, RAI International was re-launched. This decision was partially due to a change in government (which also meant a change in the executive and staff), but it was also a response to the perceived failure of RAI International to garner an adequate international audience (Morrione, Testimony [1997]). This re-launch involved a re-conceptualisation of the network’s mandate to include both information services for Italians abroad (the traditional ‘public service’ mandate for Italy’s international broadcasting) as well as programming that would increase the profile of Italian media in the global market. The mandate outlined for Roberto Morrione – appointed president as part of the re-launch – read: The necessity of strategic and operative certainties in the international positioning of the company, both with regard to programming for our co-nationals abroad and for other markets…are at the centre of the new role of RAI International. This involves bringing together in the best way the informative function of the public service, which is oriented to our community in the world in order to enrich its cultural patrimony and national identity, with an active presence in evolving markets. (Morrione, Testimony [1998]) The most significant change in the executive of the network was the appointment of Renzo Arbore, a well-known singer and bandleader, to the position of artistic director. At the time of Arbore’s appointment, the responsibilities of the artistic director at the network were ill defined, but he very quickly transformed the position into the ‘face’ of RAI International. In an interview from 1998, Arbore explained his role at the network as follows: “I’m the artistic director, which means I’m in charge of the programs that have any kind of artistic content. Also, I’m the so called “testimonial”, which is to say I do propaganda for the network, I’m the soul of RAI International” (Affatato). The most often discussed aspect of the programming on RAI International during Arbore’s tenure as artistic director was the energy and resources dedicated to events that put the spotlight on the global reach of the service itself and the possibilities that satellite distribution gave for simultaneous exchange between locations around the world. It was these ‘mega-events’ (Garofalo), in spite of constituting only a small portion of the programming schedule, that were often seen as defining RAI’s “new way” of creating international programming (Milana). La Giostra [The Merry Go Round], broadcast live on New Year’s Eve 1996, is often cited as the launch of the network’s new approach to its mission. Lasting 20 hours in total, the program was hosted by Arbore. As Morrione described it recently, The ‘mother of live shows’ was the Giostra of New Year’s ’97 where Arbore was live in the studio for 20 consecutive hours, with many guests and segments from the Pole, Peking, Moscow, Berlin, Jerusalem, San Paolo, Buenos Aires, New York and Los Angeles. It was a memorable enterprise without precedent and never to be duplicated. (Morrione, RAI International) The presentation of television as a global medium in La Giostra draws upon the relationship between live broadcasting, satellite television and conceptions of globality that has developed since the 1960s as part of what Lisa Parks describes as ‘global presence’ (Parks). However, in keeping with the dual mandate of RAI International, the audience that La Giostra is intended to constitute was not entirely hom*ogenous in nature. The lines between the ‘national’ audience, which is to say Italians abroad, and the international audience involving a broader spectrum of viewers are often blurred, but still apparent. This can be seen in the locations to which La Giostra travelled, locations that might be seen as a mirror of the places to which the broadcast might be received. On the one hand, there are segments from a series of location that speak to a global audience, many of which are framed by the symbols of the cold war and the ensuing triumph of global capitalism. The South Pole, Moscow, Beijing and a reunified Berlin can be seen as representing this understanding of the globe. These cities highlighted the scope of the network, reaching cities previously cut off from Italy behind the iron curtain (or, in the case of the Pole, the extreme of geographic isolation.) The presence of Jerusalem contributed to this mapping of the planet with an ecclesiastical, but ecumenical accent to this theme. On the other hand, Sao Paolo, Buenos Aires, and Melbourne (not mentioned by Morrione, but the first international segment in the program) also mapped the world of Italian communities around the world. The map of the globe offered by La Giostra is similar to the description of the prospective audience for RAI International that Morrione gave in November 1996 upon his appointment as director. After having outlined the network’s reception in the Americas and Australia, where there are large communities of Italians who need to be served, he goes on to note the importance of Asia: “China, India, Japan, and Korea, where there aren’t large communities of Italians, but where “made in Italy,” the image of Italy, the culture and art that separate us from others, are highly respected resources” (Morrione, “Gli Italiani”). La Giostra served as a container that held together a vision of the globe that is centered around Italy (particularly Rome, caput mundi) through the presentation on screen of the various geopolitical alliances as well as the economic and migratory connections which link Italy to the world. These two mappings of the globe brought together within the frame of the 20-hour broadcast and statements about the network’s prospective audiences suggest that two different ways of watching RAI International were often overlaid over each other. On the one hand, the segments spanning the planet stood as a sign of RAI International’s ability to produce programs at a global scale. On the other hand, there was an attempt to speak directly to communities of Italians abroad. The first vision of the planet offered by the program suggests a mode of watching more common among disinterested, cosmopolitan viewers belonging to a relatively hom*ogenous global media market. While the second vision of the planet was explicitly rooted in the international family of Italians constituted through the broadcast. La Giostra, like the ‘dual mandate’ of the network, can be seen as an attempt to bring together the national mission of network with its attempts to improve its position in global media markets. It was an attempt to unify what seemed two very different kinds of audiences: Italians abroad and non-Italians, those who spoke some Italian and those who speak no Italian at all. It was also an attempt to unify two very different ways of understanding global broadcasting: public service on the one hand and the profit-oriented goals of building a global brand. Given this orientation in the network’s programming philosophy, it is not surprising that Arbore, speaking of his activities as Artistic director, stated that his goals were to produce shows that would be accessible both to those that spoke very little Italian as well as those that were highly cultured (Arbore). In its attempt to bring these divergent practices and imagined audiences together, La Giostra can be seen as part of vision of globalisation rooted in the euphoria of the early nineties in which distance and cultural differences were reconciled through communications technology and “virtuous” transformation of ethnicity into niche markets. However, this approach to programming started to fracture and fail after a short period. The particular balance between the ethnic and the economically ecumenical mappings of the globe present in La Giostra proved to be as short lived as the ‘dual mandate’ at RAI International that underwrote its conception. Return Information The mega-events that Arbore organised came under increasing criticism from the parliamentary committees overseeing RAI’s activities as well as the RAI executive who saw them both extremely expensive to produce and of questionable value in the fulfillment of RAI’s mission as a public broadcaster (GRTV). They were sometimes described as misfatti televisivi [broadcasting misdeeds] (Arbore). The model of the televisual mega-event was increasingly targeted towards speaking to Italians abroad, dropping broader notions of the audience. This was not an overnight change, but part of a process through which the goals of the network were refocused towards ‘public service.’ Morrione, speaking before the parliamentary committee overseeing RAI’s activities, describes an evening dedicated to a celebration of the Italian flag which exemplifies this trend: The minister of Foreign Affairs asked us to prepare a Tricolore (the Italian flag) evening – that would go on air in the month of January – that we would call White, Red and Green (not the most imaginative name, but effective enough.) It would include international connections with Argentina, where there exists one of the oldest case d’italiani [Italian community centers], built shortly after the events of our Risorgimento and where they have an ancient Tricolore. We would also connect with Reggio Emilia, where the Tricolore was born and where they are celebrating the anniversary this year. Segments would also take us to the Vittoriano Museum in Rome for a series of testimonies. (Morrione, Testimony [1997]) Similar to La Giostra, the global reach of RAI International was used to create a sense of simultaneity among the dispersed communities of Italians around the world (including the population of Italy itself). The festival of the Italian flag was similarly deeply implicated in the rituals and patterns that bring together an audience and, at another level, a people. However, in the celebration of the Italian flag, the notion that such a spectacle might be of interest to those outside of a global “Italian” community has disappeared. Like La Giostra, programs of this kind are intended to be constitutive of an audience, a collectivity that would not exist were it not for the common space provided through television spectatorship. The celebration of the Italian flag is part of an attempt to produce a sense of global community organised by a shared sense of ethnic identity as expressed through the common temporality of a live broadcast. Italians around the world were part of the same Italian community not because of their shared history (even when this was the stated subject of the program as was the case with Red, White and Green), but because they co-existed by means of their experience of the mediated event. Through these events, the shared national history is produced out of the simultaneity of the common present and not, as the discourse around Italian identity presented in these programs would have it (for example, the narratives around the origin around the flag), the other way around. However, this connection between the global television event that was broadcast live and national belonging raised questions about the kind of participation they facilitated. This became a particularly salient issue with the election of the second Berlusconi government and the successful campaign to grant Italians citizens living abroad the vote, a campaign that was lead by formerly fascist (but centre-moving) Alleanza Nazionale. With the appoint of Massimo Magliaro, a longtime member of Alleanza Nazionale, to the head of the network in 2000, the concept of informazione di ritorno [return information] became increasingly prominent in descriptions of the service. The phrase was frequently used, along with tv di ritorno (Tremaglia), by the Minister for Italiani nel Mondo during the second Berlusconi administration, Mirko Tremaglia, and became a central theme in the projects envisioned for the service. (The concept had circulated previously, but it was not given the same emphasis that it would gain after Magliaro’s appointment. In an interview from 1996, Morrione is asked about his commitment to the policy of “so-called” return information. He answers the question by commenting in support of producing a ‘return image’ (immagine di ritorno), but never uses the phrase (Morrione, “Gli Italiani”). Similarly, Arbore, in an interview from 1998, is also asked about ‘so-called’ return information, but also never uses the term himself (Affatato). This suggests that its circulation was limited up until the late 1990s.) The concept of ‘return information’ – not quite a neologism in Italian, but certainly an uncommon expression – was a two-pronged, and never fully implemented, initiative. Primarily it was a policy that sought to further integrate RAI International into the system of RAI’s national television networks. This involved both improving the ability of RAI International to distribute information about Italy to communities of Italians abroad as well as developing strategies for the eventual use of programming produced by RAI International on the main national networks as a way of raising the awareness of Italians in Italy about the lives and beliefs of Italians abroad. (The programming produced by RAI International was never successfully integrated into the schedules of the other national networks. This issue remained an issue that had yet to be resolved as recently as the negotiations between the Prime Minister’s office and RAI to establish a new agreement governing RAI’s international service in 2007.) This is not to say that there was a dramatic shift in the kind of programming on the network. There had always been elements of these new goals in the programming produced exclusively for RAI International. The longest running program on the network, Sportello Italia [Information Desk Italy], provided information to Italians abroad about changes in Italian law that effected Italians abroad as well as changes in bureaucratic practice generally. It often focused on issues such as the voting rights of Italians abroad, questions about receiving pensions and similar issues. It was joined by a series of in-house productions that primarily consisted of news and information programming whose roots were in the new division in charge of radio and television broadcasts since the sixties. The primary change was the elimination of large-scale programs, aside from those relating to the Italian national soccer team and the Pope, due to budget restrictions. This was part of a larger shift in the way that the service was envisioned and its repositioning as the primary conduit between Italy and Italians abroad. Speaking in 2000, Magliaro explained this as a change in the network’s priorities from ‘entertainment’ to ‘information’: There will be a larger dose of information and less space for entertainment. Informational programming will be the privileged product in which we will invest the majority of our financial and human resources, both on radio and on television. Providing information means both telling Italians abroad about Italy and allowing public opinion in our country to find out about Italians around the world. (Morgia) Magliaro’s statement suggests that there is a direct connection between the changing way of conceiving of ‘global’ Italian television and the mandate of RAI International. The spectacles of the mid-nineties, implicitly characterised by Magliaro as ‘entertainment,’ were as much about gaining the attention of those who did not speak Italian or watch Italian television as speaking to Italians abroad. The kind of participation in the nation that these events solicited were limited in that they did not move beyond a relatively passive experience of that nation as community brought together through the diffuse and distracted experience of ‘entertainment’. The rise of informazione di ritorno was a discourse that offered a particular conception of Italians abroad who were more directly involved in the affairs of the nation. However, this was more than an increased interest in the participation of audiences. Return information as developed under Magliaro’s watch posited a different kind of viewer, a viewer whose actions were explicitly and intimately linked to their rights as citizens. It is not surprising that Magliaro prefaced his comments about the transformation of RAI’s mandate and programming priorities by acknowledging that the extension of the vote to Italians abroad demands a different kind of broadcaster. The new editorial policy of RAI International is motivated from the incontrovertible fact that Italians abroad will have the right to vote in a few months … . In terms of the product that we are developing, aimed at adequately responding to the new demands created by the vote… (Morgia) The granting of the vote to Italians abroad meant that the forms of symbolic communion that produced through the mega-events needed to be supplanted by a policy that allowed for a more direct link between the ritual aspects of global media to the institutions of the Italian state. The evolution of RAI International cannot be separated from the articulation of an increasingly ethno-centric conception of citizenship and the transformation of the Italian state over the course of the 1990s and early 2000s towards. The transition between these two approaches to global television in Italy is important for understanding the events that unfolded around RAI International’s role in the development of a global Italian citizenry. A development that should not be separated from the development of increasingly stern immigration policies whose effect is to identify and export undesirable outsiders. The electoral defeat of Berlusconi in 2006 and the ongoing political instability surrounding the centre-left government in power since then has meant that the future development of RAI International and the long-term effects of the right-wing government on the cultural and political fabric of Italy remain unclear at present. The current need for a reformed electoral system and talk about the need for greater efficiency from the new executive at RAI make the evolution of the global Italian citizenry an important context for understanding the role of media in the globalised nation-state in the years to come. References Affatato, M. “I ‘Segreti’ di RAI International.” GRTV.it, 17 Feb. 1998. Arbore, R. “‘Il mio sogno? Un Programma con gli italiani all’estero.’” GRTV.it, 18 June 1999. Foot, J. Milan since the Miracle: City, Culture, and Identity. Oxford: Berg, 2001. Garofalo, R. “Understanding Mega-Events: If We Are the World, Then How Do We Change It? In C. Penley and A. Ross, eds., Technoculture. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1991. 247-270. Magliaro, M. “Speech to Second Annual Conference.” Comites Canada, 2002. Milana, A. RAI International: 40 anni, una storia. Rome: RAI, 2003. Morgia, G. La Rai del Duemila per gli italiani nel mondo: Intervista con Massimo Magliaro. 2001. Morrione, R. “Gli Italiani all’estero ‘azionisti di riferimento.’” Interview with Roberto Morrione. GRTV.it, 15 Nov. 1996. Morrione, R. Testimony of Roberto Morrione to Commitato Bicamerale per la Vigilanza RAI, 12 December 1997. Rome, 1997. 824-841. Morrione, R. Testimony of Roberto Morrione to Commitato Bicamerale per la Vigilanza RAI, 17 November 1998. Rome, 1998. 1307-1316. Morrione, R. “Tre anni memorabili.” RAI International: 40 anni, una storia. Rome: RAI, 2003. 129-137. Parks, L. Cultures in Orbit: Satellites and the Televisual. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2005. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Hayward, Mark. "Two Ways of Being Italian on Global Television." M/C Journal 10.6/11.1 (2008). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0804/05-hayward.php>. APA Style Hayward, M. (Apr. 2008) "Two Ways of Being Italian on Global Television," M/C Journal, 10(6)/11(1). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0804/05-hayward.php>.

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“We have made Italy, now we must make Italians,” in the (probably apocryphal) words of the Prime Minister, sometime after the unification of the nation in 1860. Perhaps in French, if it was said at all. (The quotation is typically attributed to Massimo D’Azeglio, the prime minister of Piedmont and predecessor of the first Italian prime minister Camillo Cavour. Many have suggested that the phrase was misquoted and misunderstood (see Doyle.) D’Azeglio spoke in Italian when he addressed the newly-formed Italian parliament, but my reference to French is meant to indicate the fragility of the national language in early Italy where much of the ruling class spoke French while the majority of the people in the peninsula still spoke regional dialects.) It was television – more than print media or even radio – that would have the biggest impact in terms of ‘making Italians.’ Writing about Italy in the 1950s, a well-known media critic suggested that television, a game show actually, “was able to succeed where The Divine Comedy failed … it gave Italy a national language” (qtd. in Foot). But these are yesterday’s problems. We have Italy and Italians. Moreover, the emergence of global ways of being and belonging are evidence of the ways in which the present transcends forms of belonging rooted in the old practices and older institutions of the nation-state. But, then again, maybe not. “A country that allows you to vote in its elections must be able to provide you with information about those elections” (Magliaro). This was 2002. The country is still Italy, but this time the Italians are anywhere but Italy. The speaker is referring to the extension of the vote to Italian citizens abroad, represented directly by 18 members of parliament, and the right to information guaranteed the newly enfranchised electorate. What, then, is the relationship between citizenship, the state and global television today? What are the modalities of involvement and participation involved in these transformations of the nation-state into a globally-articulated network of institutions? I want to think through these questions in relation to two ways that RAI International, the ‘global’ network of the Italian public broadcaster, has viewed Italians around the world at different moments in its history: mega-events and return information. Mega-Events Eighteen months after its creation in 1995, RAI International was re-launched. This decision was partially due to a change in government (which also meant a change in the executive and staff), but it was also a response to the perceived failure of RAI International to garner an adequate international audience (Morrione, Testimony [1997]). This re-launch involved a re-conceptualisation of the network’s mandate to include both information services for Italians abroad (the traditional ‘public service’ mandate for Italy’s international broadcasting) as well as programming that would increase the profile of Italian media in the global market. The mandate outlined for Roberto Morrione – appointed president as part of the re-launch – read: The necessity of strategic and operative certainties in the international positioning of the company, both with regard to programming for our co-nationals abroad and for other markets…are at the centre of the new role of RAI International. This involves bringing together in the best way the informative function of the public service, which is oriented to our community in the world in order to enrich its cultural patrimony and national identity, with an active presence in evolving markets. (Morrione, Testimony [1998]) The most significant change in the executive of the network was the appointment of Renzo Arbore, a well-known singer and bandleader, to the position of artistic director. At the time of Arbore’s appointment, the responsibilities of the artistic director at the network were ill defined, but he very quickly transformed the position into the ‘face’ of RAI International. In an interview from 1998, Arbore explained his role at the network as follows: “I’m the artistic director, which means I’m in charge of the programs that have any kind of artistic content. Also, I’m the so called “testimonial”, which is to say I do propaganda for the network, I’m the soul of RAI International” (Affatato). The most often discussed aspect of the programming on RAI International during Arbore’s tenure as artistic director was the energy and resources dedicated to events that put the spotlight on the global reach of the service itself and the possibilities that satellite distribution gave for simultaneous exchange between locations around the world. It was these ‘mega-events’ (Garofalo), in spite of constituting only a small portion of the programming schedule, that were often seen as defining RAI’s “new way” of creating international programming (Milana). La Giostra [The Merry Go Round], broadcast live on New Year’s Eve 1996, is often cited as the launch of the network’s new approach to its mission. Lasting 20 hours in total, the program was hosted by Arbore. As Morrione described it recently, The ‘mother of live shows’ was the Giostra of New Year’s ’97 where Arbore was live in the studio for 20 consecutive hours, with many guests and segments from the Pole, Peking, Moscow, Berlin, Jerusalem, San Paolo, Buenos Aires, New York and Los Angeles. It was a memorable enterprise without precedent and never to be duplicated. (Morrione, RAI International) The presentation of television as a global medium in La Giostra draws upon the relationship between live broadcasting, satellite television and conceptions of globality that has developed since the 1960s as part of what Lisa Parks describes as ‘global presence’ (Parks). However, in keeping with the dual mandate of RAI International, the audience that La Giostra is intended to constitute was not entirely hom*ogenous in nature. The lines between the ‘national’ audience, which is to say Italians abroad, and the international audience involving a broader spectrum of viewers are often blurred, but still apparent. This can be seen in the locations to which La Giostra travelled, locations that might be seen as a mirror of the places to which the broadcast might be received. On the one hand, there are segments from a series of location that speak to a global audience, many of which are framed by the symbols of the cold war and the ensuing triumph of global capitalism. The South Pole, Moscow, Beijing and a reunified Berlin can be seen as representing this understanding of the globe. These cities highlighted the scope of the network, reaching cities previously cut off from Italy behind the iron curtain (or, in the case of the Pole, the extreme of geographic isolation.) The presence of Jerusalem contributed to this mapping of the planet with an ecclesiastical, but ecumenical accent to this theme. On the other hand, Sao Paolo, Buenos Aires, and Melbourne (not mentioned by Morrione, but the first international segment in the program) also mapped the world of Italian communities around the world. The map of the globe offered by La Giostra is similar to the description of the prospective audience for RAI International that Morrione gave in November 1996 upon his appointment as director. After having outlined the network’s reception in the Americas and Australia, where there are large communities of Italians who need to be served, he goes on to note the importance of Asia: “China, India, Japan, and Korea, where there aren’t large communities of Italians, but where “made in Italy,” the image of Italy, the culture and art that separate us from others, are highly respected resources” (Morrione, “Gli Italiani”). La Giostra served as a container that held together a vision of the globe that is centered around Italy (particularly Rome, caput mundi) through the presentation on screen of the various geopolitical alliances as well as the economic and migratory connections which link Italy to the world. These two mappings of the globe brought together within the frame of the 20-hour broadcast and statements about the network’s prospective audiences suggest that two different ways of watching RAI International were often overlaid over each other. On the one hand, the segments spanning the planet stood as a sign of RAI International’s ability to produce programs at a global scale. On the other hand, there was an attempt to speak directly to communities of Italians abroad. The first vision of the planet offered by the program suggests a mode of watching more common among disinterested, cosmopolitan viewers belonging to a relatively hom*ogenous global media market. While the second vision of the planet was explicitly rooted in the international family of Italians constituted through the broadcast. La Giostra, like the ‘dual mandate’ of the network, can be seen as an attempt to bring together the national mission of network with its attempts to improve its position in global media markets. It was an attempt to unify what seemed two very different kinds of audiences: Italians abroad and non-Italians, those who spoke some Italian and those who speak no Italian at all. It was also an attempt to unify two very different ways of understanding global broadcasting: public service on the one hand and the profit-oriented goals of building a global brand. Given this orientation in the network’s programming philosophy, it is not surprising that Arbore, speaking of his activities as Artistic director, stated that his goals were to produce shows that would be accessible both to those that spoke very little Italian as well as those that were highly cultured (Arbore). In its attempt to bring these divergent practices and imagined audiences together, La Giostra can be seen as part of vision of globalisation rooted in the euphoria of the early nineties in which distance and cultural differences were reconciled through communications technology and “virtuous” transformation of ethnicity into niche markets. However, this approach to programming started to fracture and fail after a short period. The particular balance between the ethnic and the economically ecumenical mappings of the globe present in La Giostra proved to be as short lived as the ‘dual mandate’ at RAI International that underwrote its conception. Return Information The mega-events that Arbore organised came under increasing criticism from the parliamentary committees overseeing RAI’s activities as well as the RAI executive who saw them both extremely expensive to produce and of questionable value in the fulfillment of RAI’s mission as a public broadcaster (GRTV). They were sometimes described as misfatti televisivi [broadcasting misdeeds] (Arbore). The model of the televisual mega-event was increasingly targeted towards speaking to Italians abroad, dropping broader notions of the audience. This was not an overnight change, but part of a process through which the goals of the network were refocused towards ‘public service.’ Morrione, speaking before the parliamentary committee overseeing RAI’s activities, describes an evening dedicated to a celebration of the Italian flag which exemplifies this trend: The minister of Foreign Affairs asked us to prepare a Tricolore (the Italian flag) evening – that would go on air in the month of January – that we would call White, Red and Green (not the most imaginative name, but effective enough.) It would include international connections with Argentina, where there exists one of the oldest case d’italiani [Italian community centers], built shortly after the events of our Risorgimento and where they have an ancient Tricolore. We would also connect with Reggio Emilia, where the Tricolore was born and where they are celebrating the anniversary this year. Segments would also take us to the Vittoriano Museum in Rome for a series of testimonies. (Morrione, Testimony [1997]) Similar to La Giostra, the global reach of RAI International was used to create a sense of simultaneity among the dispersed communities of Italians around the world (including the population of Italy itself). The festival of the Italian flag was similarly deeply implicated in the rituals and patterns that bring together an audience and, at another level, a people. However, in the celebration of the Italian flag, the notion that such a spectacle might be of interest to those outside of a global “Italian” community has disappeared. Like La Giostra, programs of this kind are intended to be constitutive of an audience, a collectivity that would not exist were it not for the common space provided through television spectatorship. The celebration of the Italian flag is part of an attempt to produce a sense of global community organised by a shared sense of ethnic identity as expressed through the common temporality of a live broadcast. Italians around the world were part of the same Italian community not because of their shared history (even when this was the stated subject of the program as was the case with Red, White and Green), but because they co-existed by means of their experience of the mediated event. Through these events, the shared national history is produced out of the simultaneity of the common present and not, as the discourse around Italian identity presented in these programs would have it (for example, the narratives around the origin around the flag), the other way around. However, this connection between the global television event that was broadcast live and national belonging raised questions about the kind of participation they facilitated. This became a particularly salient issue with the election of the second Berlusconi government and the successful campaign to grant Italians citizens living abroad the vote, a campaign that was lead by formerly fascist (but centre-moving) Alleanza Nazionale. With the appoint of Massimo Magliaro, a longtime member of Alleanza Nazionale, to the head of the network in 2000, the concept of informazione di ritorno [return information] became increasingly prominent in descriptions of the service. The phrase was frequently used, along with tv di ritorno (Tremaglia), by the Minister for Italiani nel Mondo during the second Berlusconi administration, Mirko Tremaglia, and became a central theme in the projects envisioned for the service. (The concept had circulated previously, but it was not given the same emphasis that it would gain after Magliaro’s appointment. In an interview from 1996, Morrione is asked about his commitment to the policy of “so-called” return information. He answers the question by commenting in support of producing a ‘return image’ (immagine di ritorno), but never uses the phrase (Morrione, “Gli Italiani”). Similarly, Arbore, in an interview from 1998, is also asked about ‘so-called’ return information, but also never uses the term himself (Affatato). This suggests that its circulation was limited up until the late 1990s.) The concept of ‘return information’ – not quite a neologism in Italian, but certainly an uncommon expression – was a two-pronged, and never fully implemented, initiative. Primarily it was a policy that sought to further integrate RAI International into the system of RAI’s national television networks. This involved both improving the ability of RAI International to distribute information about Italy to communities of Italians abroad as well as developing strategies for the eventual use of programming produced by RAI International on the main national networks as a way of raising the awareness of Italians in Italy about the lives and beliefs of Italians abroad. (The programming produced by RAI International was never successfully integrated into the schedules of the other national networks. This issue remained an issue that had yet to be resolved as recently as the negotiations between the Prime Minister’s office and RAI to establish a new agreement governing RAI’s international service in 2007.) This is not to say that there was a dramatic shift in the kind of programming on the network. There had always been elements of these new goals in the programming produced exclusively for RAI International. The longest running program on the network, Sportello Italia [Information Desk Italy], provided information to Italians abroad about changes in Italian law that effected Italians abroad as well as changes in bureaucratic practice generally. It often focused on issues such as the voting rights of Italians abroad, questions about receiving pensions and similar issues. It was joined by a series of in-house productions that primarily consisted of news and information programming whose roots were in the new division in charge of radio and television broadcasts since the sixties. The primary change was the elimination of large-scale programs, aside from those relating to the Italian national soccer team and the Pope, due to budget restrictions. This was part of a larger shift in the way that the service was envisioned and its repositioning as the primary conduit between Italy and Italians abroad. Speaking in 2000, Magliaro explained this as a change in the network’s priorities from ‘entertainment’ to ‘information’: There will be a larger dose of information and less space for entertainment. Informational programming will be the privileged product in which we will invest the majority of our financial and human resources, both on radio and on television. Providing information means both telling Italians abroad about Italy and allowing public opinion in our country to find out about Italians around the world. (Morgia) Magliaro’s statement suggests that there is a direct connection between the changing way of conceiving of ‘global’ Italian television and the mandate of RAI International. The spectacles of the mid-nineties, implicitly characterised by Magliaro as ‘entertainment,’ were as much about gaining the attention of those who did not speak Italian or watch Italian television as speaking to Italians abroad. The kind of participation in the nation that these events solicited were limited in that they did not move beyond a relatively passive experience of that nation as community brought together through the diffuse and distracted experience of ‘entertainment’. The rise of informazione di ritorno was a discourse that offered a particular conception of Italians abroad who were more directly involved in the affairs of the nation. However, this was more than an increased interest in the participation of audiences. Return information as developed under Magliaro’s watch posited a different kind of viewer, a viewer whose actions were explicitly and intimately linked to their rights as citizens. It is not surprising that Magliaro prefaced his comments about the transformation of RAI’s mandate and programming priorities by acknowledging that the extension of the vote to Italians abroad demands a different kind of broadcaster. The new editorial policy of RAI International is motivated from the incontrovertible fact that Italians abroad will have the right to vote in a few months … . In terms of the product that we are developing, aimed at adequately responding to the new demands created by the vote… (Morgia) The granting of the vote to Italians abroad meant that the forms of symbolic communion that produced through the mega-events needed to be supplanted by a policy that allowed for a more direct link between the ritual aspects of global media to the institutions of the Italian state. The evolution of RAI International cannot be separated from the articulation of an increasingly ethno-centric conception of citizenship and the transformation of the Italian state over the course of the 1990s and early 2000s towards. The transition between these two approaches to global television in Italy is important for understanding the events that unfolded around RAI International’s role in the development of a global Italian citizenry. A development that should not be separated from the development of increasingly stern immigration policies whose effect is to identify and export undesirable outsiders. The electoral defeat of Berlusconi in 2006 and the ongoing political instability surrounding the centre-left government in power since then has meant that the future development of RAI International and the long-term effects of the right-wing government on the cultural and political fabric of Italy remain unclear at present. The current need for a reformed electoral system and talk about the need for greater efficiency from the new executive at RAI make the evolution of the global Italian citizenry an important context for understanding the role of media in the globalised nation-state in the years to come. References Affatato, M. “I ‘Segreti’ di RAI International.” GRTV.it, 17 Feb. 1998. Arbore, R. “‘Il mio sogno? Un Programma con gli italiani all’estero.’” GRTV.it, 18 June 1999. Foot, J. Milan since the Miracle: City, Culture, and Identity. Oxford: Berg, 2001. Garofalo, R. “Understanding Mega-Events: If We Are the World, Then How Do We Change It? In C. Penley and A. Ross, eds., Technoculture. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1991. 247-270. Magliaro, M. “Speech to Second Annual Conference.” Comites Canada, 2002. Milana, A. RAI International: 40 anni, una storia. Rome: RAI, 2003. Morgia, G. La Rai del Duemila per gli italiani nel mondo: Intervista con Massimo Magliaro. 2001. Morrione, R. “Gli Italiani all’estero ‘azionisti di riferimento.’” Interview with Roberto Morrione. GRTV.it, 15 Nov. 1996. Morrione, R. Testimony of Roberto Morrione to Commitato Bicamerale per la Vigilanza RAI, 12 December 1997. Rome, 1997. 824-841. Morrione, R. Testimony of Roberto Morrione to Commitato Bicamerale per la Vigilanza RAI, 17 November 1998. Rome, 1998. 1307-1316. Morrione, R. “Tre anni memorabili.” RAI International: 40 anni, una storia. Rome: RAI, 2003. 129-137. Parks, L. Cultures in Orbit: Satellites and the Televisual. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2005.

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Cities have long been important sites of collective memory. In this paper, I highlight the ritual and memorial functions of cities by focusing on Gibellina, a Sicilian town destroyed by earthquake, and the subsequent struggle among its community to articulate a sense of spatial belonging with its remains. By examining the productive relationships between art, landscape and collective memory, I consider how memorial objects in Gibellina have become integral to the reimagining of place, and, in some cases, to forgetting. To address the relationship between memorial objects and the articulation of communities from this unique vantage point, a significant part of my analysis compares memorial initiatives both in and around the old site on which Gibellina once stood. More specifically, my paper compares the aesthetic similarities between the Italian artist Alberto Burri’s design for a large concrete overlay of the city’s remains, and the Berlin Holocaust Memorial by the American architect Peter Eisenman. To reveal the distinctiveness of Burri’s design in relation to Eisenman’s work and the rich commentaries that have been produced in its name, and therefore to highlight the specificity of their relationship, I extend my comparison to more recent attempts at rebuilding Gibellina in the image of a “frontier city of art” (“Museum Network Belicina”).Broadly speaking, this paper is framed by a series of observations concerning the role that landscape plays in the construction or naturalization of collective identity, and by a further attempt at mapping the bonds that tend to be shared among members of particular communities in any given circ*mstance. To organize my thoughts in this area, I follow W. J. T. Mitchell’s interpretation of landscape as “a medium of exchange,” in other words, as an artistic practice that galvanizes nature for the purpose of naturalizing culture and its relations of power (5). While the terms of landscape art may in turn be described as “complicated,” “mutual” and marked by “ambivalence,” as Mitchell himself suggests, I would further argue that the artist’s sought-after result will, in almost every case, be to unify the visual and the discursive fields through an ideological operation that engenders, reinforces, and, perhaps also mystifies the constituents of community in general (9). From this perspective, landscape represents a crucial if unavoidable materialization both of community and collective memory.Conflicting viewpoints about this formation are undoubtedly present in the literature. For instance, in describing the effects of this operation, Mitchell, to use one example, will suggest that landscape as a mode of creation unfolds in ways that are similar to that of a dream, or that the materialization of landscape art is in accordance with the promise of “emancipation” that dreams inscribe into imaginaries (12). During the course of investigating and overturning the premise of Mitchell’s claim through a number of writers and commentators, I conclude my paper by turning to a famous work on the inoperative community by Jean-Luc Nancy. This work is especially useful for bringing clarity for understanding what is lost in the efforts by Gibellina’s residents to reconstruct a new city adjacent to the old, and therefore to emancipate themselves from their destructive past. By emphasizing the significance of acknowledging death for the regeneration and durability of communities and their material urban life, I suggest that the wishes of Gibellina’s residents have resulted in an environment for memory and memorialization despite apparent wishes to the contrary. In my reference to Nancy’s metaphor of ‘inoperativity’, therefore, I suggest that the community to emerge from Gibellina’s disaster is, in a sense, yet to come.Figure 1. The “Cretto di Burri” by Alberto Burri (1984-1989). Creative Commons.The old city of Gibellina was a township of Arabic and Medieval origins located southwest of Palermo in the heart of Sicily’s Belice valley. In January 1968, the region experienced a series of earthquakes as it had before. This time, however, the strongest among them provoked a rupture that within moments led to the complete destruction of towns and villages, and to the death of nearly 400 inhabitants. “From a seismological point of view,” as Susan Hough and Roger Bilham write, the towns and villages of the Belice valley were at this time “disasters in the making” (87). Maligned by a particular configuration of geological fault lines, the fragile structures along the surface of the valley were almost certain to be destroyed at some point in their lifetime. In 1968, after the largest disaster in recent history, the surviving inhabitants of the dilapidated urban centres were moved to the squalor conditions of displacement camps, in which many lived without permanent housing into the 1970s. While some of the smaller communities opted to rebuild, a number of the larger townships made the decision to move altogether. In 1971, a new settlement was created in Gibellina’s name, just eighteen kilometres west of the ruin.Since that time, I claim that a pattern of memory and forgetting has developed in the space between the ‘old’ and the ‘new’. For instance, the old city of Gibellina underwent a dramatic refurbishment in the 1980s when an internationally renowned Italian sculptor, Alberto Burri, was invited by the city to build a large concrete structure directly on top of the city’s remains. As depicted in Figure One, the artist moulded the destroyed buildings into blocks of smooth concrete surfaces. Standing roughly at human scale, Burri divided these stone slabs, or stelae, in such a way as to retain the lineaments of Gibellina’s medieval streets. Although unfinished and abandoned by the artist due to lack of funds, the tomb of this destroyed city has since become both an artistic oddity and a permanent fixture on the Sicilian landscape. As Elisebha Fabienne and Platzer write,if an ancient inhabitant of Gibellina walks in the inside of the Cretto, he is able to recognise the topic position of his house, but he is also forced by the Verfremdung [alienting effect] of the topical elements to distance himself from the past, to infer new information. (75)According to this assessment, the work’s intrinsic merit appears to be in Burri’s effort to forge a link between a shared memory of the city’s past, and the potential for that memory to fortify the imagination towards a future. In spatial terms, the merit of the work lies in preserving the skeletal imprint of the urban landscape in order to retain a semblance of this once vibrant and living community. Andrea Simitch and Val Warke appear to corroborate this hypothesis. They suggest that while Burri’s structure includes a specific imprint or reference point of the city’s remains, “embedded within the masses that construct the ghosted streets is the physical detritus of imagined narratives” (61). In other words, Simitch and Warke maintain that by using the archival or preserving function to communicate a ritual practice, Burri’s Cretto is intended to infuse the forgotten urban space of old Gibellina with a promise that it will eventually be found and therefore remembered. This promise is met, in turn, by the invitation for visitors to stroll through the hallowed interior of Gibellina as they would any other city. In this sense, the Cretto invites a plurality of narratives and meanings depending on the visitor at hand. In the absence of guidance or interruption, the hope appears to be that visitors will gain an experience of the place that is both familiar and disturbing.But there is a hidden dimension to this promise that the authors above do not explore in sufficient detail. For instance, Nigel Clark analyzes the way in which Burri has insisted upon “confronting us with the stark absence of life where once there was vitality,” a confrontation by the artist that is materialized by “cavernous wounds” (83). On this basis, by interpreting the promise of memory that others have discussed in terms of a warning about the longevity or durability of the built environment, Clark writes that Burri’s Cretto represents “an assertion of the forces of earth that have not been eclipsed by other forms of endangerment” (83). The implication of this particular forewarning is that “the precariousness of human settlement” is guaranteed by a non-human world that insists upon the relentless force of erasure (83). On the other hand, I would argue that Clark’s insistence upon situating the Cretto in relation to the natural forces of destruction ultimately represents a narrowing of perspective on Burri’s work. Significantly, by citing Burri’s choice of supposedly abstracted shapes made from lifeless concrete, Clark reduces the geographical intervention of the artist to “a paradigm of modernist austerity” (82). From Clark’s perspective, the overture to Modernism is meant to highlight Burri’s attempt at pairing the scale and proportion of the work with an effort to convey a sense of purity through abstraction. However, while some interpretations of Burri’s Cretto may be dependent upon its allusion to such Modernist formalism, it should also be recognized that the specific concerns raised by Gibellina go significantly beyond these equivocations.In fact, one crucial element of Burri’s artistic process that is not recognized by Clark is his investment in the American land art movement, which at the time of Burri’s design for Gibellina was led by Michael Heizer, Robert Smithson and other prominent artists in the United States. Burri’s debt to this movement can be detected by his gradual shift towards landscape throughout his career, and by his eventual break from the enclosed and constrained space of the gallery. On this basis, the crumbling city design at Gibellina obliterates the boundaries as to what constitutes a work of art in relation to the land it occupies, and this, in turn, throws into question the specific criteria that we use to assess its value or artistic merit. In an important way, land art and landscape in general forces us to rethink the relationship between art and community in unparalleled ways. To put it another way, if Clark’s overriding concern for that which lies beneath the surface allows us to consider the importance of relationships between memory, forgetting, and erasure, I argue that Burri’s concern with the surface and the ground make it clear that projects such as the Gibellina Cretto might be better paired with memorial sites that deal in architecture.Figure 2. The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe / Berlin Holocaust Memorial, by Peter Eisenman. Photograph courtesy of the author.A useful comparison in this regard is Peter Eisenman’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in downtown Berlin. For one, not only is Eisenman’s site composed of a similar exterior of concrete stelae, those concrete blocks resembling gravestones, but it has also been routinely scorned for the same reasons that Clark raised against Burri as mentioned above. To put it another way, while visitors may be struck by the memorial’s haunting and inspirational configuration of voids, some notable commentators, including the venerable James E. Young, have insinuated that the site signifies a restoration of the monument, derived as it is from a modernist architecture in which recuperation and amnesia are at play with each other (184-224). A more sympathetic reading of Eisenman’s memorial might point to the uniquely architectural vision he held for cultural memory. With Adrian Parr for instance, we find that the traumatic memory of the Holocaust can be effectively transposed through the virtual content of the imagination as personified by visitors to Eisenman’s memorial. That is, by attending to the atrocities of the past, Parr claims that we need not be exhausted by the overwhelming sense of destruction that the memorial site brings to the literal surface. Rather, we might benefit more from considering the event of destruction as but one aspect of the spatial experience of the place to which it is dedicated—an experience that must be open-ended by design. By using the topographical lens that Parr, taking several pages from Gilles Deleuze, describes as “intensive,” I argue that Eisenman’s design is unique for its explicit encouragement to be both creative and present simultaneously (158).On this account, Parr makes the compelling assertion that memorial culture facilitates an epistemic rupture or “break,” that that it reveals an opportunity to restore the potential for using the place occupied by memory as a starting point for effecting social change (3). Parr writes that “memorial culture is utopian memory thinking”—a defining slogan, to be sure, but one with which the author hopes will re-establish the link between memory and the force of life, and, in the process, to recognize the energetic resources that remain concealed by the traditional narratives of memorialization (3). Stefano Corbo corroborates Parr’s assertion by pointing to Eisenman’s efforts in the 1980s to supplement formal concerns with archaeological perspectives, and therefore to develop a theory whereby architecture presages a “deep structure,” in which the artistry or attempt at formal innovation ultimately rests on “a process of invention” itself (41). To accomplish this aim, a specific reference should be made to an early period in Eisenman’s career, in which the architect turned to conceptual issues as opposed to the demands of materiality, and more significantly, to a critical rethinking of site-specific engagement (Bedard). Included in this turn was a willingness on Eisenman’s part to explore the layered and textured history of cities, as well as the linguistic or deconstructive relationships that exist between the ground and the trace.The interdisciplinary complexity of Eisenman’s approach is one that responds to the dominance of architectural form, and it therefore mirrors, as Corbo writes, a delicate interplay between “presence and absence, permanence and loss” (44). The city of Berlin with its cultural memory thus evinces a sort of tectonic rupture and collision upon its surfaces, but a rupture that both runs parallel and opposite to the natural disaster that engulfed Gibellina in 1968. Returning to Parr’s demand that we begin to (re)assert the power of virtual and imaginative space, I argue that Eisenman’s memorial design may be better appreciated for its ability to situate the city itself in relation to competing terms of artistic practice. That is, if Eisenman’s efforts indicate a softening “of the boundary between architecture and the landscape,” to quote Tomà Berlanda, the Holocaust Memorial might in turn be a productive counterpoint in the task of working through the specificity of Burri’s design and the meaning with which it has since been attached (2).Burri’s Cretto raises a number of questions for this hypothesis, as with the Cretto we find a displacement of the constitutive process that writers such as W.J.T. Mitchell describe above in relation to the generative potential of community. Undoubtedly, the imperative to unify is present in the Cretto’s aesthetic presentation, as the concrete surfaces maintain the capacity to reflect the light of the sun against a wide green earth that stretches beyond the visitor’s horizon. On the other hand, while Mitchell, along with Parr and other commentators might opt to insist upon a deeper correlation between the unifying function of the landscape and the forces of life, intensity, or desire, I would only reiterate that Burri’s design is ultimately based on establishing a meaningful relationship with death, not life, and he is consequently focused on the much less spectacular mission of providing solutions as to what the remains should become in the aftermath of total destruction. If there is an intensity to speak of here, it is a maligned intensity, and an intensity that can only be established through relation.Figure 3. The “Porta del Belice” by Pietro Consagra (2014). Wiki Commons.If Burri’s Cretto were measured by the criteria that are variously described by Mitchell and others, the effects that the landscape produces would have necessarily to account for an expression of desire for emancipation from death. However, in a significant departure from Eisenman’s Holocaust Memorial, Burri’s design by itself is marked by a throughout absence of any expression of desire for emancipation as such. Indeed, finding such a promised emancipatory narrative would require one to cast their gaze away from the Cretto altogether, and towards a nearby urban center that has supposedly triumphed over the very need for a memory culture at all. This urban center is none other than Gibellina Nuova. As a point in fact, the settlers of Gibellina Nuova did insist upon emancipating themselves from their destructive past. In 1971, the city planners and governors of Gibellina Nuova made efforts to attract contemporary Italian artists and architects, to design and build a series of commemorative structures, and ultimately to make the settlement into a “città di frontiera dell’arte”—a frontier city of art (“Museum Network Belicina”). With the potential for rejuvenation just a stone’s throw away from the original city, the former inhabitants appear to have become immediately invested in the sort of utopian potential that would make its architectural wonders capable of transgressing the line that perennially divides art from community and from the living world. Rivalled only by the refurbishment of Marfa, Texas, which in the last twenty years has become a shrine to minimalist sculpture, the edifices at Gibellina Nuova have been authored by some of Italy’s better-known mid-century artists and architects, including Ludovico Quaroni, Vitorrio Gregotti, and, most notably, Pietro Consagra, whose ‘Porta del Belice’ (Figure Two) has become the most iconic urban fixture of the new urban designs. With the hopes of becoming a sort of “open-air museum” in which to attract international visitors, the city is now in possession of an exceedingly large number of public memorials and avant-garde buildings in various states of decay and disrepair (Bileddo). Predictably, this museological distinction has become a curse in many ways. Some commentators have argued that the obsession among city planners to create a “laboratory of art and architecture” has led in fact to an urban center of monstrous proportions: a city space that can only be described as “elliptical and spinning” (Bileddo). Whereas Gibellina Nuova was supposed to represent a rebalancing of the forces of life in relation to the funereal themes of the Cretto, the robust initiatives of the 1980s have instead produced an egregious lack of cohesiveness, a severed link to Sicilian culture, and a stark erasure of the distinctive traditions of the Belice valley.On the other hand, this experiment in urban design has been reduced to a venerable time capsule of 1970s Italian sculpture, an archive that persists but in constant disrepair. More significantly, however, the city’s failure to deliver on its many promises raises important questions about the ritual and memorial functions of urban space in general, of what specific relationships need to be forged between the history of a place and its architectural presentation, and the ways in which memorials come to reflect, privilege or convoke particular values over those of others. As Elisebha Fabienne Platzer writes, “Gibellina portrays its future in order to forget,” as “its faith in contemporary art is precisely a reaction to death,” or, more specifically, to its effacement (73). If the various pastiche designs of the city’s buildings and ritual edifices fail to stand the measure of time, I claim that it is not simply because they are gaudy reminders of a time best forgotten, but rather because they signify the restless hunt for resolution among inhabitants of this still-unsettled community.Whereas Burri’s Cretto activates a process of mourning and working-through that proves to be unresolvable and yet necessary, the city of Gibellina Nuova operates instead by neutralizing and dividing this process. Taken as a whole, the irreparable relationship between the two sites offers competing images of the relation between place and community. From the time of its division by earthquake if not sooner, the inhabitants of Gibellina became an “inoperative” community in the same way that the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy has famously described. In the specific hopes of uncovering the motives of Burri and those of the designers and architects of Gibellina Nuova, I argue that Nancy uses the terms of inoperability as a makeshift solution for the persistent rootedness of communities in an atomized metaphysics for which the relationality between subjects is an abiding problem. Nancy defines community on the basis of its relational content alone, and for this reason he is able to make the claim that death itself should be a necessary moment of its articulation. Nancy writes that “community has not taken place,” as beyond “what society has crushed or lost, it is something that happens to us in the form of a question, waiting, event or imperative” (11).Though Nancy is attempting to provide his own interpretation of the impervious dialectic between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, between “community” and “society,” the substance of his assertion can be brought into a critical reading of Gibellina’s abiding problem of its formations of collective memory in the aftermath of destruction. For instance, it might be argued that if we leave the experience of loss aside, we can perhaps begin to acknowledge that communities are transformed through complex interactions for which their inert physicality provides but one important indication. While “old” Gibellina was not lost in a day, Gibellina Nuova was not created in an instant. For Nancy, it would rather be the case that “death is indissociable from community, and that it is through death that the community reveals itself” (14). Given this claim, while Gibellina Nuova has undoubtedly been shaped and reconstituted by the architecture of the future and the desire to forget, it could equally be argued that this very architecture shares in a reciprocal exchange with the Cretto, a circuit of memory that inadvertently houses an archive of the city’s destructive past. As the community comes into being through resistance, entropy, possibility and reparation, the city landscape provides some clues regarding the trace of this activity as left upon its ground.ReferencesBedard, Jean-Francois, ed. Cities of Artificial Excavation: The Work of Peter Eisenman, 1978-1988. New York: Rizzoli Publishing, 1994.Berlanda, Tomà. Architectural Topographies: A Graphic Lexicon of How Buildings Touch the Ground. New York: Routledge, 2014.Bileddo, Marco. “Back in Sicily / The Three Dogs Gibellina.” Eodoto108 Magazine. 30 July 2014. Bilham, Roger G., and Susan Elizabeth Hough. After the Earth Quakes: Elastic Rebound on an Urban Planet. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.Clark, Nigel. Inhuman Nature: Sociable Life on a Dynamic Planet. Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications, 2010.Corbo, Stefano. From Formalism to Weak Form: The Architecture and Philosophy of Peter Eisenman. Farnham: Ashgate, 2014.Mitchell, W.J. Thomas. Landscape and Power. University of Chicago Press, 2002.Museum Network Belicina. Nancy, Jean-Luc. Inoperative Community. Trans. Christopher Fynsk. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991.Parr, Adrian. Deleuze and Memorial Culture: Desire, Singular Memory and the Politics of Trauma. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008.Platzer, Elisbha Fabienne. “Semiotics of Spaces: City and Landart.” Seni/able Spaces: Space, Art and the Environment. Edward Huijbens and Ólafur Jónsson, eds. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007.Simitch, Andrea, and Val Warke. The Language of Architecture: 26 Principles Every Architect Should Know. Rockport Publishers Incorporated, 2014.Young, James E. At Memory’s Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002.

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Hors d’oeuvre The popularity of cookbooks and culinary television shows in the last few years has been the origin of all sorts of new phenomena, such as literature crossing the bridge from cookbooks to such subgenres as food memoirs and culinary travelogues, or the discovery of new food cultures and food vocabulary. We can now cook the Basque menestra following the recipe of the famous blogger and cookbook author, Aran Goayaga, or try our hand at the Chinese soup tangyuan from Leslie Li’s Daughter of Heaven regardless of where we live. But how well does food translate across languages and cultures? I know what to expect from menestra as I am familiar with the Italian minestrone, which was introduced into the western dialects of Slovene as mineštra. But when reading about tangyuan, there is no mental image, much less a taste imprint, accompanying the word. Language and food are closely linked, if for nothing else, for the fact that the mouth is instrumental in both. For language, the oral cavity is the means of expression, for food it is the means for reception and tasting. It is like an intersection where language and food meet. When we reminisce about a favourite childhood dish or food, we can virtually taste it only by saying the word. The senses, supported by emotions, are a powerful tool, a reliable memory. It is for this reason that sometimes emotions are more easily expressed through food than with words, such as Tita’s longing and desperation in Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate. It is perhaps because of this inability to truly verbalise the wonder and deliciousness of food that when translating food between different languages and cultures, meanings and tastes can become unclear or lost. Appetiser In less exact culinary genres, such as food memoirs, difficult translations can be tackled by using approximate and roundabout descriptions. “Metaphors are very plentiful, evocative, and useful in food memoirs. They are often created to explain exotic foods and culinary practices in terms that are more familiar to [...] readers” (Waxman 373). Similarly, in an interview about multiculturalism and identity, Homi Bhabha suggests that “all forms of culture are in some ways related to each other” and thus translatable (Rutherford 209–10). However, Bhabha is also referring to metaphors, myths, and symbols. Food, however, is a very particular ingredient of culture that cannot be always expressed with metaphors when translated. Cookbooks require an exact terminology; metaphors are of little help when a soufflé collapses or steaks end up overdone. Yet despite cultural, ethnic, religious, and other differences, there are certain concepts, such as beauty, that can be almost universally appreciated. Kant’s notion of “common sense“ explains what enables us to comprehend and appreciate beauty. By this universal communicability Kant “means that humans all must have a kind of sensing ability which operates the same way” (Burnham). This sensing ability could easily be expanded onto the beauty (and deliciousness) of food. After all, just as everyone can appreciate the magnificence of a Renoir, they can enjoy the satisfying mix of spices and herbs in a steak tartare, regardless of their mother tongue. And yet, when food is transformed into a written recipe and the language becomes a barrier, the opportunity for misunderstanding becomes greater. Walter Benjamin maintains that in translation, “the transfer can never be total [...] Even when all the surface content has been extracted and transmitted, the primary concern of the genuine translator remains elusive. Unlike the words of the original, it is not translatable, because the relationship between content and language is quite different in the original and the translation” (19). Furthermore, translation “implies adapting the meaning of a proposition, enabling it to pass from one code to another” (Bourriaud 30). If translation means adaptation, then in the process we lose the nuances of dishes that differ from one village to the next, not to mention from one nation to another at the other end of the world. And with this, we can lose subtle “insights into cultures” (Waxman 364). Brett Jocelyn Epstein, a translator and editor of a number of cookbooks, enumerates several issues that cause trouble when translating culinary texts, among them the availability of ingredients, different cuts of meats, measurements, and the kitchen equipment. While all are of equal importance for the translation of a text, let us focus on the difficulties that can arise when translating the ingredients that can sometimes be essential for a dish but difficult to find in a foreign country. Epstein emphasizes that simply substituting an ingredient with a more easily obtainable one is not an appropriate solution if this is repeated throughout a cookbook for recipe after recipe, ingredient after ingredient. There are limits to the changes a translator can make in a text; limits that turn one dish into an entirely new fare with a host of new ingredients. Instead, Epstein suggests keeping the original ingredients, but adding a list of possible substitutes. National Dish Let us have a look at an edible example. In France, crème fraîche is a naturally fermented thick cream, but the version sold in the UK is fermented by adding sour cream, buttermilk, or yoghurt. In North Wales it is known as “croghurt“ (a portmanteau word for “cream and yoghurt“) (Ayto 103). Crème fraîche, although slightly sour with pH of about 4.5, is not sour cream, but in many countries sour cream is used as a substitute because the French version is unobtainable. On the contrary, in Italy, it is near impossible to find sour cream. There is no tradition of using it in Italian cuisine, and it is mostly immigrants from other countries, such as Ukrainians, Poles, or Slovenians, who use it in their cooking. Panna acida or panna agra, as sour cream is known in Italy, is being imported and only sold in selected shops. As another example, the Swedes use filmjölk and gräddfil which are most often translated as yoghurt and cultivated buttermilk respectively, although these translations are mere approximations. Filmjölk may resemble yoghurt in consistency but it is fermented by different bacteria that give it a less sour taste. Gräddfil is a little thicker than yoghurt and also not as sour. Then there are kefir, piimä, kumis, lassi, ayran, and clabber, to mention just a few related, but different, products. How do such untranslatable ingredients affect the final outcome? Crêpes with fruit and sour cream are not quite the same as with crème fraîche; sour cream lacks the creaminess of the crème and has a tangier taste. Worse still, sour cream can curdle when added to a soup and heated, while crème fraîche does not. It is evident then, that culinary translation affects more than just words. This is not, however, only a matter for chefs and cooks to consider; it is also an issue when an author wants to share traditional dishes with readers of other nationalities and especially when the core ingredients of their (or their country’s) signature dishes are not available globally. I am not here referring only to such unusual ingredients as the honeypot ants used in bush tucker. Some foods, despite the logistics accessibility of every nook and cranny of our world, are sometimes still difficult or impossible to obtain outside their place of origin simply for the lack of a high enough demand. Is it, then, better to stick to the original ingredients and keep the integrity of the recipe, or is it better to adapt the dish to another culture or let it exist between cultures? Would we rather our recipe remain a “wannabe dish” because readers are unable to find the ingredients for it, or would we prefer for them to enjoy an approximation of our creation? Linguist, anthropologist, and renowned chef, Rick Bayless, tackles the translation of food the same way he would translate languages. He introduced countless Mexican dishes into the North American cuisine through his award-winning Mexican restaurants, cookbooks, and his television show Mexico–One Plate at a Time. He looks at the issue of translation not solely from the point of view of the original cuisine, but also from the perspective of the target audience. “You have to really understand both cultures. Not just the words, not just the ingredients or the dishes out of context, but you have to understand it on a much broader perspective” (Translating Food). He is trying to present traditional Mexican dishes in a way that will make them “understandable“ in the American context. Bayless maintains that “people will cook a dish exactly the way it's done in the host culture,” but that makes it “this sort of relic that’s not understandable” in the target culture’s context. Or as German writer and poet, Rudolf Pannwitz, stated, “our translations, even the best ones, proceed from a wrong premise. They want to turn Hindi, Greek, English into German instead of turning German into Hindi, Greek, English” (qtd. in Benjamin 22). The more ingredients, the more complex the situation becomes, and sometimes a dish is near impossible to translate because of its cultural specificity. Mostly, such names of dishes are kept in the original, like polenta, sushi, or the already mentioned tangyuan. But particularly smaller nations, with subsequently smaller languages, feel the need to make their dishes more recognisable. For example, certain Slovenian dishes, such as idrijski žlikrofi, are registered as a traditional speciality (TSG) at the European Commission but even as such they often have poor recognisability. The same is true of other typical Slovenian dishes; while well known and appreciated at home, they are often quite unknown outside the country’s borders. Consequently, to reach higher recognisability, we often over-translate. Fig. 1. The Making of idrijski žlikrofi. 2013. The Author. An example of this is a Slovenian dessert whose established name in English is the “Prekmurian layer cake“ (a layered cake with apples, poppy seeds, cottage cheese and walnuts from the Prekmurje region, a region across the river Mura). However, it happens quite often that you will receive a decidedly different translation if you ask a waiter in a restaurant or people on the street what prekmurska gibanica is. Someone at some point literally translated it as the “over Mura moving cake“ (gibanica contains the morpheme gib- meaning “movement, motion“, hence “moving cake“, although it has nothing to do with moving). The wrong translation is probably mentioned more often than the correct one and it is so nonsensical that it has been preserved as a running joke, while some still think it is a correct translation. Another quandary for the translator is the existence of words that denote different dishes in one language. Within hundred kilometres of my hometown, the name fancelj refers to three different culinary delights. We use it to denote an omelette-like dish of beaten eggs with yarrow, lemon balm or other herbs occasionally added to it. In the upper Soča valley, it is known to denote doughnuts. Further to the south, fancelj stands for deep-fried buns similar to what the French call pets-de-nonne (literally “nun’s farts“). Similarly, in Swedish, the terms kaka and tårta quite often overlap in their usage and thus cause confusion when being translated into English (as cake and torte, and sometimes even as cookie, depending on the type of pastry in the original recipe). If one is not familiar with such dialectal distinctions or cultural peculiarities, it is difficult to avoid mistranslations. Such delicate translations also include the Turkish coffee that becomes Greek coffee in Greek bars, French toast that is called pain perdu in France, or Russian salad, called salade russe by the French, but French salad by Slovenians (and salat oliv’e by the Russians). Furthermore, if you order à la mode in France, you will be served beef braised with vegetables. In the US, however, you can only order à la mode for dessert as it means an apple pie or similar dessert served with ice cream (Ayto). These examples are often due to disagreements and misconceptions about who created a certain dish, and wrong usage can cause resentment among the (presumably) wronged parties. Sometimes, delicious bits of information get lost in translation. A Slovenian dialectal word knedelj is usually translated into English as dumpling, a neat and straightforward translation. But in the original word knedelj that was borrowed from the German knödel, related to kneten (Snoj 209), one can detect traces of Proto-Germanic knedanan that developed through Old Saxon knedan into Old English cnedan and today’s knead (Online Etymology Dictionary). The two words, one English and the other dialectal Slovene, originate in the same ancient expression. But I suppose only linguists would find this information worth mulling over for a few seconds before tucking into a wholesome serving of plum dumplings. Considering the aforementioned difficulties of culinary translation, it is not surprising that certain words are often simply left in the original. This is especially true of Italian dishes, such as types of pasta, or certain Asian fares (for more on translating Chinese dishes see Mu 2010). Consequently, many are now familiar with calzone, bento, farfalle, sashimi, zucchini, and zabaglione (the latter of which is also known as sabayon, zabaione, and zabajone). Even once the words find their place in their adoptive language and the users become wholly familiarised with their meaning and thus the problem of translation is avoided, another difficulty arises—that of adapting the word (morphologically) to the new language. Pine nuts in American English are also called pignoli, a word borrowed from Italian. There seems to be considerable confusion as to the plural form of the word in its English usage. Pignoli, originally a plural form of pignolo, “hovers between singular and plural in English”, where subsequently two other plural forms have appeared—pignolia and pignolis (Ayto 277). Dessert For readers, getting to know about other cultures’s foods and their preparation can be very enriching for gaining an understanding of both those particular cultures and, in turn, their own (Waxman), but for writers and translators of cookbooks, food memoirs, culinary travelogues, and other such culturally and culinary specific genres (and especially those from smaller countries), translating food expressions can be challenging. There is no simple rule that helps translate every expression or ingredient. Translations must be carried out on a case-to-case basis, sometimes compromising the food, sometimes the translation. Similarly, as more and more people become nomads in the 21st century, immigrating for economic or political reasons, family, or simply for fun, in the same way food too is becoming a “portable practice” (Bourriaud 33) that crosses boundaries, cultures, and languages. Due to this, food is taking on a new role; its functions “both unifying and divisive” (Waxman 366). The culinary translator’s task should be to translate in such a way that the divisive effect is minimised as much as possible and yet the text retains its cultural flavour. This is difficult, and requires knowledge of both the source and target languages and cultures, but ultimately it can be done. Food and language are like a pair of tango dancers—caught in a passionate embrace, but bickering constantly nonetheless, their tastes too dissimilar. Or, as Isabel Allende suggests, to seduce a lover one needs both food and words: “language is also aphrodisiac in regard to food; commenting on the dishes, their flavours and perfumes, is a sensual exercise for which we have a vast vocabulary filled with wit, metaphors, references, humour, word games, and subtleties” (106). But to seduce with words, we must first taste the food. Perhaps translators and authors of culinary texts are not all accomplished cooks, but it is of great help if they can prepare and taste the dishes and ingredients that they are attempting to adapt to new cultures and environments. References Allende, Isabel. Aphrodite, A Memoir of the Senses. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1998. Ayto, John. The Diner’s Dictionary: Word Origins of Food & Drink. UK: Oxford UP, 2012. Benjamin, Walter. “The Task of the Translator.” The Translation Studies Reader. Ed. Lawrence Venuti. London: Routledge, 2004. 15–25. Bourriaud, Nicolas. The Radicant. New York: Lukas & Sternberg, 2010. Burnham, Douglas. “Kant’s Aesthetics.” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy 30 Jun. 2005. 7 Apr. 2013 ‹http://www.iep.utm.edu/kantaest›. Epstein, Brett Jocelyn. “What’s Cooking: Translating Food.” Translation Journal, 13.3 (2009). 11 Mar. 2013 ‹http://www.bokorlang.com/journal/49cooking.htm›. Esquivel, Laura. Like Water for Chocolate. USA: Transworld Publishers, 1989. Goayaga, Aran. Small Plates & Sweet Treats: My Family’s Journey to Gluten-free Cooking. New York: Little, Brown & Company, 2012. Li, Leslie. Daughter of Heaven: A Memoir of Earthly Recipes. New York: Arcade, 2005. Mu, John Congjun. “English Translation of Chinese Dish Names.” Translation Journal 14.4 (Oct. 2010). 8 Apr. 2013 ‹http://www.translationjournal.net/journal/54dishes.htm›. Online Etymology Dictionary. 12 Feb. 2013 ‹http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=knead&allowed_in_frame=0›. Rutherford, Jonathan. “The Third Space: Interview with Homi Bhabha.” Identity: Community, Culture, Difference. Ed. Jonathan Rutherford. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990. 207–221. Snoj, Marko. Slovenski etimološki slovar. Ljubljana: Modrijan založba, 2009. “Translating Food.” Visual Thesaurus 23 May 2007. 11 Mar. 2013 ‹https://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/wc/translating-food›. Waxman, Barbara Frey. “Food Memoirs: What They Are, Why They Are Popular, and Why They Belong in the Literature Classroom.” College English 70.4 (2008): 363–82.

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Art Imitating ArtThis article discusses the global, historical and literary references that are present in the video game franchise Bayonetta. In particular, references to Dante’s Divine Comedy, the works of Dr John Dee, and European traditions of witchcraft are examined. Bayonetta is modern in the sense that she is a woman of the world. Her character shows how history and literature may be used, re-used, and evolve into new formats, and how modern games travel abroad through time and space.Drawing creative inspiration from other works is nothing new. Ideas and themes, art and literature are frequently borrowed and recast. Carmel Cedro cites Northrop Frye in the example of William Shakespeare and Charles Dickens. These writers created stories and characters that have developed a level of acclaim and resonated with many individuals, resulting in countless homages over the years. The forms that these appropriations take vary widely. Media formats, such as film adaptations and even books, take the core characters or narrative from the original and re-work them into a different context. For example, the novel Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson published in 1883 was adapted into the 2002 Walt Disney animated film Treasure Planet. The film maintained the concepts of the original narrative and retained key characters but re-imaged them to fit the science fiction genre (Clements and Musker).The video-game franchise Bayonetta draws inspiration from distinct sources creating the foundation for the universe and some plot points to enhance the narrative. The main sources are Dante’s Divine Comedy, the projections of John Dee and his mystical practices as well as the medieval history of witches.The Vestibule: The Concept of BayonettaFigure 1: Bayonetta Concept ArtBayonetta ConceptsThe concept of Bayonetta was originally developed by video game designer Hideki Kamiya, known previously for his work including The Devil May Cry and the Resident Evil game series. The development of Bayonetta began with Kamiya requesting a character design that included three traits: a female lead, a modern witch, and four guns. This description laid the foundations for what was to become the hack and slash fantasy heroine that would come to be known as Bayonetta. "Abandon all hope ye who enter here"The Divine Comedy, written by Dante Alighieri during the 1300s, was a revolutionary piece of literature for its time, in that it was one of the first texts that formalised the vernacular Italian language by omitting the use of Latin, the academic language of the time. Dante’s work was also revolutionary in its innovative contemplations on religion, art and sciences, creating a literary collage of such depth that it would continue to inspire hundreds of years after its first publication.Figure 2: Domenico di Michelino’s fresco of Dante and his Divine Comedy, surrounded by depictions of scenes in the textBayonetta explores the themes of The Divine Comedy in a variety of ways, using them as an obvious backdrop, along with subtle homages and references scattered throughout the game. The world of Bayonetta is set in the Trinity of Realities, three realms that co-exist forming the universe: Inferno, Paradiso and the Chaos realm—realm of humans—and connected by Purgitorio—the intersection of the trinity. In the game, Bayonetta travels throughout these realms, primarily in the realm of Purgitorio, the area in which magical and divine entities may conduct their business. However, there are stages within the game where Bayonetta finds herself in Paradiso and the human realm. This is a significant factor relating to The Divine Comedy as these realms also form the areas explored by Dante in his epic poem. The depth of these parallels is not exclusive to factors in Dante’s masterpiece, as there are also references to other art and literature inspired by Dante’s legacy. For example, the character Rodin in Bayonetta runs a bar named “The Gates of Hell.” In 1917 French artist Auguste Rodin completed a sculpture, The Gates of Hell depicting scenes and characters from The Divine Comedy. Rodin’s bar in Bayonetta is manifested as a dark impressionist style of architecture, with an ominous atmosphere. In early concept art, the proprietor of the bar was to be named Mephisto (Kamiya) derived from “Mephistopheles”, another name for the devil in some mythologies. Figure 3: Auguste Rodin's Gate of Hell, 1917Aspects of Dante’s surroundings and the theological beliefs of his time can be found in Bayonetta, as well as in the 2013 anime film adaptation Bayonetta, Bloody Fate. The Christian virtues, revered during the European Middle Ages, manifest themselves as enemies and adversaries that Bayonetta must combat throughout the game. Notably, the names of the cardinal virtues serve as “boss ranked” foes. Enemies within a game, usually present at the end of a level and more difficult to defeat than regular enemies within “Audito Sphere” of the “Laguna Hierarchy” (high levels of the hierarchy within the game), are named in Italian; Fortitudo, Temperantia, Lustitia, and Sapientia. These are the virtues of Classical Greek Philosophy, and reflect Dante’s native language as well as the impact the philosophies of Ancient Greece had on his writings. The film adaption of Bayonetta incorporated many elements from the game. To adjust the game effectively, it was necessary to augment the plot in order to fit the format of this alternate media. As it was no longer carried by gameplay, the narrative became paramount. The diverse plot points of the new narrative allowed for novel possibilities for further developing the role of The Divine Comedy in Bayonetta. At the beginning of the movie, for example, Bayonetta enters as a nun, just as she does in the game, only here she is in church praying rather than in a graveyard conducting a funeral. During her prayer she recites “I am the way into the city of woe, abandon all hope, oh, ye who enter here,” which is a Canto of The Divine Comedy. John Dee and the AngelsDr John Dee (1527—1608), a learned man of Elizabethan England, was a celebrated philosopher, mathematician, scientist, historian, and teacher. In addition, he was a researcher of magic and occult arts, as were many of his contemporaries. These philosopher magicians were described as Magi and John Dee was the first English Magus (French). He was part of a school of study within the Renaissance intelligensia that was influenced by the then recently discovered works of the gnostic Hermes Trismegistus, thought to be of great antiquity. This was in an age when religion, philosophy and science were intertwined. Alchemy and chemistry were still one, and astronomers, such as Johannes Kepler and Tyco Brahe cast horoscopes. John Dee engaged in spiritual experiments that were based in his Christian faith but caused him to be viewed in some circles as dangerously heretical (French).Based on the texts of Hermes Trismegistas and other later Christian philosophical and theological writers such as Dionysius the Areopagite, Dee and his contemporaries believed in celestial hierarchies and levels of existence. These celestial hierarchies could be accessed by “real artificial magic,” or applied science, that included mathematics, and the cabala, or the mystical use of permutations of Hebrew texts, to access supercelestial powers (French). In his experiments in religious magic, Dee was influenced by the occult writings of Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa (1486—1535). In Agrippa’s book, De Occulta Philosophia, there are descriptions for seals, symbols and tables for summoning angels, to which Dee referred in his accounts of his own magic experiments (French). Following his studies, Dee constructed a table with a crystal placed on it. By use of suitable rituals prescribed by Agrippa and others, Dee believed he summoned angels within the crystal, who could be seen and conversed with. Dee did not see these visions himself, but conversed with the angels through a skryer, or medium, who saw and heard the celestial beings. Dee recorded his interviews in his “Spiritual Diaries” (French). Throughout Bayonetta there are numerous seals and devices that would appear to be inspired by the work of Dee or other Renaissance Magi.In these sessions, John Dee, through his skryer Edward Kelley, received instruction from several angels. The angels led him to believe he was to be a prophet in the style of the biblical Elijah or, more specifically like Enoch, whose prophesies were detailed in an ancient book that was not part of the Bible, but was considered by many scholars as divinely inspired. As a result, these experiments have been termed “Enochian conversations.” The prophesies received by Dee foretold apocalyptic events that were to occur soon and God’s plan for the world. The angels also instructed Dee in a system of magic to allow him to interpret the prophesies and participate in them as a form of judge. Importantly, Dee was also taught elements of the supposed angelic language, which came to be known as “Enochian” (Ouellette). Dee wrote extensively about his interviews with the angels and includes statements of their hierarchy (French, Ouellette). This is reflected in the “Laguna Hierarchy” of Bayonetta, sharing similarities in name and appearance of the angels Dee had described. Platinum Games creative director Jean-Pierre Kellams acted as writer and liaison, assisting the English adaptation of Bayonetta and was tasked by Hideki Kamiya to develop Bayonetta’s incantations and subsequently the language of the angels within the game (Kellams).The Hammer of WitchesOne of the earliest and most integral components of the Bayonetta franchise is the fact that the title character is a witch. Witches, sorcerers and other practitioners of magic have been part of folklore for centuries. Hideki Kamiya stated that the concept of” classical witches” was primarily a European legend. In order to emulate this European dimension, he had envisioned Bayonetta as having a British accent which resulted in the game being released in English first, even though Platinum Games is a Japanese company (Kamiya). The Umbra Witch Clan hails from Europe within the Bayonetta Universe and relates more closely to the traditional European medieval witch tradition (Various), although some of the charms Bayonetta possesses acknowledge the witches of different parts of the world and their cultural context. The Evil Harvest Rosary is said to have been created by a Japanese witch in the game. Bayonetta herself and other witches of the game use their hair as a conduit to summon demons and is known as “wicked weaves” within the game. She also creates her tight body suit out of her hair, which recedes when she decides to use a wicked weave. Using hair in magic harks back to a legend that witches often utilised hair in their rituals and spell casting (Guiley). It is also said that women with long and beautiful hair were particularly susceptible to being seduced by Incubi, a form of demon that targets sleeping women for sexual intercourse. According to some texts (Kramer), witches formed into the beings that they are through consensual sex with a devil, as stated in Malleus Maleficarum of the 1400s, when he wrote that “Modern Witches … willingly embrace this most foul and miserable form of servitude” (Kramer). Bayonetta wields her sexuality as proficiently as she does any weapon. This lends itself to the belief that women of such a seductive demeanour were consorts to demons.Purgitorio is not used in the traditional sense of being a location of the afterlife, as seen in The Divine Comedy, rather it is depicted as a dimension that exists concurrently within the human realm. Those who exist within this Purgitorio cannot be seen with human eyes. Bayonetta’s ability to enter and exit this space with the use of magic is likened to the myth that witches were known to disappear for periods of time and were purported to be “spirited away” from the human world (Kamiya).Recipes for gun powder emerge from as early as the 1200s but, to avoid charges of witchcraft due to superstitions of the time, they were hidden by inventors such as Roger Bacon (McNab). The use of “Bullet Arts” in Bayonetta as the main form of combat for Umbra Witches, and the fact that these firearm techniques had been honed by witches for centuries before the witch hunts, implies that firearms were indeed used by dark magic practitioners until their “discovery” by ordinary humans in the Bayonetta universe. In addition to this, that “Lumen Sages” are not seen to practice bullet arts, builds on the idea of guns being a practice of black magic. “Lumen Sages” are the Light counterpart and adversaries of the Umbra Witches in Bayonetta. The art of Alchemy is incorporated into Bayonetta as a form of witchcraft. Players may create their own health, vitality, protective and mana potions through a menu screen. This plays on the taboo of chemistry and alchemy of the 1500s. As mentioned, John Dee's tendency to dabble in such practices was considered by some to be heretical (French, Ouellette).Light and dark forces are juxtaposed in Bayonetta through the classic adversaries, Angels and Demons. The moral flexibility of both the light and dark entities in the game leaves the principles of good an evil in a state of ambiguity, which allows for uninhibited flow in the story and creates a non-linear and compelling narrative. Through this non-compliance with the pop culture counterparts of light and dark, gamers are left to question the foundations of old cultural norms. This historical context lends itself to the Bayonetta story not only by providing additional plot points, but also by justifying the development decisions that occur in order to truly flesh out Bayonetta’s character.ConclusionCompelling story line, characters with layered personality, and the ability to transgress boundaries of time and travel are all factors that provide a level of depth that has become an increasingly important aspect in modern video gameplay. Gamers love “Easter eggs,” the subtle references and embellishments scattered throughout a game that make playing games like Bayonetta so enjoyable. Bayonetta herself is a global traveller whose journeying is not limited to “abroad.” She transgresses cultural, time, and spatial boundaries. The game is a mosaic of references to spatial time dimensions, literary, and historical sources. This mix of borrowings has produced an original gameplay and a unique storyline. Such use of literature, mythology, and history to enhance the narrative creates a quest game that provides “meaningful play” (Howard). This process of creation of new material from older sources is a form of renewal. As long as contemporary culture presents literature and history to new audiences, the older texts will not be forgotten, but these elements will undergo a form of renewal and restoration and the present-day culture will be enhanced as a result. In the words of Bayonetta herself: “As long as there’s music, I’ll keep on dancing.”ReferencesCedro, Carmel. "Dolly Varden: Sweet Inspiration." Australasian Journal of Popular Culture 2.1 (2012): 37-46. French, Peter J. John Dee: The World of an Elizabethan Magus. London: London, Routledge and K. Paul, 1972. Guiley, Rosemary. The Encyclopedia of Demons and Demonology. Infobase Publishing, 2009. Howard, Jeff. Quests: Design, Theory, and History in Games and Narratives. Wellesley, Mass.: A.K. Peters, 2008. Kamiya, Hideki.Bayonetta. Bayonetta. Videogame. Sega, Japan, 2009.Kellams, Jean-Pierre. "Butmoni Coronzon (from the Mouth of the Witch)." Platinum Games 2009.Kramer, Heinrich. The Malleus Maleficarum of Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger. Eds. Sprenger, Jakob, or joint author, and Montague Summers. New York: Dover, 1971.McNab, C. Firearms: The Illustrated Guide to Small Arms of the World. Parragon, 2008.Ouellette, Francois. "Prophet to the Elohim: John Dee's Enochian Conversations as Christian Apocalyptic Discourse." Master of Arts thesis. ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 2004.Treasure Planet. The Walt Disney Company, 2003.Various. "Bayonetta Wikia." 2016.

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Introduction: The Creative Arts and Regional Well-BeingThe relationship between regionalism, well-being, and the creative arts has enjoined significant attention from community activists, commercial entrepreneurs, policy analysts, artists, and researchers over recent years (Australia Council for the Arts, “Living Culture”; Australia Council for the Arts, “The Arts in Regional Australia;” Drummond, Keane, and West; Elg; Warren, and West; Woodward, Bremner, and Cahalan). Underpinning most of the activity and research in this area is the understanding (occasionally bordering on an un-critical presumption) that the creative arts make a positive contribution to regional well-being. Commenting on the Live. Love. Life. creative-arts wellness festival in Daylesford, Victoria, Mary-Anne Thomas (Member of Parliament for the state seat of Macedon) stated that the festival will “reinforce Daylesford and the Macedon Ranges’ status as one of the nation’s leading wellness destinations” (Elg). For Thomas, it would appear that the linkage of the creative arts to regional well-being is never in doubt; which is to say, always already available for reinforcement. According to university-based researchers Margaret Woodward, Craig Bremner, and Anthony Cahalan, writing in a more scholarly and critical register, “there is a growing body of research which shows that thriving creative industries and cultural activities are crucial for the health and vitality of a region and its communities” (3). Qualifying this, they add that: “Achieving high levels of community well being through thriving creative activity is not however without its challenges in regional Australia” (3). Similarly, Rozaline Drummond, Jondi Keane, and Patrick West present their work as a test of the efficacy of the creative arts in aiding regional well-being: The opportunity to work collaboratively with a community like the one at Lake Bolac [Victoria] provided an occasion to gauge our discerning and initiating skills within creative-arts research and to test the argument that the combination of our different approaches adds to community and individual well-being. Our approach is informed by Gilles Deleuze’s ethical proposition that the health of a community is directly influenced by the richness of the composition of its parts. (n.p.)Deleuzean philosophy aside, quantitative data indicates that people in regional Australia are increasingly optimistic about the positive impact of the creative arts on their well-being. In 2016, 57% believed the arts impacted their sense of well-being and happiness, up from 52% in 2013 (Australia Council for the Arts, “The Arts in Regional Australia”). Given this article’s emphasis on place and well-being in relation to located creative-arts production, it is worth citing another dataset from the same Australia Council for the Arts publication, which details the “Location of Professional Artists”:There continues to be a concentration of artists in urban areas. Three quarters (74%) live in cities, compared to two thirds of the Australian population. This urban concentration […] may in part be related to concentration of cultural infrastructure in cities.1 in 6 Australian artists live in regional cities or towns (16%) and around 1 in 10 live in rural, remote or very remote areas (11%). (n.p.)Regional artists are a minority voice in the Australian creative arts. But the ways in which a minority voice is constructed, and the (potential) impact a minoritarian position has within the wider debate about regional well-being and the creative arts, requires careful unpacking. Ironically, creative artists themselves have been relatively neglected actors in this space. Working with Tony Birch’s short story, “The Red House”, as a neglected text of regionalism, this article exposes oversights in current understandings of the connection between well-being and regionalism. The Voice of the Regional Artist and “Resistant Speech” It is important to recognise that the “concentration of artists in urban areas” may sometimes lead to situations where non-regional artists, in the undoubtedly well-meaning pursuit of regional well-being, drown out the voices of regional artists in regional places (Australia Council for the Arts, “The Arts in Regional Australia”). Drummond, Keane, and West, all city-based artists, show sensitivity to this problem in their observation that: “It is not for the artists to presume that they can empower a [regional] community.” Certainly, regional artists and communities should take the lead in the development of regional well-being through the creative arts. The problem of (not) speaking for the other is, however, not so easily dealt with (Spivak). While urban artists might adopt the strategy of consciously allowing regional artists a voice, making such allowance could itself be viewed as a play of privilege and power by the city-based practitioner, resourced by their greater “concentration of cultural infrastructure” (Australia Council for the Arts, “The Arts in Regional Australia”). It is notoriously difficult to give the slip to the relatively invisible operations of entitlement. Furthermore, even if the regional artist is given a voice, there are many different ways of being heard or not heard. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s distinction between “speaking” and “talking” is useful here. Discussing “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in an interview with Bulan Lahiri, Spivak notes that: “It was not about talking. It was about: when the subaltern speaks there is not enough infrastructure for people to recognise it as resistant speech. That’s what it means.” In this crucial move, Spivak refines understanding of the issues at stake around the minoritarian position of regional artists. It is not enough for regional artists merely to “talk”; rather, they must be heard with the full impact of “resistant speech” (Lahiri). Obviously, what Spivak means by the “infrastructure” of “resistant speech” differs from the meaning the word “infrastructure” has in the Australia Council for the Arts publication referred to above, which employs the term as part of a governmental and technocratic discourse (“The Arts in Regional Australia”). The distance separating these two usages of “infrastructure” indicates the difference between the quantitative and the qualitative. Working with Spivak, this article’s focus is on the gap or failing in the infrastructure of qualitative research that has led to the relative neglect of Tony Birch’s short story “The Red House” as a significant text of regionalism. The Australia Council for the Arts, with its quantitative and empirical methodology, would not count Birch as a regional writer (to the best of the author’s knowledge, Birch lives and works in Melbourne). Its definition of a regional artist undermines the possibilities of a qualitative research infrastructure. However, recognizing the powerful regional concerns within a text by a primarily city-based writer like Birch is a key move, not only in expanding the definition of who counts as a minoritarian regional writer, but in giving voice to the “resistant speech” of women and children, subalterns on Spivak’s terms, within the regional-urban flux (Lahiri). The aim of this article is to give voice to Tony Birch as a regional writer, at least insofar as he is the author of “The Red House”, while also addressing the issue of well-being (as linked to the curse of domestic violence), through attention to Birch’s artistic re-creation of regionalism. In this way, working with Spivak’s reference to “infrastructure,” the aim is to nurture the growth of a research infrastructure open to a more productive engagement with regionalism, which begins by nuancing the definition of regional. It is not that regional artists, defined either by their demography or (as with Birch) by their creative concerns, are not “talking” rather, what they are saying is not being recognised in Spivak’s strong sense of “speaking”. Indeed, the very fact that Birch is not a regional writer in an empirical sense, and that, as will be explored later in this article, “The Red House” is not even primarily set in a regional location, has at least one important consequence. Potentially, it increases the value of Birch’s short story to an engagement with regionalism, given that “The Red House” unfolds regionalism as a concept always already in productive dialogue with other frameworks of place (such as the urban and the international). To the extent that Birch is a city-based writer of regionalism, and thus on the (urban) margin of the (regional) margin, he enlivens an exquisite position of minoritarian power. Furthermore, “The Red House” contains a diversity of acute insights into the nexus of regionalism and well-being that, to date, critics have overlooked. “The Red House” and the Well-Being of Places Comparatively little scholarly attention has been paid to creative work that itself dramatises and interrogates the issue of regional well-being. Tony Birch’s short story “The Red House” (2006), from his collection of linked stories (which is sometimes referred to as a novel) Shadowboxing, is a particularly interesting candidate to fill this gap in the literature, given how delicately it ranges across, and problematises, the division between the urban and the regional.“The Red House” is the opening story of Shadowboxing. Covering a period of close to a decade, loosely overlapping with the 1960s, and set in different parts of Victoria and Melbourne, it is told in the voice of Michael, who recounts the story of a peripatetic family under stress and struggling to survive. The first sentence reads: “We moved to the red house in the winter after my younger sister, May, died of meningitis” (1). The first page also establishes the place-based coordinates of the story: “In the weeks following our move from Clunes back to Fitzroy, our new house was almost submerged by a rising flood” (1). Birch’s interrogation of regionalism will henceforth operate largely along the Clunes-Fitzroy axis. Fitzroy is an inner-city suburb of Melbourne while Clunes is a small regional town (present population: approximately 2000) about 140 kilometres north-west of Melbourne (Clunes). A flashback section of three pages or so, early on in the story, fills in the events leading up to the return to Melbourne after May’s death in Clunes. Apart from this, the story has a linear structure. The various spatial shifts of “The Red House”, both within Melbourne and between Clunes and Melbourne, are all triggered by threats against, or the pursuit of, multiple modes of well-being. The first move reflects the promise of a fresh romantic union: “It was only after he [Michael’s father] had met my mother and moved with her to my [maternal] grandmother’s house over in Carlton that he had left Fitzroy for the first time in his life” (4–5). This move from Fitzroy to Carlton is followed by a much bigger one: Carlton to Clunes. Implicated in this move are at least two modes of well-being: “The eventual move to the bush had come on the advice of a doctor at the public hospital. He said that the fresh air would help my dad recover from [his] asthma” (5); however, “My grandmother told me years later that the move did not really have all that much to do with his asthma. It was the drink” (5). The context is the husband’s assault of “his six months’ pregnant wife” with “a straight right on the end of her nose” (5). The decision to move to Clunes is made by Michael’s mother: “He fought with her so much that my mother eventually decided that she would have to move away from her mother’s house, for both their sakes. Clunes was a drastic move. But it worked, for a time […]. They appeared happy” (6). This part of “The Red House” unpacks the complexities of how well-being and (physical and mental) health are linked in a social matrix; a physical ailment (asthma) elides an addiction to alcohol, until a doctor’s discourse (validated by the authority of a medical establishment) is subverted by the subalternate voice of Michael’s grandmother. This passage also dramatises the abject scenario of a victim (Michael’s mother) attending to the well-being of her persecutor (Michael’s father) by moving to Clunes “for both their sakes” (6).Subsequently, May is born in Clunes, “a ‘special baby’. She was magical even…” (6). Indeed, “My father’s habit of explosive anger melted before May. He was truly besotted with her” (6). Just before what would have been her second birthday, May dies. “My father wanted to bring May back to Melbourne for burial, but my mother stood up to him and demanded that she be buried in the town where she was born” (6). This is the most powerful enduring connection of Michael’s family to regional Clunes. Significantly, well-being (in the sense of survival and the rebuilding of happiness after the tragic death of a daughter) is dispersed differently, through place, by mother and father, along gendered lines. While the mother wants her daughter’s birthplace and place of death to coincide, the father wants to possess his daughter, almost as if she were an object, by returning her to the city for burial. (Space restrictions preclude further exploration here of the many issues raised by May’s death, including those around the gendered nexus between well-being [happiness] and the proximity or otherwise to a child’s burial place.) After May’s death, Michael’s father’s behaviour deteriorates once more. The domestic violence continues: “It was difficult for my mother to find anything safe to say to him […]. She tried to talk about May with him several times, but he either responded with silence, or swore and yelled at her uncontrollably. He also found his way back to the pubs” (7). The decision to return to Melbourne is made by Michael’s father, against his wife’s wishes: And then one night after he had walked in from the pub he sat down at the table and just said to her, ‘f*ck all this fresh-air bullsh*t, we’re going back to Melbourne.’ She tried persuading him to stay, talked about his job and my school, but he would not listen. He got sick of her talking and slammed a fist into his heavy palm. ‘We’re f*cken going. That’s it. We’re going.’ And that was it.She looked across the table that night and saw once again the man she had married six years earlier, the man who she had deceived herself had faded and eventually disappeared with the move away from the city. (7)In this passage, well-being (even if only imagined rather than real) is explicitly linked to place. Shortly afterwards, the family moves into the red house, where they will remain. The flashback section of the text has already sketched out the chain of events that leads to the return to the city, while also commenting on the agency Michael’s mother exercises in dealing with what, to her, is an unwelcome situation: “Mum […] had argued against coming back to the city. She sensed the looming danger in my father moving back both to his old streets and his old habits. But on realising that she had no real say in the matter, she was determined to ensure that she at least have some say in the house she was moving into” (4). Specifically, Michael’s mother turns her Fitzroy house into the regional house left behind in Clunes. Under her influence, “It wasn’t long before the inside of the house came to life and began to resemble the old place at Clunes” (11). Again: she brings a portrait of May, along with assorted baby belongings, into the Fitzroy house, keeping this secret from her husband. Thus, Michael’s mother infiltrates regional place into urban place as a strategy of (subalternate) well-being. In summary, “The Red House” unpacks well-being as an expansive category shaped by domestic violence, in a negative sense, but also more positively by the actuality or promise of happiness. It also interrogates the fine-grained links between well-being in its incarnations as medical and emotional health. At the same time, it maps the rise and fall of well-being against a human geography of regional and urban places, refusing any simplistic connection of place to well-being (more faintly, there is even the problematising presence of international place, in the character of the Italian landlord, Mr Carboni, and the reference to “the local Italian community [2]). Thus, the text’s regionalism suggests a strategic model, reliant on human intervention in the (re-)creation of place; this is most evident in Michael’s mother’s actions. “The Red House” rewards interpretation as a text of how regional place (Clunes) is re-made in urban place (Fitzroy) through the rehabilitation of a house in the interests of well-being. Well-Being and Domestic Violence across Places It is hard to imagine a greater threat to the well-being of women and children than domestic violence. This makes it all the more surprising that “The Red House” is one of relatively few texts (to the author’s knowledge) to offer a detailed outline of the territory of well-being, in its many forms stretching from the health-based to the emotional, while also including a direct and unflinching consideration of domestic violence. (One cognate text is Kathryn Heyman’s novel The Breaking, which merges medical disability and domestic violence within a broader consideration of regional well-being.) Even more unusual is the way Birch’s story of well-being and domestic violence is mapped in relation to regional and non-regional places. “The Red House” is rare and valuable for its triangulation of well-being, domestic violence, and place; above all, in its refusal to resort to any comforting notion that regional places have essential qualities that make them necessarily better for well-being than the experience of cities. This is perhaps the meaning of the colour of the red house, a colour Michael’s father hates. According to a local know-all, Emu Bailey, the red was originally a form of protest by Ettie Rogers, “‘some sort of communist’” (10). “‘Most everyone around here back then was DLP [Democratic Labour Party]. Still is, some of them. Ettie wasn’t in agreement with the others in the street, so she let them know all about it. Redone it every summer too, the same colour, red’” (10). When Michael’s mother responds to her husband’s injunction to re-paint the house “‘any colour but that f*cken red’” (13) by preparing to re-paint it, subversively, “a deep red splash of colour” (19) it is not difficult to discern a silent protest, passed down from woman to woman, against the domestic violence suffered by Michael and his mother. Indeed, Birch comes very close to describing the red of the house as blood-like, labelling it “a rich congealed red” (2). “Congealed” is often used to describe blood. In this way, through a colour that evokes the body, a house becomes a visible and metaphorical protest against the bodily violence (but also emotional and mental torment) that is domestic violence. As Meg Mundell argues, “the body is integral to how literary sense of place is produced” (8). This bodily, coloured protest folds back into the special sort of place the Fitzroy home becomes. If Michael’s mother cannot keep living in Clunes, she can at least paint her city house red. Perhaps attesting to the success of this female protest, there is, towards the end of “The Red House”, a fascinating moment when, as if influenced by the domestic circ*mstances of transplanted place (from regional Clunes) created by Michael’s mother, domestic violence threatens, but is thwarted. Michael’s mother has just told her husband that she is going to have another baby: “He spun around and moved towards her. I thought that maybe he was going to hit her. But he didn’t. He stopped in front of her. They were toe to toe” (17). Place and (pregnant) body, in an intensified combination (or even, to riff on Spivak’s terminology, as an “infrastructure”), allow the subaltern to “speak” against her oppression. Conclusion: Re-Defining Regionalism through the Literary Creative Arts Tony Birch’s “The Red House” re-creates the regional as something other than a pre-determined place. Regionalism is “activated,” in a strategic mode, within the flux of the urban and the regional. This is particularly evident in the actions of Michael’s mother. She preserves her well-being (located in Clunes, as it were, where her daughter is buried) even after she is forced by her husband to return to Melbourne (the place she left to escape from his domestic violence). The picture of May acts as a talisman of well-being (aptly, given Clunes is described by Michael as “a town where old superstitions held sway over logic” [6]), which Michael’s mother smuggles from regional Clunes into her Melbourne house. “The Red House” is thus a vital literary rejoinder to the conceptualisation of well-being, and regional areas employed by government bodies and commercial entities, which instrumentalizes a binary opposition of the regional/non-regional. By extension, it contests the naïve linkage of regional place to well-being through a nuanced investigation into the complex links between place (regional, urban, even international) and multi-faceted well-being. Birch’s story is a valuable, fine-grained creative analysis of well-being (extending from happiness, comfort and security through to what might be called the “ill-being” of domestic violence), which is matched to an equally fine-grained engagement with multiple modalities of place. It challenges the reader to creatively re-think how regionalism and well-being might align. References Australia Council for the Arts. “Living Culture: First Nations Arts Participation and Wellbeing.” Sydney: Australia Council for the Arts, 2017. 10 Mar. 2019 <https://www.australiacouncil.gov.au/research/living-culture/>.———. “The Arts in Regional Australia: A Research Summary.” Sydney: Australia Council for the Arts, 2017. 10 Mar. 2019 <https://www.australiacouncil.gov.au/research/regional-arts-summary/>.Birch, Tony. “The Red House.” Shadowboxing. Melbourne: Scribe, 2006. 1–19. Clunes, Victoria. Wikipedia. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clunes,_Victoria>.Drummond, Rozalind, Jondi Keane, and Patrick West. “Zones of Practice: Embodiment and Creative Arts Research.” M/C Journal 15.4 (2012). 1 Mar. 2019 <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/528>.Elg, Hayley. “New Wellness Festival for Daylesford.” The Advocate 22 Jan. 2018. 1 Mar. 2019 <https://www.hepburnadvocate.com.au/story/5182322/the-live-love-life-festival-is-coming-to-daylesford-this-november/>.Heyman, Kathryn. “When I First Wrote about Domestic Violence, No One Talked about It. Now the Shame has Lifted.” The Guardian. 21 May 2017. 10 Mar. 2019 <https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/may/21/when-i-first-wrote-about-domestic-violence-no-one-talked-about-it-now-the-shame-has-lifted>.Lahiri, Bulan. “In Conversation: Speaking to Spivak.” The Hindu 5 Feb. 2011. 1 Mar. 2019 <https://www.thehindu.com/books/In-Conversation-Speaking-to-Spivak/article15130635.ece>.Mundell, Meg. “Crafting ‘Literary Sense of Place’: The Generative Work of Literary Place-Making.” JASAL: Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature 18.1 (2018): 1–17. 10 Mar. 2019 <https://openjournals.library.sydney.edu.au/index.php/JASAL/article/view/12375>.Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993: 66–111. Warren, Brad, and Patrick West. “From Ecological Creativity to an Ecology of Well-Being: ‘Flows & Catchments’ as a Case Study of NVivo.” Landscapes: The Journal of the International Centre for Landscape and Language 5.2 (2013): 1–15. 1 Mar. 2019 <https://ro.ecu.edu.au/landscapes/vol5/iss2/21/>.Woodward, Margaret, Craig Bremner, and Anthony Cahalan. “Defining the Geography of Creativity in a Regional Australian University.” Proceedings of the 2012 Australian Council of University Art and Design Schools (ACUADS) Conference: Region and Isolation: The Changing Function of Art & Design Education within Diasporic Cultures and Borderless Communities. Australian Council of University Art and Design Schools (ACUADS) Conference 2012. Perth: Australian Council of University Art and Design Schools (ACUADS), 2012: 1–13. 1 Mar. 2019 <https://acuads.com.au/conference/article/defining-the-geography-of-creativity-in-a-regional-australian-university/>.

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The academic journal is obsolete. In a world where there are more titles than ever, this is a comment on their form – especially the print journal – rather than their quantity. Now that you can get everything online, it doesn’t really matter what journal a paper appears in; certainly it doesn’t matter what’s in the same issue. The experience of a journal is rapidly obsolescing, for both editors and readers. I’m obviously not the first person to notice this (see, for instance, "Scholarly Communication"; "Transforming Scholarly Communication"; Houghton; Policy Perspectives; Teute), but I do have a personal stake in the process. For if the journal is obsolete then it follows that the editor is obsolete, and I am the editor of the International Journal of Cultural Studies. I founded the IJCS and have been sole editor ever since. Next year will see the fiftieth issue. So far, I have been responsible for over 280 published articles – over 2.25 million words of other people’s scholarship … and counting. We won’t say anything about the words that did not get published, except that the IJCS rejection rate is currently 87 per cent. Perhaps the first point that needs to be made, then, is that obsolescence does not imply lack of success. By any standard the IJCS is a successful journal, and getting more so. It has recently been assessed as a top-rating A* journal in the Australian Research Council’s journal rankings for ERA (Excellence in Research for Australia), the newly activated research assessment exercise. (In case you’re wondering, M/C Journal is rated B.) The ARC says of the ranking exercise: ‘The lists are a result of consultations with the sector and rigorous review by leading researchers and the ARC.’ The ARC definition of an A* journal is given as: Typically an A* journal would be one of the best in its field or subfield in which to publish and would typically cover the entire field/ subfield. Virtually all papers they publish will be of very high quality. These are journals where most of the work is important (it will really shape the field) and where researchers boast about getting accepted.Acceptance rates would typically be low and the editorial board would be dominated by field leaders, including many from top institutions. (Appendix I, p. 21; and see p. 4.)Talking of boasting, I love to prate about the excellent people we’ve published in the IJCS. We have introduced new talent to the field, and we have published new work by some of its pioneers – including Richard Hoggart and Stuart Hall. We’ve also published – among many others – Sara Ahmed, Mohammad Amouzadeh, Tony Bennett, Goran Bolin, Charlotte Brunsdon, William Boddy, Nico Carpentier, Stephen Coleman, Nick Couldry, Sean Cubitt, Michael Curtin, Daniel Dayan, Ben Dibley, Stephanie Hemelryk Donald, John Frow, Elfriede Fursich, Christine Geraghty, Mark Gibson, Paul Gilroy, Faye Ginsberg, Jonathan Gray, Lawrence Grossberg, Judith Halberstam, Hanno Hardt, Gay Hawkins, Joke Hermes, Su Holmes, Desmond Hui, Fred Inglis, Henry Jenkins, Deborah Jermyn, Ariel Heryanto, Elihu Katz, Senator Rod Kemp (Australian government minister), Youna Kim, Agnes Ku, Richard E. Lee, Jeff Lewis, David Lodge (the novelist), Knut Lundby, Eric Ma, Anna McCarthy, Divya McMillin, Antonio Menendez-Alarcon, Toby Miller, Joe Moran, Chris Norris, John Quiggin, Chris Rojek, Jane Roscoe, Jeffrey Sconce, Lynn Spigel, John Storey, Su Tong, the late Sako Takeshi, Sue Turnbull, Graeme Turner, William Uricchio, José van Dijck, Georgette Wang, Jing Wang, Elizabeth Wilson, Janice Winship, Handel Wright, Wu Jing, Wu Qidi (Chinese Vice-Minister of Education), Emilie Yueh-Yu Yeh, Robert Young and Zhao Bin. As this partial list makes clear, as well as publishing the top ‘hegemons’ we also publish work pointing in new directions, including papers from neighbouring disciplines such as anthropology, area studies, economics, education, feminism, history, literary studies, philosophy, political science, and sociology. We have sought to represent neglected regions, especially Chinese cultural studies, which has grown strongly during the past decade. And for quite a few up-and-coming scholars we’ve been the proud host of their first international publication. The IJCS was first published in 1998, already well into the internet era, but it was print-only at that time. Since then, all content, from volume 1:1 onwards, has been digitised and is available online (although vol 1:2 is unaccountably missing). The publishers, Sage Publications Ltd, London, have steadily added online functionality, so that now libraries can get the journal in various packages, including offering this title among many others in online-only bundles, and individuals can purchase single articles online. Thus, in addition to institutional and individual subscriptions, which remain the core business of the journal, income is derived by the publisher from multi-site licensing, incremental consortial sales income, single- and back-issue sales (print), pay-per-view, and deep back file sales (electronic). So what’s obsolete about it? In that boasting paragraph of mine (above), about what wonderful authors we’ve published, lies one of the seeds of obsolescence. For now that it is available online, ‘users’ (no longer ‘readers’!) can search for what they want and ignore the journal as such altogether. This is presumably how most active researchers experience any journal – they are looking for articles (or less: quotations; data; references) relevant to a given topic, literature review, thesis etc. They encounter a journal online through its ‘content’ rather than its ‘form.’ The latter is irrelevant to them, and may as well not exist. The Cover Some losses are associated with this change. First is the loss of the front cover. Now you, dear reader, scrolling through this article online, might well complain, why all the fuss about covers? Internet-generation journals don’t have covers, so all of the work that goes into them to establish the brand, the identity and even the ‘affect’ of a journal is now, well, obsolete. So let me just remind you of what’s at stake. Editors, designers and publishers all take a good deal of trouble over covers, since they are the point of intersection of editorial, design and marketing priorities. Thus, the IJCS cover contains the only ‘content’ of the journal for which we pay a fee to designers and photographers (usually the publisher pays, but in one case I did). Like any other cover, ours has three main elements: title, colour and image. Thought goes into every detail. Title I won’t say anything about the journal’s title as such, except that it was the result of protracted discussions (I suggested Terra Nullius at one point, but Sage weren’t having any of that). The present concern is with how a title looks on a cover. Our title-typeface is Frutiger. Originally designed by Adrian Frutiger for Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris, it is suitably international, being used for the corporate identity of the UK National Health Service, Telefónica O2, the Royal Navy, the London School of Economics , the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the Conservative Party of Canada, Banco Bradesco of Brazil, the Finnish Defence Forces and on road signs in Switzerland (Wikipedia, "Frutiger"). Frutiger is legible, informal, and reads well in small copy. Sage’s designer and I corresponded on which of the words in our cumbersome name were most important, agreeing that ‘international’ combined with ‘cultural’ is the USP (Unique Selling Point) of the journal, so they should be picked out (in bold small-caps) from the rest of the title, which the designer presented in a variety of Frutiger fonts (regular, italic, and reversed – white on black), presumably to signify the dynamism and diversity of our content. The word ‘studies’ appears on a lozenge-shaped cartouche that is also used as a design element throughout the journal, for bullet points, titles and keywords. Colour We used to change this every two years, but since volume 7 it has stabilised with the distinctive Pantone 247, ‘new fuchsia.’ This colour arose from my own environment at QUT, where it was chosen (by me) for the new Creative Industries Faculty’s academic gowns and hoods, and thence as a detailing colour for the otherwise monochrome Creative Industries Precinct buildings. There’s a lot of it around my office, including on the wall and the furniture. New Fuchsia is – we are frequently told – a somewhat ‘girly’ colour, especially when contrasted with the Business Faculty’s blue or Law’s silver; its similarity to the Girlfriend/Dolly palette does introduce a mild ‘politics of prestige’ element, since it is determinedly pop culture, feminised, and non-canonical. Image Right at the start, the IJCS set out to signal its difference from other journals. At that time, all Sage journals had calligraphic colours – but I was insistent that we needed a photograph (I have ‘form’ in this respect: in 1985 I changed the cover of the Australian Journal of Cultural Studies from a line drawing (albeit by Sydney Nolan) to a photograph; and I co-designed the photo-cover of Cultural Studies in 1987). For IJCS I knew which photo I wanted, and Sage went along with the choice. I explained it in the launch issue’s editorial (Hartley, "Editorial"). That original picture, a goanna on a cattle grid in the outback, by Australian photographer Grant Hobson, lasted ten years. Since volume 11 – in time for our second decade – the goanna has been replaced with a picture by Italian-based photographer Patrick Nicholas, called ‘Reality’ (Hartley, "Cover Narrative"). We have also used two other photos as cover images, once each. They are: Daniel Meadows’s 1974 ‘Karen & Barbara’ (Hartley, "Who"); and a 1962 portrait of Richard Hoggart from the National Portrait Gallery in London (Owen & Hartley 2007). The choice of picture has involved intense – sometimes very tense – negotiations with Sage. Most recently, they were adamant the Daniel Meadows picture, which I wanted to use as the long-term replacement of the goanna, was too ‘English’ and they would not accept it. We exchanged rather sharp words before compromising. There’s no need to rehearse the dispute here; the point is that both sides, publisher and editor, felt that vital interests were at stake in the choice of a cover-image. Was it too obscure; too Australian; too English; too provocative (the current cover features, albeit in the deep background, a TV screen-shot of a topless Italian game-show contestant)? Running Order Beyond the cover, the next obsolete feature of a journal is the running order of articles. Obviously what goes in the journal is contingent upon what has been submitted and what is ready at a given time, so this is a creative role within a very limited context, which is what makes it pleasurable. Out of a limited number of available papers, a choice must be made about which one goes first, what order the other papers should follow, and which ones must be held over to the next issue. The first priority is to choose the lead article: like the ‘first face’ in a fashion show (if you don’t know what I mean by that, see FTV.com. It sets the look, the tone, and the standard for the issue. I always choose articles I like for this slot. It sends a message to the field – look at this! Next comes the running order. We have about six articles per issue. It is important to maintain the IJCS’s international mix, so I check for the country of origin, or failing that (since so many articles come from Anglosphere countries like the USA, UK and Australia), the location of the analysis. Attention also has to be paid to the gender balance among authors, and to the mix of senior and emergent scholars. Sometimes a weak article needs to be ‘hammocked’ between two good ones (these are relative terms – everything published in the IJCS is of a high scholarly standard). And we need to think about disciplinary mix, so as not to let the journal stray too far towards one particular methodological domain. Running order is thus a statement about the field – the disciplinary domain – rather than about an individual paper. It is a proposition about how different voices connect together in some sort of disciplinary syntax. One might even claim that the combination of cover and running order is a last vestige of collegiate collectivism in an era of competitive academic individualism. Now all that matters is the individual paper and author; the ‘currency’ is tenure, promotion and research metrics, not relations among peers. The running order is obsolete. Special Issues An extreme version of running order is the special issue. The IJCS has regularly published these; they are devoted to field-shaping initiatives, as follows: Title Editor(s) Issue Date Radiocracy: Radio, Development and Democracy Amanda Hopkinson, Jo Tacchi 3.2 2000 Television and Cultural Studies Graeme Turner 4.4 2001 Cultural Studies and Education Karl Maton, Handel Wright 5.4 2002 Re-Imagining Communities Sara Ahmed, Anne-Marie Fortier 6.3 2003 The New Economy, Creativity and Consumption John Hartley 7.1 2004 Creative Industries and Innovation in China Michael Keane, John Hartley 9.3 2006 The Uses of Richard Hoggart Sue Owen, John Hartley 10.1 2007 A Cultural History of Celebrity Liz Barry 11.3 2008 Caribbean Media Worlds Anna Pertierra, Heather Horst 12.2 2009 Co-Creative Labour Mark Deuze, John Banks 12.5 2009 It’s obvious that special issues have a place in disciplinary innovation – they can draw attention in a timely manner to new problems, neglected regions, or innovative approaches, and thus they advance the field. They are indispensible. But because of online publication, readers are not held to the ‘project’ of a special issue and can pick and choose whatever they want. And because of the peculiarities of research assessment exercises, editing special issues doesn’t count as research output. The incentive to do them is to that extent reduced, and some universities are quite heavy-handed about letting academics ‘waste’ time on activities that don’t produce ‘metrics.’ The special issue is therefore threatened with obsolescence too. Refereeing In many top-rating journals, the human side of refereeing is becoming obsolete. Increasingly this labour-intensive chore is automated and the labour is technologically outsourced from editors and publishers to authors and referees. You have to log on to some website and follow prompts in order to contribute both papers and the assessment of papers; interactions with editors are minimal. At the IJCS the process is still handled by humans – namely, journal administrator Tina Horton and me. We spend a lot of time checking how papers are faring, from trying to find the right referees through to getting the comments and then the author’s revisions completed in time for a paper to be scheduled into an issue. The volume of email correspondence is considerable. We get to know authors and referees. So we maintain a sense of an interactive and conversational community, albeit by correspondence rather than face to face. Doubtless, sooner or later, there will be a depersonalised Text Management System. But in the meantime we cling to the romantic notion that we are involved in refereeing for the sake of the field, for raising the standard of scholarship, for building a globally dispersed virtual college of cultural studies, and for giving everyone – from unfavoured countries and neglected regions to famous professors in old-money universities – the same chance to get their research published. In fact, these are largely delusional ideals, for as everyone knows, refereeing is part of the political economy of publicly-funded research. It’s about academic credentials, tenure and promotion for the individual, and about measurable research metrics for the academic organisation or funding agency (Hartley, "Death"). The IJCS has no choice but to participate: we do what is required to qualify as a ‘double-blind refereed journal’ because that is the only way to maintain repute, and thence the flow of submissions, not to mention subscriptions, without which there would be no journal. As with journals themselves, which proliferate even as the print form becomes obsolete, so refereeing is burgeoning as a practice. It’s almost an industry, even though the currency is not money but time: part gift-economy; part attention-economy; partly the payment of dues to the suzerain funding agencies. But refereeing is becoming obsolete in the sense of gathering an ‘imagined community’ of people one might expect to know personally around a particular enterprise. The process of dispersal and anonymisation of the field is exacerbated by blind refereeing, which we do because we must. This is suited to a scientific domain of objective knowledge, but everyone knows it’s not quite like that in the ‘new humanities’. The agency and identity of the researcher is often a salient fact in the research. The embedded positionality of the author, their reflexiveness about their own context and room-for-manoeuvre, and the radical contextuality of knowledge itself – these are all more or less axiomatic in cultural studies, but they’re not easily served by ‘double-blind’ refereeing. When refereeing is depersonalised to the extent that is now rife (especially in journals owned by international commercial publishers), it is hard to maintain a sense of contextualised productivity in the knowledge domain, much less a ‘common cause’ to which both author and referee wish to contribute. Even though refereeing can still be seen as altruistic, it is in the service of something much more general (‘scholarship’) and much more particular (‘my career’) than the kind of reviewing that wants to share and improve a particular intellectual enterprise. It is this mid-range altruism – something that might once have been identified as a politics of knowledge – that’s becoming obsolete, along with the printed journals that were the banner and rallying point for the cause. If I were to start a new journal (such as cultural-science.org), I would prefer ‘open refereeing’: uploading papers on an open site, subjecting them to peer-review and criticism, and archiving revised versions once they have received enough votes and comments. In other words I’d like to see refereeing shifted from the ‘supply’ or production side of a journal to the ‘demand’ or readership side. But of course, ‘demand’ for ‘blind’ refereeing doesn’t come from readers; it comes from the funding agencies. The Reading Experience Finally, the experience of reading a journal is obsolete. Two aspects of this seem worthy of note. First, reading is ‘out of time’ – it no longer needs to conform to the rhythms of scholarly publication, which are in any case speeding up. Scholarship is no longer seasonal, as it has been since the Middle Ages (with university terms organised around agricultural and ecclesiastical rhythms). Once you have a paper’s DOI number, you can read it any time, 24/7. It is no longer necessary even to wait for publication. With some journals in our field (e.g. Journalism Studies), assuming your Library subscribes, you can access papers as soon as they’re uploaded on the journal’s website, before the published edition is printed. Soon this will be the norm, just as it is for the top science journals, where timely publication, and thereby the ability to claim first discovery, is the basis of intellectual property rights. The IJCS doesn’t (yet) offer this service, but its frequency is speeding up. It was launched in 1998 with three issues a year. It went quarterly in 2001 and remained a quarterly for eight years. It has recently increased to six issues a year. That too causes changes in the reading experience. The excited ripping open of the package is less of a thrill the more often it arrives. Indeed, how many subscribers will admit that sometimes they don’t even open the envelope? Second, reading is ‘out of place’ – you never have to see the journal in which a paper appears, so you can avoid contact with anything that you haven’t already decided to read. This is more significant than might first appear, because it is affecting journalism in general, not just academic journals. As we move from the broadcast to the broadband era, communicative usage is shifting too, from ‘mass’ communication to customisation. This is a mixed blessing. One of the pleasures of old-style newspapers and the TV news was that you’d come across stories you did not expect to find. Indeed, an important attribute of the industrial form of journalism is its success in getting whole populations to read or watch stories about things they aren’t interested in, or things like wars and crises that they’d rather not know about at all. That historic textual achievement is in jeopardy in the broadband era, because ‘the public’ no longer needs to gather around any particular masthead or bulletin to get their news. With Web 2.0 affordances, you can exercise much more choice over what you attend to. This is great from the point of view of maximising individual choice, but sub-optimal in relation to what I’ve called ‘population-gathering’, especially the gathering of communities of interest around ‘tales of the unexpected’ – novelty or anomalies. Obsolete: Collegiality, Trust and Innovation? The individuation of reading choices may stimulate prejudice, because prejudice (literally, ‘pre-judging’) is built in when you decide only to access news feeds about familiar topics, stories or people in which you’re already interested. That sort of thing may encourage narrow-mindedness. It is certainly an impediment to chance discovery, unplanned juxtaposition, unstructured curiosity and thence, perhaps, to innovation itself. This is a worry for citizenship in general, but it is also an issue for academic ‘knowledge professionals,’ in our ever-narrower disciplinary silos. An in-close specialist focus on one’s own area of expertise need no longer be troubled by the concerns of the person in the next office, never mind the next department. Now, we don’t even have to meet on the page. One of the advantages of whole journals, then, is that each issue encourages ‘macro’ as well as ‘micro’ perspectives, and opens reading up to surprises. This willingness to ‘take things on trust’ describes a ‘we’ community – a community of trust. Trust too is obsolete in these days of performance evaluation. We’re assessed by an anonymous system that’s managed by people we’ll never meet. If the ‘population-gathering’ aspects of print journals are indeed obsolete, this may reduce collegiate trust and fellow-feeling, increase individualist competitiveness, and inhibit innovation. In the face of that prospect, I’m going to keep on thinking about covers, running orders, referees and reading until the role of editor is obsolete too. ReferencesHartley, John. "'Cover Narrative': From Nightmare to Reality." International Journal of Cultural Studies 11.2 (2005): 131-137. ———. "Death of the Book?" Symposium of the National Scholarly Communication Forum & Australian Academy of the Humanities, Sydney Maritime Museum, 2005. 26 Apr. 2009 ‹http://www.humanities.org.au/Resources/Downloads/NSCF/RoundTables1-17/PDF/Hartley.pdf›. ———. "Editorial: With Goanna." International Journal of Cultural Studies 1.1 (1998): 5-10. ———. "'Who Are You Going to Believe – Me or Your Own Eyes?' New Decade; New Directions." International Journal of Cultural Studies 11.1 (2008): 5-14. Houghton, John. "Economics of Scholarly Communication: A Discussion Paper." Center for Strategic Economic Studies, Victoria University, 2000. 26 Apr. 2009 ‹http://www.caul.edu.au/cisc/EconomicsScholarlyCommunication.pdf›. Owen, Sue, and John Hartley, eds. The Uses of Richard Hoggart. International Journal of Cultural Studies (special issue), 10.1 (2007). Policy Perspectives: To Publish and Perish. (Special issue cosponsored by the Association of Research Libraries, Association of American Universities and the Pew Higher Education Roundtable) 7.4 (1998). 26 Apr. 2009 ‹http://www.arl.org/scomm/pew/pewrept.html›. "Scholarly Communication: Crisis and Revolution." University of California Berkeley Library. N.d. 26 Apr. 2009 ‹http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/Collections/crisis.html›. Teute, F. J. "To Publish or Perish: Who Are the Dinosaurs in Scholarly Publishing?" Journal of Scholarly Publishing 32.2 (2001). 26 Apr. 2009 ‹http://www.utpjournals.com/product/jsp/322/perish5.html›."Transforming Scholarly Communication." University of Houston Library. 2005. 26 Apr. 2009 ‹http://info.lib.uh.edu/scomm/transforming.htm›.

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From an interview with “Mr A”, executive producer and co-creator of the Getaway in Stockholm (GiS) films: Mr A: Yeah, when I tell my girlfriend, ‘You should watch this, it’s good, it’s a classic, it’s an old movie’ and she thinks it’s, like, the worst. And when I actually look at it and it is the worst, it is just a car chase … [Laughs] But you have to look a lot harder, to how it is filmed, you have to learn … Because, you can’t watch car racing for instance, because they are lousy at filming; you get no sensation of speed. If you watch the World Rally Championship it looks like they go two miles an hour. The hardest thing [of the whole thing] is capturing the speed … I want to engage with the notion of “speed” in terms of the necessary affects of automobility, but first I will give some brief background information on the Getaway in Stockholm series of films. Most of the information on the films is derived from the interview with Mr A carried out over dinner in Stockholm, October 2004. Contact was made via e-mail and I organised with the editors of Autosalon Magazine for an edited transcription to be published as an incentive to participate in the interview. Mr A’s “Tarantino-style” name is necessary because the films he makes with Mr X (co-creator) and a small unnamed group of others involve filming highly illegal acts: one or two cars racing through the streets of Stockholm evading police at sustained speeds well over 200 km/h. Due to a quirk in Swedish traffic law, unless they are caught within a certain time frame of committing driving offences or they actually admit to the driving offences, then they cannot be charged. The Swedish police are so keen to capture these renegade film makers that when they appeared on Efterlyst (pron: ef-de-list; the equivalent of “Sweden’s Most Wanted”) instead of the normal toll-free 1-800 number that viewers could phone to give tips, the number on the screen was the direct line to the chief of Stockholm’s traffic unit. The original GiS film (2000) was made as a dare. Mr A and some friends had just watched Claude Lelouch’s 1976 film C’était un Rendez-vous. Rumour has it that Lelouch had a ten-minute film cartridge and had seen how a gyro stabilised camera worked on a recent film. He decided to make use of it with his Ferrari. He mounted the camera to the bonnet and raced through the streets of Paris. In typical Parisian style at the end of the short nine minute film the driver parks and jumps from the Ferrari to embrace a waiting woman for their “rendezvous”. Shortly after watching the film someone said to Mr A, “you don’t do that sort of thing in Stockholm”. Mr A and Mr X set out to prove him wrong. Nearly all the equipment used in the filming of the first GiS film was either borrowed or stolen. The Porsche used in the film (like all the cars in the films) was lent to them. The film equipment consisted of, in Mr A’s words, a “big ass” television broadcast camera and a smaller “lipstick” camera stolen from the set of the world’s first “interactive” reality TV show called The Bar. (The Bar followed a group of people who all lived together in an apartment and also worked together in a bar. The bar was a “real” bar and served actual customers.) The first film was made for fun, but after Mr A and his associates received several requests for copies they decided to ramp up production to commercial levels. Mr A has a “real job” working in advertising; making the GiS films once a year is his main job with his advertising job being on a self-employed, casual basis. As a production team it is a good example of amateurs becoming semi-professionals within the culture industries. The GiS production team distributes one film per year under the guise of being a “documentary” which allows them to escape the wrath of Swedish authorities due to further legal quirks. Although they still sell DVDs from their Website, the main source of income comes from the sale of the worldwide distribution rights to British “powersports” specialist media company Duke Video. Duke also sells a digitally remastered DVD version of Rendezvous on their Website. As well as these legitimate distribution methods, copies of all six GiS films and Rendezvous are available on the internet through various peer-to-peer file-sharing networks. Mr A says there isn’t much he can do about online file sharing besides asking people to support the franchise if they like the films by buying the DVDs. There are a number of groups making films for car enthusiast using similar guerilla film production methods. However, most of the films are one-offs or do not involve cars driven at such radical speeds. An exception was another Swedish film maker who called himself “Ghostrider” and who produced similar films using a motorbike. Police apprehended a man who they alleged is “Ghostrider” in mid-2004 within the requisite timeframe of an offence that had been allegedly committed. The GiS films alongside these others exist within the automotive cultural industry. The automotive cultural industry is a term I am using to describe the overlap between the automotive industry and the cultural industries of popular culture. The films tap in to a niche market of car enthusiasts. There are many different types of car enthusiasts, everything from petite-bourgeois vintage-car restorers to moral panic-inducing street racers. Obviously the GiS films are targeted more towards the street racing end of the spectrum, which is not surprising because Sweden has a very developed underground street racing scene. A good example is the Stockholm-based “Birka Cup”: a quasi-professional multi-round underground street-racing tournament with 60,000 SEK (approx. AUD$11,000) prize money. The rules and rankings for the tournament are found on the tournament Website. To give some indication of what goes on at these events a short teaser video clip for the 2003 Birka Cup DVD is also available for download from the Website. The GiS films have an element of the exotic European-Other about them, not only because of the street-racing pedigree exemplified by the Birka Cup and similar underground social institutions (such as another event for “import” street racers called the “Stockholm Open”), but because they capture an excess within European car culture normally associated with exotic supercars or the extravagant speeds of cars driven on German autobahns or Italian autostradas. For example, the phrase “European Styling” is often used in Australia to sell European designed “inner-city” cars, such as the GM Holden Barina, a.k.a. the Vauxhall Corsa or the Opel Corsa. Cars from other regional manufacturing zones often do not receive such a specific regional identification; for example, cars built in Asian countries are described as “fully imported” rather than “Asian styling”. Tom O’Dell has noted that dominant conception of automobility in Sweden is different to that of the US. That is, “automobility” needs to be qualified with a national or local context and I assume that other national contexts in Europe would equally be just as different. However, in non-European, mainly post-colonial contexts, such as Australia, the term “European” is an affectation signaling something special. On a different axis, “excess” is directly expressed in the way the police are “captured” in the GiS films. Throughout the GiS series there is a strongly antagonist relation to the police. The initial pre-commercial version of the first GiS film had NWA’s “f*ck the Police” playing over the opening credits. Subsequent commercially-released versions of the film had to change the opening title music due to copyright infringement issues. The “bonus footage” material of subsequent DVDs in the series represents the police as impotent and foolish. Mr A describes it as a kind of “prank” played on police. His rationale is that they live out the fantasy that “everyone” wishes they could do to the police when they are pulled over for speeding and the like; as he puts it, “flipping the bird and driving off”. The police are rendered foolish and captured on film, which is an inversion of the normative traffic-cop-versus-traffic-infringer power relation. Mr A specifies the excess of European modernity to something specific to automobility, which is the near-universal condition of urbanity in most developed nations. The antagonism between the GiS drivers and the police is figured as a duel. The speed of the car(s) obviously exceeds what is socially and legally acceptable and therefore places the drivers in direct conflict with police. The speed captured on film is in part a product of this tension and gives speed a qualitative cultural dimension beyond a simple notion from rectilinear physics of speed as a rate of motion. The qualitative dimension of speed as been noted by Peter Wollen: Speed is not simply thrilling in itself, once sufficiently accelerated, but also enables us to enter exposed and unfamiliar situations, far removed from the zones of safety and normality – to travel into space, for instance, beyond the frontiers of the known. (106) Knowledge is subsumed by the dialect of road safety: “safety” versus “speed”. Knowledge takes on many forms and it is here that speed gains its complexity. In the high-school physics of rectilinear motion speed refers to a rate. Mr A discusses speed as a sensation (“thrill” in the language of Wollen) in the quote at the beginning of the essay. If the body develops sensations from affects and percepts (Deleuze and Guattari 179-83), then what are the affects and percepts that are developed by the body into the sensation of speed? The catchphrase for the GiS films is “Reality Beats Fiction By Far!” The “reality” at stake here is not only the actuality of cars traveling at high speeds within urban spaces, which in the vernacular of automotive popular culture is more “real” than Hollywood representations, but the “reality” of automobilised bodies engaging with and “getting away” from the police. Important here is that the police serve as the symbolic representatives of the governmental institutions and authorities that regulate and discipline populations to be automobilised road users. The police are principally symbolic because one’s road-user body is policed, to a large degree, by one’s self; that is, by the perceptual apparatus that enables us to judge traffic’s rates of movement and gestures of negotiation that are indoctrinated into habit. We do this unthinkingly as part of everyday life. What I want to suggest is that the GiS films tap into the part of our respective bodily perceptual and affective configurations that allow us to exist as road users. To explain this I need to go on a brief detour through “traffic” and its relation to “speed”. Speed serves a functional role within automobilised societies. Contrary to the dominant line from the road safety industry, the “speed limit” we encounter everyday on the road is not so much a limit, but a guide for the self-organisation of traffic. To think the “speed limit” as a limit allows authorities to imagine a particular movement-based threshold of perception and action that bestows upon drivers the ability to negotiate the various everyday hazard-events that constitute the road environment. This is a negative way to look at traffic and is typical of the (post)modernist preoccupation with incorporating contingency (“the accident”) into behavioural protocol and technical design (Lyotard 65-8). It is not surprising that the road safety industry is an exemplary institution of what Gilles Deleuze called the “control society”. The business of the road safety industry is the perpetual modulation of road user populations in a paradoxical attempt to both capture (forecast and study) the social mechanics of the accident-event while postponing its actualisation. Another way to look at traffic is to understand it as a self-organising system. Ilya Prigogine and Robert Herman modeled vehicle traffic as two flows – collective and individual – as a function of the concentration and speed of vehicles. At a certain tipping point the concentration of traffic is such that individual mobility is subsumed by the collective. Speed plays an important role both in the abstract sense of a legislated “speed limit” and as the emergent consistency of mobile road users distributed in traffic. That is, automotive traffic does not move at a constant speed, but nominally moves at a consistent speed. The rate and rhythms of traffic have a consistency that we all must become familiar with to successfully negotiate the everyday system of automobility. For example, someone simply walking becomes a “pedestrian” in the duration of automobilised time-space. Pedestrians must embody a similar sense of the rate of traffic as that perceived by drivers in the cars that constitute traffic. The pedestrian uses this sense of speed when negotiating traffic so as to cross the road, while the driver uses it to maintain a safe distance from the car in front and so on. The shared sense of speed demands an affective complicity of road-user bodies to allow them to seamlessly incorporate themselves into the larger body of traffic on a number of different registers. When road users do not comply with this shared sense of speed that underpins traffic they are met with horn blasts, rude figure gestures, abuse, violence and so on. The affects of traffic are accelerated in the body and developed by the body into the sensations and emotions of “road rage”. Road users must performatively incorporate the necessary dispositions for participating with other road users in traffic otherwise they disrupt the affective script (“habits”) for the production of traffic. When I screened the first GiS film in a seminar in Sweden the room was filled with the sound of horrified gasps. Afterwards someone suggested to me that they (the Swedes) were more shocked than I (an Australian) about the film. Why? Is it because I am a “hoon”? We had all watched the same images heard the same sounds, yet, the “speeds” were not equal. They had experienced the streets in the film as a part of traffic. Their bodies knew just how slow the car was meant to be going. The film captured and transmitted the affects of a different automobilised body. Audiences follow the driver “getting away” from those universally entrusted (at least on a symbolic level) with the governance of traffic – the police – while, for a short period, becoming a new body that gets away from the “practiced perception” (Massumi 189) of habits that normatively enable the production of traffic. What is captured in the film – the event of the getaway – has the potential to develop in the body of the spectator as the sensation of “speed” and trigger a getaway of the body. Acknowledgement I would like to acknowledge the generous funding from the Centre for Cultural Research and the College of Arts, Education and Social Sciences, University of Western Sydney, in awarding me the 2004 CCR CAESS Postgraduate International Scholarship, and the support from my colleagues at the Advanced Cultural Studies Institute of Sweden where I carried out this research as a doctoral exchange student. References Deleuze, Gilles. “Postscript on Control Societies”. Negotiations. Trans. Martin Joughin. New York: Columbia UP, 1995. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. What Is Philosophy? Trans. Graham Burchill and Hugh Tomlinson. London: Verso, 1994. Getaway in Stockholm series. 21 Oct. 2005 http://www.getawayinstockholm.com>. Lyotard, Jean François. The Inhuman: Reflections on Time. Trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby. Stanford, California: Stanford UP, 1991. Massumi, Brian. “Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation”. Post-Contemporary Interventions. Eds. Stanley Fish and Fredric Jameson. Durham, London: Duke UP, 2002. O’Dell, Tom. “Raggare and the Panic of Mobility: Modernity and Everyday Life in Sweden.” Car Culture. Ed. Daniel Miller. Oxford: Berg, 2001. 105-32. Prigogine, Ilya, and Robert Herman. “A Two-Fluid Approach to Town Traffic.” Science 204 (1979): 148-51. Wollen, Peter. “Speed and the Cinema.” New Left Review 16 (2002): 105–14. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Fuller, Glen. "The Getaway." M/C Journal 8.6 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0512/07-fuller.php>. APA Style Fuller, G. (Dec. 2005) "The Getaway," M/C Journal, 8(6). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0512/07-fuller.php>.

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IntroductionIn the wine world, authenticity is not just desired, it is actively required. That demand comes from a complex of producers, distributors and consumers, and other interested parties. Consequently, the authenticity of wine is constantly created, reworked, presented, performed, argued over, contested and appreciated.At one level, such processes have clear economic elements. A wine deemed to be an authentic “expression” of something—the soil and micro-climate in which it was grown, the environment and culture of the region from which it hails, the genius of the wine-maker who nurtured and brought it into being, the quintessential characteristics of the grape variety it is made from—will likely make much more money than one deemed inauthentic. In wine, as in other spheres, perceived authenticity is a means to garner profits, both economic and symbolic (Beverland).At another level, wine animates a complicated intertwining of human tastes, aesthetics, pleasures and identities. Discussions as to the authenticity, or otherwise, of a wine often involve a search by the discussants for meaning and purpose in their lives (Grahm). To discover and appreciate a wine felt to “speak” profoundly of the place from whence it came possibly involves a sense of superiority over others: I drink “real” wine, while you drink mass-market trash (Bourdieu). It can also create reassuring senses of ontological security: in discovering an authentic wine, expressive of a certain aesthetic and locational purity (Zolberg and Cherbo), I have found a cherishable object which can be reliably traced to one particular place on Earth, therefore possessing integrity, honesty and virtue (Fine). Appreciation of wine’s authenticity licenses the self-perception that I am sophisticated and sensitive (Vannini and Williams). My judgement of the wine is also a judgement upon my own aesthetic capacities (Hennion).In wine drinking, and the production, distribution and marketing processes underpinning it, much is at stake as regards authenticity. The social system of the wine world requires the category of authenticity in order to keep operating. This paper examines how and why this has come to be so. It considers the crafting of authenticity in long-term historical perspective. Demand for authentic wine by drinkers goes back many centuries. Self-conscious performances of authenticity by producers is of more recent provenance, and was elaborated above all in France. French innovations then spread to other parts of Europe and the world. The paper reviews these developments, showing that wine authenticity is constituted by an elaborate complex of environmental, cultural, legal, political and commercial factors. The paper both draws upon the social science literature concerning the construction of authenticity and also points out its limitations as regards understanding wine authenticity.The History of AuthenticityIt is conventional in the social science literature (Peterson, Authenticity) to claim that authenticity as a folk category (Lu and Fine), and actors’ desires for authentic things, are wholly “modern,” being unknown in pre-modern contexts (Cohen). Consideration of wine shows that such a view is historically uninformed. Demands by consumers for ‘authentic’ wine, in the sense that it really came from the location it was sold as being from, can be found in the West well before the 19th century, having ancient roots (Wengrow). In ancient Rome, there was demand by elites for wine that was both really from the location it was billed as being from, and was verifiably of a certain vintage (Robertson and Inglis). More recently, demand has existed in Western Europe for “real” Tokaji (sweet wine from Hungary), Port and Bordeaux wines since at least the 17th century (Marks).Conventional social science (Peterson, Authenticity) is on solider ground when demonstrating how a great deal of social energies goes into constructing people’s perceptions—not just of consumers, but of wine producers and sellers too—that particular wines are somehow authentic expressions of the places where they were made. The creation of perceived authenticity by producers and sales-people has a long historical pedigree, beginning in early modernity.For example, in the 17th and 18th centuries, wine-makers in Bordeaux could not compete on price grounds with burgeoning Spanish, Portuguese and Italian production areas, so they began to compete with them on the grounds of perceived quality. Multiple small plots were reorganised into much bigger vineyards. The latter were now associated with a chateau in the neighbourhood, giving the wines connotations of aristocratic gravity and dignity (Ulin). Product-makers in other fields have used the assertion of long-standing family lineages as apparent guarantors of tradition and quality in production (Peterson, Authenticity). The early modern Bordelaise did the same, augmenting their wines’ value by calling upon aristocratic accoutrements like chateaux, coats-of-arms, alleged long-term family ownership of vineyards, and suchlike.Such early modern entrepreneurial efforts remain the foundations of the very high prestige and prices associated with elite wine-making in the region today, with Chinese companies and consumers particularly keen on the grand crus of the region. Globalization of the wine world today is strongly rooted in forms of authenticity performance invented several hundred years ago.Enter the StateAnother notable issue is the long-term role that governments and legislation have played, both in the construction and presentation of authenticity to publics, and in attempts to guarantee—through regulative measures and taxation systems—that what is sold really has come from where it purports to be from. The west European State has a long history of being concerned with the fraudulent selling of “fake” wines (Anderson, Norman, and Wittwer). Thus Cosimo III, Medici Grand Duke of Florence, was responsible for an edict of 1716 which drew up legal boundaries for Tuscan wine-producing regions, restricting the use of regional names like Chianti to wine that actually came from there (Duguid).These 18th century Tuscan regulations are the distant ancestors of quality-control rules centred upon the need to guarantee the authenticity of wines from particular geographical regions and sub-regions, which are today now ubiquitous, especially in the European Union (DeSoucey). But more direct progenitors of today’s Geographical Indicators (GIs)—enforced by the GATT international treaties—and Protected Designations of Origin (PDOs)—promulgated and monitored by the EU—are French in origin (Barham). The famous 1855 quality-level classification of Bordeaux vineyards and their wines was the first attempt in the world explicitly to proclaim that the quality of a wine was a direct consequence of its defined place of origin. This move significantly helped to create the later highly influential notion that place of origin is the essence of a wine’s authenticity. This innovation was initially wholly commercial, rather than governmental, being carried out by wine-brokers to promote Bordeaux wines at the Paris Exposition Universelle, but was later elaborated by State officials.In Champagne, another luxury wine-producing area, small-scale growers of grapes worried that national and international perceptions of their wine were becoming wholly determined by big brands such as Dom Perignon, which advertised the wine as a luxury product, but made no reference to the grapes, the soil, or the (supposedly) traditional methods of production used by growers (Guy). The latter turned to the idea of “locality,” which implied that the character of the wine was an essential expression of the Champagne region itself—something ignored in brand advertising—and that the soil itself was the marker of locality. The idea of “terroir”—referring to the alleged properties of soil and micro-climate, and their apparent expression in the grapes—was mobilised by one group, smaller growers, against another, the large commercial houses (Guy). The terroir notion was a means of constructing authenticity, and denouncing de-localised, hom*ogenizing inauthenticity, a strategy favouring some types of actors over others. The relatively highly industrialized wine-making process was later represented for public consumption as being consonant with both tradition and nature.The interplay of commerce, government, law, and the presentation of authenticity, also appeared in Burgundy. In that region between WWI and WWII, the wine world was transformed by two new factors: the development of tourism and the rise of an ideology of “regionalism” (Laferté). The latter was invented circa WWI by metropolitan intellectuals who believed that each of the French regions possessed an intrinsic cultural “soul,” particularly expressed through its characteristic forms of food and drink. Previously despised peasant cuisine was reconstructed as culturally worthy and true expression of place. Small-scale artisanal wine production was no longer seen as an embarrassment, producing wines far more “rough” than those of Bordeaux and Champagne. Instead, such production was taken as ground and guarantor of authenticity (Laferté). Location, at regional, village and vineyard level, was taken as the primary quality indicator.For tourists lured to the French regions by the newly-established Guide Michelin, and for influential national and foreign journalists, an array of new promotional devices were created, such as gastronomic festivals and folkloric brotherhoods devoted to celebrations of particular foodstuffs and agricultural events like the wine-harvest (Laferté). The figure of the wine-grower was presented as an exemplary custodian of tradition, relatively free of modern capitalist exchange relations. These are the beginnings of an important facet of later wine companies’ promotional literatures worldwide—the “decoupling” of their supposed commitments to tradition, and their “passion” for wine-making beyond material interests, from everyday contexts of industrial production and profit-motives (Beverland). Yet the work of making the wine-maker and their wines authentically “of the soil” was originally stimulated in response to international wine markets and the tourist industry (Laferté).Against this background, in 1935 the French government enacted legislation which created theInstitut National des Appellations d’Origine (INAO) and its Appelation d’Origine Controlle (AOC) system (Barham). Its goal was, and is, to protect what it defines as terroir, encompassing both natural and human elements. This legislation went well beyond previous laws, as it did more than indicate that wine must be honestly labelled as deriving from a given place of origin, for it included guarantees of authenticity too. An authentic wine was defined as one which truly “expresses” the terroir from which it comes, where terroir means both soil and micro-climate (nature) and wine-making techniques “traditionally” associated with that area. Thus French law came to enshrine a relatively recently invented cultural assumption: that places create distinctive tastes, the value of this state of affairs requiring strong State protection. Terroir must be protected from the untrammelled free market. Land and wine, symbiotically connected, are de-commodified (Kopytoff). Wine is embedded in land; land is embedded in what is regarded as regional culture; the latter is embedded in national history (Polanyi).But in line with the fact that the cultural underpinnings of the INAO/AOC system were strongly commercially oriented, at a more subterranean level the de-commodified product also has economic value added to it. A wine worthy of AOC protection must, it is assumed, be special relative to wines un-deserving of that classification. The wine is taken out of the market, attributed special status, and released, economically enhanced, back onto the market. Consequently, State-guaranteed forms of authenticity embody ambivalent but ultimately efficacious economic processes. Wine pioneered this Janus-faced situation, the AOC system in the 1990s being generalized to all types of agricultural product in France. A huge bureaucratic apparatus underpins and makes possible the AOC system. For a region and product to gain AOC protection, much energy is expended by collectives of producers and other interested parties like regional development and tourism officials. The French State employs a wide range of expert—oenological, anthropological, climatological, etc.—who police the AOC classificatory mechanisms (Barham).Terroirisation ProcessesFrench forms of legal classification, and the broader cultural classifications which underpin them and generated them, very much influenced the EU’s PDO system. The latter uses a language of authenticity rooted in place first developed in France (DeSoucey). The French model has been generalized, both from wine to other foodstuffs, and around many parts of Europe and the world. An Old World idea has spread to the New World—paradoxically so, because it was the perceived threat posed by the ‘placeless’ wines and decontextualized grapes of the New World which stimulated much of the European legislative measures to protect terroir (Marks).Paxson shows how artisanal cheese-makers in the US, appropriate the idea of terroir to represent places of production, and by extension the cheeses made there, that have no prior history of being constructed as terroir areas. Here terroir is invented at the same time as it is naturalised, made to seem as if it simply points to how physical place is directly expressed in a manufactured product. By defining wine or cheese as a natural product, claims to authenticity are themselves naturalised (Ulin). Successful terroirisation brings commercial benefits for those who engage in it, creating brand distinctiveness (no-one else can claim their product expresses that particularlocation), a value-enhancing aura around the product which, and promotion of food tourism (Murray and Overton).Terroirisation can also render producers into virtuous custodians of the land who are opposed to the depredations of the industrial food and agriculture systems, the categories associated with terroir classifying the world through a binary opposition: traditional, small-scale production on the virtuous side, and large-scale, “modern” harvesting methods on the other. Such a situation has prompted large-scale, industrial wine-makers to adopt marketing imagery that implies the “place-based” nature of their offerings, even when the grapes can come from radically different areas within a region or from other regions (Smith Maguire). Like smaller producers, large companies also decouple the advertised imagery of terroir from the mundane realities of industry and profit-margins (Beverland).The global transportability of the terroir concept—ironic, given the rhetorical stress on the uniqueness of place—depends on its flexibility and ambiguity. In the French context before WWII, the phrase referred specifically to soil and micro-climate of vineyards. Slowly it started mean to a markedly wider symbolic complex involving persons and personalities, techniques and knowhow, traditions, community, and expressions of local and regional heritage (Smith Maguire). Over the course of the 20th century, terroir became an ever broader concept “encompassing the physical characteristics of the land (its soil, climate, topography) and its human dimensions (culture, history, technology)” (Overton 753). It is thought to be both natural and cultural, both physical and human, the potentially contradictory ramifications of such understanding necessitating subtle distinctions to ward off confusion or paradox. Thus human intervention on the land and the vines is often represented as simply “letting the grapes speak for themselves” and “allowing the land to express itself,” as if the wine-maker were midwife rather than fabricator. Terroir talk operates with an awkward verbal balancing act: wine-makers’ “signature” styles are expressions of their cultural authenticity (e.g. using what are claimed as ‘traditional’ methods), yet their stylistic capacities do not interfere with the soil and micro-climate’s natural tendencies (i.e. the terroir’sphysical authenticity).The wine-making process is a case par excellence of a network of humans and objects, or human and non-human actants (Latour). The concept of terroir today both acknowledges that fact, but occludes it at the same time. It glosses over the highly problematic nature of what is “real,” “true,” “natural.” The roles of human agents and technologies are sequestered, ignoring the inevitably changing nature of knowledges and technologies over time, recognition of which jeopardises claims about an unchanging physical, social and technical order. Harvesting by machine production is representationally disavowed, yet often pragmatically embraced. The role of “foreign” experts acting as advisors —so-called “flying wine-makers,” often from New World production cultures —has to be treated gingerly or covered up. Because of the effects of climate change on micro-climates and growing conditions, the taste of wines from a particular terroir changes over time, but the terroir imaginary cannot recognise that, being based on projections of timelessness (Brabazon).The authenticity referred to, and constructed, by terroir imagery must constantly be performed to diverse audiences, convincing them that time stands still in the terroir. If consumers are to continue perceiving authenticity in a wine or winery, then a wide range of cultural intermediaries—critics, journalists and other self-proclaiming experts must continue telling convincing stories about provenance. Effective authenticity story-telling rests on the perceived sincerity and knowledgeability of the teller. Such tales stress romantic imagery and colourful, highly personalised accounts of the quirks of particular wine-makers, omitting mundane details of production and commercial activities (Smith Maguire). Such intermediaries must seek to interest their audience in undiscovered regions and “quirky” styles, demonstrating their insider knowledge. But once such regions and styles start to become more well-known, their rarity value is lost, and intermediaries must find ever newer forms of authenticity, which in turn will lose their burnished aura when they become objects of mundane consumption. An endless cycle of discovering and undermining authenticity is constantly enacted.ConclusionAuthenticity is a category held by different sorts of actors in the wine world, and is the means by which that world is held together. This situation has developed over a long time-frame and is now globalized. Yet I will end this paper on a volte face. Authenticity in the wine world can never be regarded as wholly and simply a social construction. One cannot directly import into the analysis of that world assumptions—about the wholly socially constructed nature of phenomena—which social scientific studies of other domains, most notably culture industries, work with (Peterson, Authenticity). Ways of thinking which are indeed useful for understanding the construction of authenticity in some specific contexts, cannot just be applied in simplistic manners to the wine world. When they are applied in direct and unsophisticated ways, such an operation misses the specificities and particularities of wine-making processes. These are always simultaneously “social” and “natural”, involving multiple forms of complex intertwining of human actions, environmental and climatological conditions, and the characteristics of the vines themselves—a situation markedly beyond beyond any straightforward notion of “social construction.”The wine world has many socially constructed objects. But wine is not just like any other product. Its authenticity cannot be fabricated in the manner of, say, country music (Peterson, Country). Wine is never in itself only a social construction, nor is its authenticity, because the taste, texture and chemical elements of wine derive from complex human interactions with the physical environment. Wine is partly about packaging, branding and advertising—phenomena standard social science accounts of authenticity focus on—but its organic properties are irreducible to those factors. Terroir is an invention, a label put on to certain things, meaning they are perceived to be authentic. But the things that label refers to—ranging from the slope of a vineyard and the play of sunshine on it, to how grapes grow and when they are picked—are entwined with human semiotics but not completely created by them. A truly comprehensive account of wine authenticity remains to be written.ReferencesAnderson, Kym, David Norman, and Glyn Wittwer. “Globalization and the World’s Wine Markets: Overview.” Discussion Paper No. 0143, Centre for International Economic Studies. Adelaide: U of Adelaide, 2001.Barham, Elizabeth. “Translating Terroir: The Global Challenge of French AOC Labelling.” Journal of Rural Studies 19 (2003): 127–38.Beverland, Michael B. “Crafting Brand Authenticity: The Case of Luxury Wines.” Journal of Management Studies 42.5 (2005): 1003–29.Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. London: Routledge, 1992.Brabazon, Tara. “Colonial Control or Terroir Tourism? The Case of Houghton’s White Burgundy.” Human Geographies 8.2 (2014): 17–33.Cohen, Erik. “Authenticity and Commoditization in Tourism.” Annals of Tourism Research 15.3 (1988): 371–86.DeSoucey, Michaela. “Gastronationalism: Food Traditions and Authenticity Politics in the European Union.” American Sociological Review 75.3 (2010): 432–55.Duguid, Paul. “Developing the Brand: The Case of Alcohol, 1800–1880.” Enterprise and Society 4.3 (2003): 405–41.Fine, Gary A. “Crafting Authenticity: The Validation of Identity in Self-Taught Art.” Theory and Society 32.2 (2003): 153–80.Grahm, Randall. “The Soul of Wine: Digging for Meaning.” Wine and Philosophy: A Symposium on Thinking and Drinking. Ed. Fritz Allhoff. Oxford: Blackwell, 2008. 219–24.Guy, Kolleen M. When Champagne Became French: Wine and the Making of a National Identity. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2003.Hennion, Antoine. “The Things That Bind Us Together.”Cultural Sociology 1.1 (2007): 65–85.Kopytoff, Igor. “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as a Process." The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Ed. Arjun Appadurai. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986. 64–91.Laferté, Gilles. “End or Invention of Terroirs? Regionalism in the Marketing of French Luxury Goods: The Example of Burgundy Wines in the Inter-War Years.” Working Paper, Centre d’Economie et Sociologie Appliquées a l’Agriculture et aux Espaces Ruraux, Dijon.Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Harvard: Harvard UP, 1993.Lu, Shun and Gary A. Fine. “The Presentation of Ethnic Authenticity: Chinese Food as a Social Accomplishment.” The Sociological Quarterly 36.3 (1995): 535–53.Marks, Denton. “Competitiveness and the Market for Central and Eastern European Wines: A Cultural Good in the Global Wine Market.” Journal of Wine Research 22.3 (2011): 245–63.Murray, Warwick E. and John Overton. “Defining Regions: The Making of Places in the New Zealand Wine Industry.” Australian Geographer 42.4 (2011): 419–33.Overton, John. “The Consumption of Space: Land, Capital and Place in the New Zealand Wine Industry.” Geoforum 41.5 (2010): 752–62.Paxson, Heather. “Locating Value in Artisan Cheese: Reverse Engineering Terroir for New-World Landscapes.” American Anthropologist 112.3 (2010): 444–57.Peterson, Richard A. Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2000.———. “In Search of Authenticity.” Journal of Management Studies 42.5 (2005): 1083–98.Polanyi, Karl. The Great Transformation. Boston: Beacon Press, 1957.Robertson, Roland, and David Inglis. “The Global Animus: In the Tracks of World Consciousness.” Globalizations 1.1 (2006): 72–92.Smith Maguire, Jennifer. “Provenance and the Liminality of Production and Consumption: The Case of Wine Promoters.” Marketing Theory 10.3 (2010): 269–82.Trubek, Amy. The Taste of Place: A Cultural Journey into Terroir. Los Angeles: U of California P, 2008.Ulin, Robert C. “Invention and Representation as Cultural Capital.” American Anthropologist 97.3 (1995): 519–27.Vannini, Phillip, and Patrick J. Williams. Authenticity in Culture, Self and Society. Farnham: Ashgate, 2009.Wengrow, David. “Prehistories of Commodity Branding.” Current Anthropology 49.1 (2008): 7–34.Zolberg, Vera and Joni Maya Cherbo. Outsider Art: Contesting Boundaries in Contemporary Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997.

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Susheel Kumar Sharma’s Unwinding Self: A Collection of Poems. Cuttack: Vishvanatha Kaviraj Institute, 2020, ISBN: 978-81-943450-3-9, Paperback, pp. viii + 152. Like his earlier collection, The Door is Half Open, Susheel Kumar Sharma’s Unwinding Self: A Collection of Poems has three sections consisting of forty-two poems of varied length and style, a detailed Glossary mainly on the proper nouns from Indian culture and tradition and seven Afterwords from the pens of the trained readers from different countries of four continents. The structure of the book is circular. The first poem “Snapshots” indicates fifteen kaleidoscopic patterns of different moods of life in about fifteen words each. It seems to be a rumination on the variegated images of everyday experiences ranging from individual concerns to spiritual values. Art-wise, they can be called mini-micro-poems as is the last poem of the book. While the character limit in a micro poem is generally 140 (the character limit on Twitter) Susheel has used just around 65 in each of these poems. Naturally, imagery, symbolism and cinematic technique play a great role in this case. In “The End of the Road” the poet depicts his individual experiences particularly changing scenario of the world. He seems to be worried about his eyesight getting weak with the passage of time, simultaneously he contrasts the weakness of his eyesight with the hypocrisy permeating the human life. He compares his diminishing eyesight to Milton and shows his fear as if he will get blind. He changes his spectacles six times to clear his vision and see the plurality of a reality in human life. It is an irony on the changing aspects of human life causing miseries to the humanity. At the end of the poem, the poet admits the huge changes based on the sham principles: “The world has lost its original colour” (4). The concluding lines of the poem make a mockery of the people who are not able to recognise reality in the right perspective. The poem “Durga Puja in 2013” deals with the celebration of the festival “Durga Puja” popular in the Hindu religion. The poet’s urge to be with Ma Durga shows his dedication towards the Goddess Durga, whom he addresses with different names like ‘Mai’, ‘Ma’ and ‘Mother’. He worships her power and expresses deep reverence for annihilating the evil-spirits. The festival Durga Puja also reminds people of victory of the goddess on the elusive demons in the battlefield. “Chasing a Dream on the Ganges” is another poem having spiritual overtones. Similarly, the poem “Akshya Tritya” has religious and spiritual connotations. It reflects curiosity of people for celebration of “Akshya Tritya” with enthusiasm. But the political and economic overtones cannot be ignored as the poem ends with the remarkable comments: The GDP may go up on this day; Even, Budia is able to Eat to his fill; Panditji can blow his Conch shell with full might. Outside, somebody is asking for votes; Somebody is urging others to vote. I shall vote for Akshya Tritya. (65-66) “On Reading Langston Hughes’ ‘Theme for English B’” is a long poem in the collection. In this poem, the poet reveals a learner’s craving for learning, perhaps who comes from an extremely poor background to pursue his dreams of higher education. The poet considers the learner’s plights of early childhood, school education and evolutionary spirit. He associates it with Dronacharya and Eklavya to describe the mythical system of education. He does not want to be burdened with the self-guilt by denying the student to be his ‘guru’ therefore, he accepts the challenge to change his life. Finally, he shows his sympathy towards the learner and decides to be the ‘guru’: “It is better to face/A challenge and change/Than to be burden with a life/Of self-guilt. /I put my signatures on his form willy-nilly” (11). The poem “The Destitute” is an ironical presentation of the modern ways of living seeking pleasure in the exotic locations all over the world. It portrays the life of a person who has to leave his motherland for earning his livelihood, and has to face an irreparable loss affecting moral virtues, lifestyle, health and sometimes resulting in deaths. The poem “The Black Experience” deals with the suppression of the Africans by the white people. The poem “Me, A Black Doxy”, perhaps points out the dilemma of a black woman whether she should prostitute herself or not, to earn her livelihood. Perhaps, her deep consciousness about her self-esteem does not allow her to indulge in it but she thinks that she is not alone in objectifying herself for money in the street. Her voice resonates repeatedly with the guilt of her indulgence on the filthy streets: At the dining time Me not alone? In the crowded street Me not alone? They ’ave white, grey, pink hair Me ’ave black hair – me not alone There’s a crowd with black hair. Me ’ave no black money Me not alone? (14) The poem “Thus Spake a Woman” is structured in five sections having expressions of the different aspects of a woman’s love designs. It depicts a woman’s dreams and her attraction towards her lover. The auditory images like “strings of a violin”, “music of the violin” and “clinch in my fist” multiply intensity of her feelings. With development of the poem, her dreams seem to be shattered and sadness know the doors of her dreamland. Finally, she is confronted with sadness and is taken back to the past memories reminding her of the difficult situations she had faced. Replete with poetic irony, “Bubli Poems” presents the journey of a female, who, from the formative years of her life to womanhood, experienced gender stereotypes, biased sociocultural practices, and ephemeral happiness on the faces of other girls around her. The poem showcases the transformation of a village girl into a New Woman, who dreams her existence in all types of luxurious belongings rather than identifying her independent existence and finding out her own ways of living. Her dreams lead her to social mobility through education, friendships, and the freedom that she gains from her parents, family, society and culture. She attempts her luck in the different walks of human life, particularly singing and dancing and imagines her social status and wide popularity similar to those of the famous Indian actresses viz. Katrina and Madhuri Dixit: “One day Bubli was standing before the mirror/Putting on a jeans and jacket and shaking her hips/She was trying to be a local Katrina” (41). She readily bears the freakish behaviour of the rustic/uncultured lads, derogatory comments, and physical assaults in order to fulfil her expectations and achieves her individual freedom. Having enjoyed all the worldly happiness and fashionable life, ultimately, she is confronted with the evils designs around her which make her worried, as if she is ignorant of the world replete with the evils and agonies: “Bubli was ignorant of her agony and the lost calm” (42). The examples of direct poetic irony and ironic expressions of the socio-cultural evils, and the different governing bodies globally, are explicit in this poem: “Bubli is a leader/What though if a cheerleader./The news makes her family happy.”(40), “Others were blaming the Vice-Chancellor/ Some others the system;/ Some the freedom given to girls;”(45), and “Some blame poverty; some the IMF;/ Some the UN; some the environment;/ Some the arms race; some the crony’s lust;/ Some the US’s craving for power;/Some the UK’s greed. (46-47). Finally, Bubli finds that her imaginative world is fragile. She gives up her corporeal dreams which have taken the peace of her mind away. She yearns for shelter in the temples and churches and surrenders herself before deities praying for her liberation: “Jai Kali,/ Jai Mahakali, Jai Ma, Jai Jagaddhatri,/ Save me, save the world.” (47). In the poem “The Unlucky”, the poet jibes at those who are lethargic in reading. He identifies four kinds of readers and places himself in the fourth category by rating himself a ‘poor’ reader. The first three categories remind the readers of William Shakespeare’s statement “Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.” At the end of the poem, the poet questions himself for being a poet and teacher. The question itself reflects on his ironic presentation of himself as a poor reader because a poet’s wisdom is compared with that of the philosopher and everybody worships and bows before a teacher, a “guru”, in the Indian tradition. The poet is considered the embodiment of both. The poet’s unfulfilled wish to have been born in Prayagraj is indexed with compunction when the poem ends with the question “Why was I not born in Prayagraj?” (52). Ending with a question mark, the last line of the poem expresses his desire for perfection. The next poem, “Saying Goodbye”, is elegiac in tone and has an allusion to Thomas Gray’s “The Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” in the line “When the curfew tolls the knell of the parting day”; it ends with a question mark. The poem seems to be a depiction of the essence and immortality of ‘time’. Reflecting on the poet’s consideration of the power and beauty of ‘time’, Pradeep Kumar Patra rightly points out, “It is such a phenomena that nobody can turn away from it. The moment is both beautiful as well as ferocious. It beautifies and showcases everything and at the same time pulls everything down when necessary” (146). Apparently, the poem “The Kerala Flood 2018”is an expression of emotions at the disaster caused by the flood in 2018. By reminding of Gandhi’s tenets to be followed by people for the sake of morality and humankind, the poet makes an implicit criticism of the pretentions, and violation of pledges made by people to care of other beings, particularly, cow that is worshiped as “mother” and is considered to be a symbol of fertility, peace and holiness in Hinduism as well as the Buddhist culture. The poet also denigrates people who deliberately ignore the sanctity of the human life in Hinduism and slaughter the animal cow to satisfy their appetites. In the poem, the carnivorous are criticized explicitly, but those who pretend to be herbivorous are decried as shams: If a cow is sacrosanct And people eat beef One has to take a side. Some of the friends chose to Side with cow and others With the beef-eaters. Some were more human They chose both. (55) The poet infuses positivity into the minds of the Indian people. Perhaps, he thinks that, for Indians, poverty, ignorance, dirt and mud are not taboos as if they are habitual to forbear evils by their instincts. They readily accept them and live their lives happily with pride considering their deity as the preserver of their lives. The poem “A Family by the Road” is an example of such beliefs, in which the poet lavishes most of his poetic depiction on the significance of the Lord Shiva, the preserver of people in Hinduism: Let me enjoy my freedom. I am proud of my poverty. I am proud of my ignorance. I am proud of my dirt. I have a home because of these. I am proud of my home. My future is writ on the walls Of your houses My family shall stay in the mud. After all, somebody is needed To clean the dirt as well. I am Shiva, Shivoham. (73) In the poem “Kabir’s Chadar”, the poet invokes several virtues to back up his faith in spirituality and simplicity. He draws a line of merit and virtue between Kabir’s Chadar which is ‘white’ and his own which is “thickly woven” and “Patterned with various beautiful designs/ In dark but shining colours” (50). The poet expresses his views on Kabir’s ‘white’ Chadar symbolically to inculcate the sense of purity, fortitude, spirituality, and righteousness among people. The purpose of his direct comparison between them is to refute artificiality, guilt and evil intents of humanity, and propagate spiritual purity, the stark simplicities of our old way of life, and follow the patience of a saint like Kabir. The poem “Distancing” is a statement of poetic irony on the city having two different names known as Bombay and Mumbai. The poet sneers at its existence in Atlas. Although the poet portraits the historical events jeering at the distancing between the two cities as if they are really different, yet the poet’s prophetic anticipation about the spread of the COVID-19 in India cannot be denied prima facie. The poet’s overwhelming opinions on the overcrowded city of Bombay warn humankind to rescue their lives. Even though the poem seems to have individual expressions of the poet, leaves a message of distancing to be understood by the people for their safety against the uneven things. The poem “Crowded Locals” seems to be a sequel to the poem “Distancing”. Although the poet’s purpose, and appeal to the commonplace for distancing cannot be affirmed by the readers yet his remarks on the overcrowded cities like in Mumbai (“Crowded Locals”), foresee some risk to the humankind. In the poem “Crowded Locals”, he details the mobility of people from one place to another, having dreams in their eyes and puzzles in their minds for their livelihood while feeling insecure especially, pickpockets, thieves and strangers. The poet also makes sneering comments on the body odour of people travelling in first class. However, these two poems have become a novel contribution for social distancing to fight against the COVID-19. In the poem “Buy Books, Not Diamonds” the poet makes an ironical interpretation of social anarchy, political upheaval, and threat of violence. In this poem, the poet vies attention of the readers towards the socio-cultural anarchy, especially, anarchy falls on the academic institutions in the western countries where capitalism, aristocracy, dictatorship have armed children not with books which inculcate human values but with rifles which create fear and cause violence resulting in deaths. The poet’s perplexed opinions find manifestation in such a way as if books have been replaced with diamonds and guns, therefore, human values are on the verge of collapse: “Nine radiant diamonds are no match/ To the redness of the queen of spades. . . . / … holding/ Rifles is a better option than/ Hawking groundnuts on the streets?” (67).The poet also decries the spread of austere religious practices and jihadist movement like Boko Haram, powerful personalities, regulatory bodies and religious persons: “Boko Haram has come/Obama has also come/The UN has come/Even John has come with/Various kinds of ointments” (67). The poem “Lost Childhood” seems to be a memoir in which the poet compares the early life of an orphan with the child who enjoys early years of their lives under the safety of their parents. Similarly, the theme of the poem “Hands” deals with the poet’s past experiences of the lifestyle and its comparison to the present generation. The poet’s deep reverence for his parents reveals his clear understanding of the ways of living and human values. He seems to be very grateful to his father as if he wants to make his life peaceful by reading the lines of his palms: “I need to read the lines in his palm” (70). In the poem “A Gush of Wind”, the poet deliberates on the role of Nature in our lives. The poem is divided into three sections, perhaps developing in three different forms of the wind viz. air, storm, and breeze respectively. It is structured around the significance of the Nature. In the first section, the poet lays emphasis on the air we breathe and keep ourselves fresh as if it is a panacea. The poet criticizes artificial and material things like AC. In the second section, he depicts the stormy nature of the wind scattering papers, making the bed sheets dusty affecting or breaking the different types of fragile and luxurious objects like Italian carpets and lamp shades with its strong blow entering the oriels and window panes of the houses. Apparently, the poem may be an individual expression, but it seems to be a caricature on the majesty of the rich people who ignore the use of eco-chic objects and disobey the Nature’s behest. In the third and the last section of the poem, the poet’s tone is critical towards Whitman, Pushkin and Ginsberg for their pseudoscientific philosophy of adherence to the Nature. Finally, he opens himself to enjoy the wind fearlessly. The poems like “A Voice” , “The New Year Dawn”, “The New Age”, “The World in Words in 2015”, “A Pond Nearby”, “Wearing the Scarlet Letter ‘A’”, “A Mock Drill”, “Strutting Around”, “Sahibs, Snobs, Sinners”, “Endless Wait”, “The Soul with a New Hat”, “Renewed Hope”, “Like Father, Unlike Son”, “Hands”, “Rechristening the City”, “Coffee”, “The Unborn Poem”, “The Fountain Square”, “Ram Setu”, and “Connaught Place” touch upon the different themes. These poems reveal poet’s creativity and unique features of his poetic arts and crafts. The last poem of the collection “Stories from the Mahabharata” is written in twenty-five stanzas consisting of three lines each. Each stanza either describes a scene or narrates a story from the Mahabharata, the source of the poem. Every stanza has an independent action verb to describe the actions of different characters drawn from the Mahabharata. Thus, each stanza is a complete miniscule poem in itself which seems to be a remarkable characteristic of the poem. It is an exquisite example of ‘Micro-poetry’ on paper, remarkable for its brevity, dexterity and intensity. The poet’s conscious and brilliant reframing of the stories in his poem sets an example of a new type of ‘Found Poetry’ for his readers. Although the poet’s use of various types images—natural, comic, tragic, childhood, horticultural, retains the attention of readers yet the abundant evidences of anaphora reflect redundancy and affect the readers’ concentration and diminishes their mental perception, for examples, pronouns ‘her’ and ‘we’ in a very small poem “Lost Childhood”, articles ‘the’ and ‘all’ in “Crowded Locals”, the phrase ‘I am proud of’ in “A Family by the Road” occur many times. Svitlana Buchatska’s concise but evaluative views in her Afterword to Unwinding Self help the readers to catch hold of the poet’s depiction of his emotions. She writes, “Being a keen observer of life he vividly depicts people’s life, traditions and emotions involving us into their rich spiritual world. His poems are the reflection on the Master’s world of values, love to his family, friends, students and what is more, to his beloved India. Thus, the author reveals all his beliefs, attitudes, myths and allusions which are the patterns used by the Indian poets” (150). W. H. Auden defines poetry as “the clear expression of mixed feelings.” It seems so true of Susheel Sharma’s Unwinding Self. It is a mixture of poems that touch upon the different aspects of human life. It can be averred that the collection consists of the poet’s seamless efforts to delve into the various domains of the human life and spot for the different places as well. It is a poetic revue in verse in which the poet instils energy, confidence, power and enthusiasm into minds of Indian people and touches upon all aspects of their lives. The poverty, ignorance, dirt, mud, daily struggle against liars, thieves, pickpockets, touts, politician and darkness have been depicted not as weaknesses of people in Indian culture but their strengths, because they have courage to overcome darkness and see the advent of a new era. The poems teach people morality, guide them to relive their pains and lead them to their salvation. Patricia Prime’s opinion is remarkable: “Sharma writes about his family, men and women, childhood, identity, roots and rootlessness, memory and loss, dreams and interactions with nature and place. His poised, articulate poems are remarkable for their wit, conversational tone and insight” (138). Through the poems in the collection, the poet dovetails the niceties of the Indian culture, and communicates its beauty and uniqueness meticulously. The language of the poem is lucid, elevated and eloquent. The poet’s use of diction seems to be very simple and colloquial like that of an inspiring teacher. On the whole the book is more than just a collection of poems as it teaches the readers a lot about the world around them through a detailed Glossary appended soon after the poems in the collection. It provides supplementary information about the terms used abundantly in Indian scriptures, myths, and other religious and academic writings. The Glossary, therefore, plays pivotal role in unfolding the layers of meaning and reaching the hearts of the global readers. The “Afterwords” appended at the end, enhances readability of poems and displays worldwide acceptability, intelligibility, and popularity of the poet. The Afterwords are a good example of authentic Formalistic criticism and New Criticism. They indirectly teach a formative reader and critic the importance of forming one’s opinion, direct reading and writing without any crutches of the critics.

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Abstract:

In recent years a number of dramas focussing on Indigenous Australians and Australian history have appeared on the ABC, one of Australia's two public television channels. These dramas have different foci but all represent some aspects of Australian Indigenous history and how it interacts with 'mainstream' representations of Australian history. The four programs I will look at are Cleverman (Goalpost Pictures, 2016-ongoing), Glitch (Matchbox Films, 2015-ongoing), The Secret River (Ruby Entertainment, 2015) and Redfern Now (Blackfella Films, 2012), each of which engages with the past in a unique way.Clearly, different creators, working with different plots and in different genres will have different ways of representing the past. Redfern Now and Cleverman are both produced by Indigenous creators whereas the creators of The Secret River and Glitch are white Australians. Redfern Now and The Secret River are in a realist mode, whereas Glitch and Cleverman are speculative fiction. My argument proceeds on two axes: first, speculative genres allow for more creative ways of representing the past. They give more freedom for the creators to present affective representations of the historical past. Speculative genres also allow for more interesting intellectual examinations of what we consider to be history and its uncertainties. My second axis argues, because it is hard to avoid when looking at this group of texts, that Indigenous creators represent the past in different ways than non-Indigenous creators. Indigenous creators present a more elliptical vision. Non-Indigenous creators tend to address historical stories in more overt ways. It is apparent that even when dealing with the same histories and the same facts, the understanding of the past held by different groups is presented differently because it has different affective meanings.These television programs were all made in the 2010s but the roots of their interpretations go much further back, not only to the history they represent but also to the arguments about history that have raged in Australian intellectual and popular culture. Throughout most of the twentieth century, indigenous history was not discussed in Australia, until this was disturbed by WEH Stanner's reference in the Boyer lectures of 1968 to "our great Australian silence" (Clark 73). There was, through the 1970s and 80s, increased discussion of Indigenous history, and then in the 1990s there was a period of social and cultural argument known locally as the 'History Wars'. This long-running public disagreement took place in both academic and public arenas, and involved historians, other academics, politicians, journalists and social commentators on each side. One side argued that the arrival of white people in Australia led to frontier wars, massacre, attempted genocide and the ongoing oppression of Indigenous people (Reynolds). The other posited that when white people arrived they killed a few Aborigines but mostly Aboriginal people were killed by disease or failure to 'defend' their culture (Windschuttle). The first viewpoint was revisionist from the 1960s onwards and the second represented an attempt at counter-revision – to move the understanding of history back to what it was prior to the revision. The argument took place not only among historians, but was taken up by politicians with Paul Keating, prime minister 1993-1996, holding the first view and John Howard, prime minister 1996-2007, aggressively pursuing the second. The revisionist viewpoint was championed by historians such as Henry Reynolds and Lyndall Ryan and academics and Aboriginal activists such as Tony Birch and Aileen Moreton Robinson; whereas the counter-revisionists had Keith Windschuttle and Geoffrey Blainey. By and large the revisionist viewpoint has become dominant and the historical work of the counter-revisionists is highly disputed and not accepted.This argument was prominent in Australian cultural discourse throughout the 1990s and has never entirely disappeared. The TV shows I am examining were not made in the 1990s, nor were they made in the 2000s - it took nearly twenty years for responses to the argument to make the jump from politicians' speeches and opinion pieces to television drama. John Ellis argues that the role of television in popular discourse is "working through," meaning contentious issues are first raised in news reports, then they move to current affairs, then talk shows and documentaries, then sketch comedy, then drama (Ellis). Australian Indigenous history was extensively discussed in the news, current affairs and talk shows in the 1990s, documentaries appeared somewhat later, notably First Australians in 2008, but sketch comedy and drama did not happen until in 2014, when Black Comedy's programme first aired, offering sketches engaging often and fiercely with indigenous history.The existence of this public discourse in the political and academic realms was reflected in film before television. Felicity Collins argues that the "Blak Wave" of Indigenous film came to exist in the context of, and as a response to, the history wars (Collins 232). This wave of film making by Indigenous film makers included the works of Rachel Perkins, Warwick Thornton and Ivan Sen – whose films chronicled the lives of Indigenous Australians. There was also what Collins calls "back-tracking films" such as Rabbit-Proof Fence (2002) and The Tracker (2010) made by white creators that presented arguments from the history wars for general audiences. Collins argues that both the "blak wave" and the "back track" created an alternative cultural sphere where past injustices are acknowledged. She says: "the films of the Blak Wave… cut across the history wars by turning an Indigenous gaze on the colonial past and its afterlife in the present" (Collins 232). This group of films sees Indigenous gazes relate the past and present whereas the white gaze represents specific history. In this article I examine a similar group of representations in television programs.History is not an innocent discourse. In western culture 'history' describes a certain way of looking at the past that was codified in the 19th century (Lloyd 375). It is however not the only way to look at the past, theorist Mark Day has described it as a type of relation with the past and argues that other understandings of the past such as popular memory and mythology are also available (Day). The codification of history in the 19th century involved an increased reliance on documentary evidence, a claim to objectivity, a focus on causation and, often though not always, a focus on national, political history. This sort of history became the academic understanding of history – which claims to be, if not objective, at least capable of disinterest; which bases its arguments on facts and which can establish its facts through reference to documentary records (Froeyman 219). Aileen Moreton-Robinson would call this "white patriarchal knowledge" that seeks to place the indigenous within its own type of knowledge production ("The White Man's Burden" 414). The western version of history tends to focus on causation and to present the past as a coherent narrative leading to the current point in time. This is not an undisputed conception of history in the western academy but it is common and often dominant.Post-colonialist analyses of history argue that western writing about non-western subjects is biased and forces non-westerners into categories used to oppress them (Anderson 44). These categories exist ahistorically and deny non-westerners the ability to act because if history cannot be perceived then it is difficult to see the future. That is to say, because non-western subjects in the past are not seen as historical actors, as people whose actions effected the future, then, in the present, they are unable to access to powerful arguments from history. Historians' usual methodology casts Indigenous people as the 'subjects' of history which is about them, not by them or for them (Tuhiwai Smith 7, 30-32, 144-5). Aboriginal people are characterised as prehistoric, ancient, timeless and dying (Birch 150). This way of thinking about Indigenous Australia removes all agency from Aboriginal actors and restoring agency has been a goal of Aboriginal activists and historians. Aileen Moreton Robinson discusses how Aboriginal resistance is embodied through "oral history (and) social memory," engaging with how Aboriginal actors represent themselves and are represented in relation to the past and historical settings is an important act ("Introduction" 127).Redfern Now and Cleverman were produced through the ABC's Indigenous Department and made by Indigenous filmmakers, whereas Glitch and The Secret River are from the ABC drama department and were made by white Australians. The different programs also have different generic backgrounds. Redfern Now and The Secret River are different forms of realist texts; social realism and historical realism. Cleverman and Glitch, however, are speculative fiction texts that can be argued to be in the mode of magical realism, they "denaturalise the real and naturalise the marvellous" they are also closely tied ideas of retelling colonial stories and "resignify(ing) colonial territories and pasts" (Siskind 834-5).Redfern Now was produced by Blackfella Films for the ABC. It was, with much fanfare, released as the first drama made for television, by Aboriginal people and about Aboriginal people (Blundell). The central concerns of the program are issues in the present, its plots and settings are entirely contemporary. In this way it circumvents the idea and standard representation of Indigenous Australians as ancient and timeless. It places the characters in the program very much in the present.However, one episode "Stand Up" does obliquely engage with historical concerns. In this episode a young boy, Joel Shields, gets a scholarship to an expensive private school. When he attends his first school assembly he does not sing the national anthem with the other students. This leads to a dispute with the school that forms the episode's plot. As punishment for not singing Joel is set an assignment to research the anthem, which he does and he finds the song off-putting – with the words 'boundless plains to share' particularly disconcerting. His father supports him saying "it's not our song" and compares Joel singing it to a "whitefella doing a corrobboree". The national anthem stands metaphorically for the white hegemony in Australia.The school itself is also a metaphor for hegemony. The camerawork lingers on the architecture which is intended to imply historical strength and imperviousness to challenge or change. The school stands for all the force of history white Australia can bring to bear, but in Australia, all architecture of this type is a lie, or at least an exaggeration – the school cannot be more than 200 years old and is probably much more recent.Many of the things the program says about history are conveyed in half sentences or single glances. Arguably this is because of its aesthetic mode – social realism – that prides itself on its mimicry of everyday life and in everyday life people are unlikely to set out arguments in organised dot-point form. At one point the English teacher quotes Orwell, "those who control the past control the future", which seems overt but it is stated off-screen as Joel walks into the room. This seeming aside is a statement about history and directly recalls central arguments of the history wars, which make strong political arguments about the effects of the past, and perceptions of the past, on the present and future. Despite its subtlety, this story takes place within the context of the history wars: it is about who controls the past. The subtlety of the discussion of history allows the film makers the freedom to comment on the content and effects of history and the history wars without appearing didactic. They discuss the how history has effected the present history without having to make explicit historical causes.The other recent television drama in the realist tradition is The Secret River. This was an adaptation of a novel by Kate Grenville. It deals with Aboriginal history from the perspective of white people, in this way it differs from Redfern Now which discusses the issues from the perspective of Aboriginal people. The plot concerns a man transported to Australia as a convict in the early 19th century. The man is later freed and, with his family, attempts to move to the Hawksbury river region. The land they try to settle is, of course, already in use by Aboriginal people. The show sets up the definitional conflict between the idea of settler and invader and suggests the difference between the two is a matter of perspective. Of the shows I am examining, it is the most direct in its representation of historical massacre and brutality. It represents what Felicity Collins described as a back-tracking text recapitulating the colonial past in the light of recovered knowledge. However, from an Indigenous perspective it is another settler tale implying Aboriginal people were wiped out at the time of colonisation (Godwin).The Secret River is told entirely from the perspective of the invaders. Even as it portrays their actions as wrong, it also suggests they were unavoidable or inevitable. Therefore it does what many western histories of Indigenous people do – it classifies and categorises. It sets limits on interpretation. It is also limited by its genre, as a straightforward historical drama and an adaptation, it can only tell its story in a certain way. The television series, like the book before it, prides itself on its 'accurate' rendition of an historical story. However, because it comes from such a very narrow perspective it falls into the trap of categorising histories that might have usefully been allowed to develop further.The program is based on a novel that attracted controversy of its own. It became part of ongoing historiographical debate about the relationship between fiction and history. The book's author Kate Grenville claimed to have written a kind of affectively accurate history that actual history can never convey because the emotions of the past are hidden from the present. The book was critiqued by historians including Inge Clendinnen, who argued that many of the claims made about its historical accuracy were largely overblown (Clendinnen). The book is not the same as the TV program, but the same limitations identified by Clendinnen are present in the television text. However, I would not agree with Clendinnen that formal history is any better. I argue that the limitation of both these mimetic genres can be escaped in speculative fiction.In Glitch, Yurana, a small town in rural Victoria becomes, for no apparent reason, the site of seven people rising from the dead. Each person is from a different historical period. None are Indigenous. They are not zombies but simply people who used to be dead. One of the first characters to appear in the series is an Aboriginal teenager, Beau, we see from his point of view the characters crawling from their graves. He becomes friendly with one of the risen characters, Patrick Fitzgerald, who had been the town's first mayor. At first Fitzgerald's story seems to be one of working class man made good in colonial Australia - a standard story of Australian myth and historiography. However, it emerges that Fitzgerald was in love with an Aboriginal woman called Kalinda and Beau is his descendant. Fitzgerald, once he becomes aware of how he has been remembered by history, decides to revise the history of the town – he wants to reclaim his property from his white descendants and give it to his Indigenous descendants. Over the course of the six episodes Fitzgerald moves from being represented as a violent, racist boor who had inexplicably become the town's mayor, to being a romantic whose racism was mostly a matter of vocabulary. Beau is important to the plot and he is a sympathetic character but he is not central and he is a child. Indigenous people in the past have no voice in this story – when flashbacks are shown they are silent, and in the present their voices are present but not privileged or central to the plot.The program demonstrates a profoundly metaphorical relationship with the past – the past has literally come to life bringing with it surprising buried histories. The program represents some dominant themes in Australian historiography – other formerly dead characters include a convict-turned-bush-ranger, a soldier who was at Gallipoli, two Italian migrants and a girl who died as a result of sexual violence – but it does not engage directly with Indigenous history. Indigenous people's stories are told only in relation to the stories of white people. The text's magical realism allows a less prescriptive relationship with the past than in The Secret River but it is still restricted in its point of view and allows only limited agency to Aboriginal actors.The text's magical realism allows for a thought-provoking representation of relationships with the past. The town of Yurana is represented as a place deeply committed to the representation and glorification of its past. Its main street contains statues of its white founders and war memorials, one of its main social institutions is the RSL, its library preserves relics of the past and its publican is a war history buff. All these indicate that the past is central to the town's identity. The risen dead however dispute and revise almost every aspect of this past. Even the history that is unmentioned in the town's apparent official discourse, such as the WWII internment camp and the history of crimes, is disputed by the different stories of the past that the risen dead have to tell. This indicates the uncertainty of the past, even when it seems literally set in stone it can still be revised. Nonetheless the history of Indigenous people is only revised in ways that re-engage with white history.Cleverman is a magical realist text profoundly based in allegory. The story concerns the emergence into a near future society of a group of people known as the "Hairies." It is never made clear where they came from or why but it seems they appeared recently and are unable to return. They are an allegory for refugees. Hairypeople are part of many Indigenous Australian stories, the show's creator, Ryan Griffen, stated that "there are different hairy stories throughout Australia and they differ in each country. You have some who are a tall, some are short, some are aggressive, some are friendly. We got to sort of pick which ones will fit for us and create the Hairies for our show" (Bizzaca).The Hairies are forced to live in an area called the Zone, which, prior to the arrival of the Hairy people, was a place where Aboriginal people lived. This place might be seen as a metaphor for Redfern but it is also an allegory for Australia's history of displacing Aboriginal people and moving and restricting them to missions and reserves. The Zone is becoming increasingly securitised and is also operating as a metaphor for Australia's immigration detention centres. The prison the Hairy characters, Djukura and Bunduu, are confined to is yet another metaphor, this time for both the over-representation of Aboriginal people in prison and the securitisation of immigration detention. These multiple allegorical movements place Australia's present refugee policies and historical treatment of Aboriginal people within the same lens. They also place the present, the past and the future within the same narrative space.Most of the cast is Aboriginal and much of the character interaction is between Aboriginal people and Hairies, with both groups played by Indigenous actors. The disadvantages suffered by Indigenous people are part of the story and clearly presented as affecting the behaviour of characters but within the story Aboriginal people are more advantaged than Hairies, as they have systems, relationships and structures that Hairy people lack. The fact that so much of the interaction in the story is between Indigenous people and Hairies is important: it can be seen to be an interaction between Aboriginal people and Aboriginal mythology or between Indigenous past and present. It demonstrates Aboriginal identities being created in relation to other Aboriginal identities and not in relation to white people, where in this narrative, Aboriginal people have an identity other than that allowed for in colonialist terms.Cleverman does not really engage with the history of white invasion. The character who speaks most about this part of Aboriginal history and whose stated understanding of himself is based on that identity is Waruu. But Waruu is also a villain whose self-identity is also presented as jealous and dishonest. However, despite only passing mentions of westernised history the show is deeply concerned with a relationship with the past. The program engages with Aboriginal traditions about the past that have nothing to do with white history. It presents a much longer view of history than that of white Australia. It engages with the Aboriginal tradition of the Cleverman - demonstrated in the character of Uncle Jimmy who passes a nulla nulla (knob-headed hardwood club), as a symbol of the past, to his nephew Koen and tells him he is the new Cleverman. Cleverman demonstrates a discussion of Australian history with the potential to ignore white people. It doesn't ignore them, it doesn't ignore the invasion but it presents the possibility that it could be ignored.There is a danger in this sort of representation of the past that Aboriginal people could be relegated to the type of ahistorical, metahistorical myths that comprise colonialist history's representation of Indigenous people (Birch). But Cleverman's magical realist, near future setting tends to undermine this. It grounds representation in history through text and metaphor and then expands the definition.The four programs have different relationships with the past but all of them engage with it. The programs are both restrained and freed by the genres they operate in. It is much easier to escape the bounds of formal history in the genre of magical realism and both Glitch and Cleverman do this but have significantly different ways of dealing with history. "Stand up" and The Secret River both operate within more formally realist structures. The Secret River gives us an emotional reading of the past and a very affective one. However, it cuts off avenues of interpretation by presenting a seemingly inevitable tragedy. Through use of metaphor and silence "Stand up" presents a much more productive relationship with the past – seeing it as an ongoing argument rather than a settled one. Glitch engages with the past as a topic that is not settled and that can therefore be changed whereas Cleverman expands our definition of past and understanding of the past through allegory.It is possible to draw further connections. Those stories created by Indigenous people do not engage with the specifics of traditional dominant Australian historiography. However, they work with the assumption that everyone already knows this historiography. They do not re-present the pain of the past, instead they deal with it in oblique terms with allegory. Whereas the programs made by non-Indigenous Australians are much more overt in their representation of the sins of the past, they overtly engage with the History Wars in specific historical arenas in which those wars were fought. The non-Indigenous shows align themselves with the revisionist view of history but they do so in a very different way than the Indigenous shows.ReferencesAnderson, Ian. "Introduction: The Aboriginal Critique of Colonial Knowing." Blacklines: Contemporary Critical Writing by Indigenous Australians. Ed. Michele Grossman. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2003.Birch, Tony. "'Nothing Has Changed': The Making and Unmaking of Koori Culture." Blacklines: Contemporary Critical Writing by Indigenous Australians. Ed. Michele Grossman. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2003.Bizzaca, Chris. "The World of Cleverman." Screen Australia 2016.Blundell, Graeme. "Redfern Now Delves into the Lives of Ordinary People." The Australian 26 Oct. 2013: News Review.Clark, Anna. History's Children: History Wars in the Classroom. Sydney: New South, 2008.Clendinnen, Inga. “The History Question: Who Owns the Past?” The Quarterly Essay. Melbourne: Black Inc., 2006.Collins, Felicity. "After Dispossession: Blackfella Films and the Politics of Radical Hope." The Routledge Companion to Cinema and Politics. Eds. Yannis Tzioumakis and Claire Molloy. New York: Routledge, 2016.Day, Mark. "Our Relations with the Past." Philosophia 36.4 (2008): 417-27.Ellis, John. Seeing Things: Television in the Age of Uncertainty. London: I.B. Tauris, 2000.Froeyman, Anton. "The Ideal of Objectivity and the Public Role of the Historian: Some Lessons from the Historikerstreit and the History Wars." Rethinking History 20.2 (2016): 217-34.Godwin, Carisssa Lee. "Shedding the 'Victim Narrative' for Tales of Magic, Myth and Superhero Pride." The Conversation 2016.Lloyd, Christopher. "Historiographic Schools." A Companion to the Philosophy of History and Historiography Ed. Tucker, Aviezer. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.Moreton-Robinson, Aileen. "Introduction: Resistance, Recovery and Revitalisation." Blacklines: Contemporary Critical Writing by Indigenous Australians. Ed. Michele Grossman. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2003.———. "The White Man's Burden." Australian Feminist Studies 26.70 (2011): 413-31.Reynolds, Henry. The Other Side of the Frontier: Aboriginal Resistance to the European Invasion of Australia. 2nd ed. Ringwood, Vic.: Penguin Books, 1995.Siskind, Mariano. "Magical Realism." The Cambridge History of Postcolonial Literature. Vol. 2. Ed. Ato Quayson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. 833-68.Tuhiwai Smith, Linda. Decolonizing Methodologies Research and Indigenous Peoples. 2nd ed. London: Zed Books, 2012.Windschuttle, Keith. The Fabrication of Aboriginal History. Paddington, NSW: Macleay Press, 2002.

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Through my last lengthy writing project, it did not take long to I realise I had become obsessed with paths. The proof of it was there in my notebooks, and, most prominently, in the backlog of photographs cluttering the inner workings of my mobile phone. Most of the photographs I took had a couple of things in common: first, the astonishing greenness of the world they were describing; second, the way a road or path or corridor or pavement or trail led off into distance. The greenness was because I was in England, in summer, and mostly in a part of the country where green seems at times the only colour. I am not sure what it was about tailing perspective that caught me.Image 1: a) Undercliffe Cemetery, Bradford; b) Undercliffe Cemetery, Bradfordc) Leeds Road, Otley; d) Shibden Park, Halifax Image 2: a) Runswick Bay; b) St. Mary's Churchyard, Habberleyc) The Habberley Road, to Pontesbury; d) Todmorden, path to Stoodley Pike I was working on a kind of family memoir, tied up in my grandmother’s last days, which were also days I spent marching through towns and countryside I once knew, looking for clues about a place and its past. I had left the north-west of England a decade or so before, and I was grappling with what James Wood calls “homelooseness”, a sensation of exile that even economic migrants like myself encounter. It is a particular kind of “secular homelessness” in which “the ties that might bind one to Home have been loosened” (105-106). Loosened irrevocably, I might add. The kind of wandering which I embarked on is not unique. Wood describes it in himself, and in the work of W.G. Sebald—a writer who, he says, “had an exquisite sense of the varieties of not-belonging” (106).I walked a lot, mostly on paths I used to know. And when, later, I counted up the photographs I had taken of that similar-but-different scene, there were almost 500 of them, none of which I can bring myself to delete. Some were repeated, or nearly so—I had often tried to make sure the path in the frame was centred in the middle of the screen. Most of the pictures were almost entirely miscellaneous, and if it were not for a feature on my phone I could not work out how to turn off (that feature which tracks where each photograph was taken) I would not have much idea of what each picture represented. What’s clear is that there was some lingering significance, some almost-tangible metaphor, in the way I was recording the walking I was doing. This same significance is there, too (in an almost quantifiable way), in the thesis I was working on while I was taking the photographs: I used the word “path” 63 times in the version I handed to examiners, not counting all the times I could have, but chose not to—all the “pavements”, “trails”, “roads”, and “holloways” of it would add up to a number even more substantial. For instance, the word “walk”, or derivatives of it, comes up 115 times. This article is designed to ask why. I aim to focus on that metaphor, on that significance, and unpack the way life writing can intersect with both the journey of a life being lived, and the process of writing down that life (by process of writing I sometimes mean anything but: I mean the process of working towards the writing. Of going, of doing, of talking, of spending, of working, of thinking, of walking). I came, in the thesis, to view certain kinds of prose as a way of imitating the rhythms of the mind, but I think there’s something about that rhythm which associates it with the feet as well. Rebecca Solnit thinks so too, or, at least, that the processes of thinking and walking can wrap around each other, helixed or concatenated. In Wanderlust she says that:the rhythm of walking generates a kind of rhythm of thinking, and the passage through a landscape echoes or stimulates the passage through a series of thoughts. This creates an odd consonance between internal and external passage, one that suggests that the mind is also a landscape of sorts and that walking is one way to traverse it. (5-6)The “odd consonance” Solnit speaks of is a kind of seamlessness between the internal and external; it is something which can be aped on the page. And, in this way, prose can imitate the mind thinking. This way of writing is evident in the digression-filled, wandering, sinuous sentences of W.G. Sebald, and of Marcel Proust as well. I don’t want to entangle myself in the question of whether Proust and Sebald count as life writers here. I used them as models, and, at the very least, I think their prose manipulates the conceits of the autobiographical pact. In fact, Sebald often refused to label his own work; once he called his writing “prose [...] of indefinite form” (Franklin 123). My definition of life writing is, thus, indefinite, and merely indicates the field in which I work and know best.Edmund White, when writing on Proust, suggested that every page of Remembrance of Things Past—while only occasionally being a literal page of Proust’s mind thinking—is, nevertheless, “a transcript of a mind thinking [...] the fully orchestrated, ceaseless, and disciplined ruminations of one mind, one voice” (138). Ceaselessness, seamlessness ... there’s also a viscosity to this kind of prose—Virginia Woolf called it “impassioned”, and spoke of the way some prosecan lick up with its long glutinous tongue the most minute fragments of fact and mass them into the most subtle labyrinths, and listen silently at doors behind which only a murmur, only a whisper, is to be heard. With all the suppleness of a tool which is in constant use it can follow the windings and record the changes which are typical of the modern mind. To this, with Proust and Dostoevsky behind us, we must agree. (20)When I read White and Woolf it seemed they could have been talking about Sebald, too: everything in Sebald’s oeuvre is funnelled through what White described in Remembrance as the cyclopean “I” at the centre of the Proustian consciousness (138). The same could be said about Sebald: as Lynne Schwartz says, “All Sebald’s characters sound like the narrator” (15). And that narrator has very particular qualities, encouraged by the sense of homelooseness Wood describes: the Sebald narrator is a wanderer, by train through Italian cities and New York Suburbs, on foot through the empty reaches of the English countryside, exploring the history of each settlement he passes through [...] Wherever he travels, he finds strangely vacant streets and roads, not a soul around [...] Sebald’s books are famously strewn with evocative, gloomy black-and-white photographs that call up the presence of the dead, of vanished places, and also serve as proofs of his passage. (Schwartz 14) I tried to resist the urge to take photographs, for the simple reason that I knew I could not include them all in the finished thesis—even including some would seem (perhaps) derivative. But this method of wandering—whether on the page or in the world—was formative for me. And the linkage between thinking and walking, and walking and writing, and writing and thinking is worth exploring, if only to identify some reason for that need to show proof of passage.Walking in Proust and Sebald either forms the shape of narrative, or one its cruxes. Both found ways to let walking affect the rhythm, movement, motivation, and even the aesthetic of their prose. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, for example, is plotless because of the way it follows its narrator on a walking tour of Suffolk. The effect is similar to something Murray Baumgarten noticed in one of Sebald’s other books, The Emigrants: “The [Sebaldian] narrator discovers in the course of his travels (and with him the reader) that he is constructing the text he is reading, a text at once being imagined and destroyed, a fragment of the past, and a ruin that haunts the present” (268). Proust’s opus is a meditation on the different ways we can walk. Remembrance is a book about momentum—a book about movement. It is a book which always forges forward, but which always faces backward, where time and place can still and footsteps be paused in motion, or tiptoed upstairs and across tables or be caught in flight over the body of an octogenarian lying on a beach. And it is the walks of the narrator’s past—his encounters with landscape—that give his present (and future) thoughts impetus: the rhythms of his long-past progress still affect the way he moves and acts and thinks, and will always do so:the “Méséglise way” and the “Guermantes way” remain for me linked with many of the little incidents of that one of all the divers lives along whose parallel lines we are moved, which is the most abundant in sudden reverses of fortune, the richest in episodes; I mean the life of the mind [...] [T]he two “ways” give to those [impressions of the mind] a foundation, depth, a dimension lacking from the rest. They invest them, too, with a charm, a significance which is for me alone. (Swann’s Way 252-255)The two “ways”—walks in and around the town of Combray—are, for the narrator, frames through which he thinks about his childhood, and all the things which happened to him because of that childhood. I felt something similar through the process of writing my thesis: a need to allow the 3-mile-per-hour-connection between mind and body and place that Solnit speaks about seep into my work. I felt the stirrings of old ways; the places I once walked, which I photographed and paced, pulsed and pushed me forwards in the present and towards the future. I felt strangely attached to, and disconnected from, those pathways: lanes where I had rummaged for conkers; streets my grandparents had once lived and worked on; railways demolished because of roads which now existed, leaving only long, straight pathways through overgrown countryside suffused with time and memory. The oddness I felt might be an effect of what Wood describes as a “certain doubleness”, “where homesickness is a kind of longing for Britain and an irritation with Britain: sickness for and sickness of” (93-94). The model of seamless prose offered some way to articulate, at least, the particularities of this condition, and of the problem of connection—whether with place or the past. But it is in this shift away from conclusiveness, which occurs when the writer constructs-as-they-write, that Baumgarten sees seamlessness:rather than the defined edges, boundaries, and conventional perceptions promised by realism, and the efficient account of intention, action, causation, and conclusion implied by the stance of realistic prose, reader and narrator have to assimilate the past and present in a dream state in which they blend imperceptibly into each other. (277)It’s difficult to articulate the way in which the connection between walking, writing, and thinking works. Solnit draws one comparison, talking to the ways in which digression and association mix:as a literary structure, the recounted walk encourages digression and association, in contrast to the stricter form of a discourse or the chronological progression of a biographical or historical narrative [...] James Joyce and Virginia Woolf would, in trying to describe the workings of the mind, develop of style called stream of consciousness. In their novels Ulysses and Mrs Dalloway, the jumble of thoughts and recollections of their protagonists unfolds best during walks. This kind of unstructured, associative thinking is the kind most often connected to walking, and it suggests walking as not an analytical but an improvisational act. (21)I think the key, here, is the notion of association—in the making of connections, and, in my case, in the making of connections between present and past. When we walk we exist in a roving state, and with a dual purpose: Sophie Cunningham says that we walk to get from one place to the next, but also to insist that “what lies between our point of departure and our destination is important. We create connection. We pay attention to detail, and these details plant us firmly in the day, in the present” (Cunningham). The slipperiness of homelooseness can be emphasised in the slipperiness of seamless prose, and walking—situating self in the present—is a rebuttal of slipperiness (if, as I will argue, a rebuttal which has at its heart a contradiction: it is both effective and ineffective. It feels as close as is possible to something impossible to attain). Solnit argues that walking and what she calls “personal, descriptive, and specific” writing are suited to each other:walking is itself a way of grounding one’s thoughts in a personal and embodied experience of the world that it lends itself to this kind of writing. This is why the meaning of walking is mostly discussed elsewhere than in philosophy: in poetry, novels, letters, diaries, travellers’ accounts, and first-person essays. (26)If a person is searching for some kind of possible-impossible grounding in the past, then walking pace is the pace at which to achieve that sensation (both in the world and on the page). It is at walking pace that connections can be made, even if they can be sensed slipping away: this is the Janus-faced problem of attempting to uncover anything which has been. The search, in fact, becomes facsimile for the past itself, or for the inconclusiveness of the past. In my own work—in preparing for that work—I walked and wrote about walking up the flank of the hill which hovered above the house in which I lived before I left England. To get to the top, and the great stone monument which sits there, I had to pass that house. The door was open, and that was enough to unsettle. Baumgarten, again on The Emigrants, articulates the effect: “unresolved, fragmented, incomplete, relying on shards for evidence, the narrator insists on the inconclusiveness of his experience: rather than arriving at a conclusion, narrator and reader are left disturbed” (269).Sebald writes in his usual intense way about a Swiss writer, Robert Walser, who he calls le promeneur solitaire (“The Solitary Walker”). Walser was a prolific writer, but through the last years of his life wrote less and less until he ended up incapable of doing so: in the end, Sebald says, “the traces Robert Walser left on his path through life were so faint as to have almost been effaced altogether” (119).Sebald draws parallels between Walser and his own grandfather. Both have worked their way into Sebald’s prose, along with the author himself. Because of this co*cktail, I’ve come to read Sebald’s thoughts on Walser as sideways thoughts on his own prose (perhaps due to that cyclopean quality described by White). The works of the two writers share, at the very least, a certain incandescent ephemerality—a quality which exists in Sebald’s work, crystallised in the form and formlessness of a wasps’ nest. The wasps’ nest is a symbol Sebald uses in his book Vertigo, and which he talks to in an interview with Sarah Kafatou:do you know what a wasp’s nest is like? It’s made of something much much thinner than airmail paper: grey and as thin as possible. This gets wrapped around and around like pastry, like a millefeuille, and can get as big as two feet across. It weighs nothing. For me the wasp’s nest is a kind of ideal vision: an object that is extremely complicated and intricate, made out of something that hardly exists. (32)It is in this ephemerality that the walker’s way of moving—if not their journey—can be felt. The ephemerality is necessary because of the way the world is: the way it always passes. A work which is made to seem to encompass everything, like Remembrance of Things Past, is made to do so because that is the nature of what walking offers: an ability to comprehend the world solidly, both minutely and vastly, but with a kind of forgetting attached to it. When a person walks through the world they are firmly embedded in it, yes, but they are also always enacting a process of forgetting where they have been. This continual interplay between presence and absence is evidenced in the way in which Sebald and Proust build the consciousnesses they shape on the page—consciousnessess accustomed to connectedness. According to Sebald, it was through the prose of Walser that he learned this—or, at least, through an engagement with Walser’s world, Sebald, “slowly learned to grasp how everything is connected across space and time” (149). Perhaps it can be seen in the way that the Méséglise and Guermantes ways resonate for the Proustian narrator even when they are gone. Proust’s narrator receives a letter from an old love, in the last volume of Remembrance, which describes the fate of the Méséglise way (Swann’s way, that is—the title of the first volume in the sequence). Gilberte tells him that the battlefields of World War I have overtaken the paths they used to walk:the little road you so loved, the one we called the stiff Hawthorn climb, where you professed to be in love with me when you were a child, when all the time I was in love with you, I cannot tell you how important that position is. The great wheatfield in which it ended is the famous “slope 307,” the name you have so often seen recorded in the communiqués. The French blew up the little bridge over the Vivonne which, you remember, did not bring back your childhood to you as much as you would have liked. The Germans threw others across; during a year and a half they held one half of Combray and the French the other. (Time Regained 69-70)Lia Purpura describes, and senses, a similar kind of connectedness. The way in which each moment builds into something—into the ephemeral, shifting self of a person walking through the world—is emphasised because that is the way the world works:I could walk for miles right now, fielding all that passes through, rubs off, lends a sense of being—that rush of moments, objects, sensations so much like a cloud of gnats, a cold patch in the ocean, dust motes in a ray of sun that roil, gather, settle around my head and make up the daily weather of a self. (x)This is what seamless prose can emulate: the rush of moments and the folds and shapes which dust turns and makes. And, well, I am aware that this may seem a grand kind of conclusion, and even a peculiarly nonspecific one. But nonspecificity is built by a culmination of details, of sentences—it is built deliberately, to evoke a sense of looseness in the world. And in the associations which result, through the mind of the writer, their narrator, and the reader, much more than is evident on the page—Sebald’s “everything”—is flung to the surface. Of course, this “everything” is split through with the melancholy evident in the destruction of the Méséglise way. Nonspecificity becomes the result of any attempt to capture the past—or, at least, the past becomes less tangible the longer, closer, and slower your attempt to grasp it. In both Sebald and Proust the task of representation is made to feel seamless in echo of the impossibility of resolution.In the unbroken track of a sentence lies a metaphor for the way in which life is spent: under threat, forever assaulted by the world and the senses, and forever separated from what came before. The walk-as-method is entangled with the mind thinking and the pen writing; each apes the other, and all work towards the same kind of end: an articulation of how the world is. At least, in the hands of Sebald and Proust and through their long and complex prosodies, it does. For both there is a kind of melancholy attached to this articulation—perhaps because the threads that bind sever as well. The Rings of Saturn offers a look at this. The book closes with a chapter on the weaving of silk, inflected, perhaps, with a knowledge of the ways in which Robert Walser—through attempts to ensnare some of life’s ephemerality—became a victim of it:That weavers in particular, together with scholars and writers with whom they had much in common, tended to suffer from melancholy and all the evils associated with it, is understandable given the nature of their work, which forced them to sit bent over, day after day, straining to keep their eye on the complex patterns they created. It is difficult to imagine the depths of despair into which those can be driven who, even after the end of the working day, are engrossed in their intricate designs and who are pursued, into their dreams, by the feeling that they have got hold of the wrong thread. (283)Vladimir Nabokov, writing on Swann’s Way, gives a competing metaphor for thinking through the seamlessness afforded by walking and writing. It is, altogether, more optimistic: more in keeping with Purpura’s interpretation of connectedness: “Proust’s conversations and his descriptions merge into one another, creating a new unity where flower and leaf and insect belong to one and the same blossoming tree” (214). This is the purpose of long and complex books like The Rings of Saturn and Remembrance of Things Past: to draw the lines which link each and all together. To describe the shape of consciousness, to mimic the actions of a body experiencing its progress through the world. I think that is what the photographs I took when wandering attempt, in a failing way, to do. They all show a kind of relentlessness, but in that relentlessness is also, I think, the promise of connectedness—even if not connectedness itself. Each path aims forward, and articulates something of what came before and what might come next, whether trodden in the world or walked on the page.Author’s NoteI’d like to express my thanks to the anonymous reviewers who took time to improve this article. I’m grateful for their insights and engagement, and for the nuance they added to the final copy.References Baumgarten, Murray. “‘Not Knowing What I Should Think:’ The Landscape of Postmemory in W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants.” Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas 5.2 (2007): 267-287. 28 Sep. 2018 <https://doi.org/10.1353/pan.2007.0000>.Cunningham, Sophie. “Staying with the Trouble.” Australian Book Review 371 (May 2015). 23 June 2016 <https://www.australianbookreview.com.au/abr-online/archive/2015/2500-2015-calibre-prize-winner-staying-with-the-trouble>.Franklin, Ruth. “Rings of Smoke.” The Emergence of Memory: Conversations with W.G. Sebald. Ed. Lynne Sharon Schwartz. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2007. 121-122.Kafatou, Sarah. “An Interview with W.G. Sebald.” Harvard Review 15 (1998): 31-35. Nabokov, Vladimir. “Marcel Proust: The Walk by Swann’s Place.” 1980. Lectures on Literature. London: Picador, 1983. 207-250.Proust, Marcel. Swann’s Way. Part I. 1913. Trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff in 1922. London: Chatto & Windus, 1960.———. Time Regained. 1927. Trans. Stephen Hudson. London: Chatto & Windus, 1957.Purpura, Lia. “On Not Pivoting”. Diagram 12.1 (n.d.). 21 June 2018 <http://thediagram.com/12_1/purpura.html>.Schwartz, Lynne Sharon, ed. The Emergence of Memory: Conversations with W.G. Sebald. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2007.Sebald, W.G. The Rings of Saturn. 1995. Trans. Michael Hulse in 1998. London: Vintage, 2002.——. “Le Promeneur Solitaire.” A Place in the Country. Trans. Jo Catling. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2013. 117-154.Solnit, Rebecca. Wanderlust: A History of Walking. 2001. London: Granta Publications, 2014.White, Edmund. Proust. London: Phoenix, 1999.Wood, James. The Nearest Thing to Life. London: Jonathan Cape, 2015.Woolf, Virginia. “The Narrow Bridge of Art.” Granite and Rainbow. USA: Harvest Books, 1975.