SEMINAR SCHEDULE - WOLLONGONG - 2005: ABSTRACTS

1 September : Entertaining illusions: how Indonesian élites imagine the masses through television

Dr Mark Hobart
Centre for Media and Film Studies
School of Oriental and African Studies
and Head of Postgraduate Media Program
London University

Abstract:
Politicians, television presenters and many social scientists tend to assume that news, current affairs programmes and political talk shows are important in forming opinions and modern political subjects. Critical media scholars are more sceptical; and John Fiske famously dismissed news as ‘masculine soap opera'. Post-Suharto Indonesia is undergoing significant changes in print and broadcasting media production, with reformists pinning hopes for democratization on a liberalized media. But how are the mass media implicated, if at all, in such processes? And which media genres are likely to prove important?

Instead of dismissing popular television in Indonesia as mindless entertainment, as simply an opiate or escape for the masses, I argue we need to rethink what is going on and how viewers are imagined as subjects. A critical analysis of two genres – crime reportage and supernatural stories (mistik) – indicates how television producers position ordinary Indonesians both as subjects within programmes and as viewers of programmes. Crime genres are sometimes depicted as rites of humiliation of the poor; and mistikas a mode of resistance to modern rationality. But how justified are such interpretations on close examination? And what do such programmes tell us about how Indonesian élites (exemplified by media professionals) imagine ordinary people (aka rakyat, masyarakat, wong ciliketc.)? I suggest television in Indonesia involves a lively discourse about class, notably about how an emerging élite is struggling to imagine, position and control the masses.

4 August : Unsacred Cows and Protean Beings: writing postcolonial lesbian bodies

Dr Shalamalee Palekar
Visiting Fellow
CAPSTRANS, University of Wollongong

Abstract:
My paper examines Suniti Namjoshi's representations of the ‘raced', lesbian, creative body as a site of both ‘otherness' and empowerment. By inhabiting the subject position(s) of a diasporic Indian lesbian woman, by operating from multiple liminalities, she engages in a political act, thus opening up spaces in which she inscribes her resistance to stable genres and essentialised traditions. My paper maps out how Namjoshi's writing, with its fluid movement between ‘authenticity' and dreams, between (corpo)reality and her characters' various manifestations, between split selves and fragmented subjectivities, between playfulness and polemic, crosses boundaries of the gendered body, sexuality, desire, and ‘race'. I posit that among Namjoshi's central concerns are the actual processes of ‘othering' and marginalisation; that is, the various overt and covert ways in which dominant cultures/discourses create, maintain and perpetuate racist, patriarchal, heterosexist/homophobic ideologies of the ideal/idealised body.  Various critics position Namjoshi as an allegorical fabulist, but I will focus, rather, on how Namjoshi's dense, dialogic and multi-layered texts use these protean animal/human bodies to examine questions of community and solidarity, and their implications for minority groups.
Bio-note
Dr Palekar received her PhD from the Faculty of Arts at the University of Wollongong in 2001. She is currently a visiting fellow in CAPSTRANS and is working on a study of women's sexuality in Indian cinema.

8 June : Spreading Islam by Audio

Professor Ben Arps
University of Leiden
The Netherlands

Abstract:
Spiritual refreshment, medicine for the heart:
preaching on record and on the air in Indonesia
Over the past three decades a range of audio media have been used in Indonesia for the propagation of Islam (so-called dakwah ): audio cassettes, radio broadcasts (also on the world wide web), sound amplification, and most recently MP3 files (downloadable from the web) and even mobile phones. Several preachers have gained no less than superstar status in Indonesia and other Malay-speaking countries and among Malay-speaking Muslims abroad. This is largely due to their live and televised appearances, but there can be no doubt that their audio performances have also contributed significantly to their popularity. Zainuddin MZ, for instance, published over 60 official C60 cassettes in the 1980s and 1990s, and a great many unofficial recordings of his sermons are in circulation. The oeuvre of Aa Gym, currently the most popular Islamic preacher, contains audio cassettes as well, and several of his sermons are available on the web.
In this talk I will examine this relatively new media genre, Islamic audio preaching, focusing on the ways the preachers represent themselves, their addressees, and third persons in their performances.

25 May: Contemporary Samoan migration: echoes of the past?

Deborah Gough
PhD candidate
CAPSTRANS, University of Wollongong

Abstract:
“Oceania is vast, Oceania is expanding, Oceania is hospitable and generous, Oceania is humanity rising from the depths of brine and regions of deeper fire still, Oceania is us. We are the sea, we are the ocean, we must wake up to this ancient truth and together use it to overturn all hegemonic view that aim ultimately to confine us again, physically and psychologically …” (Hau'ofa 1993)

Much of the literature on Samoan migration is framed in the context of post-colonialism labour migration and concentrated on the post World War II period. Long before European contact however Oceanic peoples were exploring their ‘sea of islands' in search of new lands, resources and adventure. Pathways, on land and in the sea, where well established as early as the 1700s. Drawing on Epeli Hau'ofa's pivotal work this paper critiques the literature on Polynesian diaspora questioning whether it is a modern phenomenon or part of a long held set of traditional beliefs and behaviors. In so doing it argues that contemporary Samoan emigration should not be considered outside of its unique history and cultural framework.

24 May: Higher Education Policy in Malaysia

Professor Ambigapthy Pandian
Deputy Dean
School of Humanities, Universiti Sains Malaysia, Penang Malaysia

Abstract: Professor Pandian will discuss the work of  the Malaysian National Institute of Higher Education (Institut Penyelidikan Pendikikan Tinggi Negara - IPPTN) in policy research in Malaysia. IPPTN research projects have been instrumental in informing Malaysian government policy including unemployment amongst university graduates, ethnicity and opportunity in higher education, universities and regionalism and private provision of higher education. He will also discuss current and future research links with Australia.

27 April : Radical Discourse: the poetry of Indian and European women mystics

Sister Ananda Amritmaha
Sophia College
University of Mumbai, India

Abstract: This paper examines the work of four women mystic poets; two from the European Christian tradition, i.e., Juliana of Norwich, and Hildegard of Bingen, and two from the Hindu bhakti tradition of India, namely Janabai of Maharashtra and Mirabai of Mewar, Rajasthan. Their writings are explored against their specific socio-economic and politico-cultural contexts, and show how their lives and their poems reveal a sublime disregard for the norms and restrictions laid down by rigidly patriarchal societies and oppressively hierarchical religious traditions. The paper argues that these women were able to appropriate a traditionally masculine/patriarchal domain to voice their special insights and perspectives – and that these visions and insights liberated them from traditional social constraints, setting them free to express a radical and deeply transformative intimacy with their God.

Bio-note: Sister Ananda Amritmahal is a lecturer in English Literature at Sophia College, University of Mumbai, India, and Co-ordinator of the Sophia Centre for Women's Studies and Development. Her areas of specialisation are Women's Writing, Feminist Literary Criticism, and Indian Writing in English. She has just submitted her Ph.D. thesis on “A feminist perspective on Indian Women's writing, with special reference to Shashi Deshpande and Mahasweta Devi”.

13 April : Foreign Domestic Worker-Related Activism in East and Southeast Asia as an Informal Regime

Michele Ford
School of Political and International Studies,
Flinders University

Abstract: Female migrant workers, especially foreign domestic workers (hereafter FDWs) who comprise the majority of women migrants in Asia, are generally portrayed as having little or no agency in the world economy. Scholars of Asian migration have traditionally conceived of female migrant workers as either passive victims of global power structures (emphasizing macro economic dynamics) or isolated actors exerting micro agency through acts of 'everyday resistance', while proponents of the mainstream 'regulatory' approaches of neorealism and neoliberalism have failed to consider them at all. This paper focuses on FDWs' collective activism and middle-class campaigns, arguing that migrant labour issues have become an important node at which informal regimes have developed which interact with the formal regimes concerned with labour migration at the national and international levels.