School of English, Communications and Performance Studies, Monash University

Transdisciplinary Performance V Dr. Julian Millie, Lecturer in Anthropology within the School of Political and Social Enquiry. Laughing, crying, thinking: Rational-critical dialogue, oratory and traditional Islam in Indonesia Indonesia’s mass organisation Nahdlatul Ulama (NU: The Awakening of the Scholars) is often described as the country’s ‘traditionalist’ Islamic organisation. It was, after all, formed by the clerical elite of Indonesia’s Islamic schools as a response to the global Islamic reform movement of the early twentieth century, which represented a threat to the social place of the traditional leadership. In this presentation, I enhance our understanding of the character of NU’s ‘traditionalism’. I do this by exploring Islamic oratory and the social understandings it attracts within Indonesian Islamic society. It has emerged from my own fieldwork that preaching performances featuring high levels of generic variation are very popular amongst audiences of West Java. A number of the province’s professional orators receive repeat invitations to preach at life-cycle and calendrical celebrations because audiences evaluate them positively for their abilities to create pleasing, multi-vocal preaching performances. These preachers rely on their competence in a broad range of communication strategies and performance genres: comedy, singing, mimicry etc.Islamic elites in West Java, however, disapprove of such preaching, arguing that it is a sensory-based activity that impedes Islam’s potential to function as a vehicle for social improvement. Such critics use the framework of ‘rational-critical dialogue’ as a basis for a hierarchy of Islamic media in which writing is a superior medium to oratory. In other words, a thinking public is favoured over a sensory audience. This hierarchy confirms Michael Warner’s observation that rational-critical dialogue is the sole framework over which modern public spheres are recognised. I argue that NU traditionalism can be understood as the promotion and defence of sensory modes of participation and observance. The laughing, crying audience member encountered at multi-vocal preaching performances is in fact a Muslim subject valourised in NU’s public programs. This observation is important from a number of perspectives: it gives social validation to preaching strategies that treat audiences as pleasure-taking subjects and engage Muslims with culturally-specific communication forms; it provides new insight into the concept of NU ‘traditionalism’; and reminds us of the danger of assuming the dominance of the rational-critical subject as the dominant subject in approaching contemporary religion.

Transdisciplinary Performance V Amy Dobson, tutor in youth culture and media culture Hetero-sexy representation by young women on MySpace: the politics of performing an ‘objectified’ self In this paper I discuss research from my doctoral thesis, which examines the performance of contemporary popular femininities on MySpace, using a sample of 45 public MySpace profiles owned by Australian women aged 18-21. I examine the imagery, icons and photos of self used by young women to decorate their profiles that seem, at least in terms of aesthetics and the visual appearance of women’s bodies, to reinforce traditional or stereotypical gender performativity and ‘hetero-sexiness’ (a term I define), and seem to be appealing to a similar gaze economy as that produced in conventional heterosexual pornography. Performance theorist Rebecca Schneider has suggested that a purposeful construction by female artists of their specific, individual bodies in the ‘sexual object’ role can be disruptive to object/subject binaries by making visible ‘the object’s own eye’, and ‘showing the show’ of her own objectification and commodification (1997, p. 86). As Schneider theorises, when the ‘eye’ of a viewed ‘object’ is made visible within the logic of her performance, a dangerous and potentially powerful reciprocity emerges between the object herself and her viewers, which wreaks havoc on historically gendered object/subject binaries: both parties are exposed as ‘seen and seen’, ‘seer and seer’ (Schneider, 1997, p. 86). Following on from Schneider, I suggest that the premise of self-production on MySpace may be significant in understanding and evaluating how the MySpace material functions from a feminist perspective. Could the MySpace premise of self-production serve to alert viewers to the creative ‘eyes’ of the individual subjects ‘behind’ such imagery? Does this mean that even typically sexually objectified female imagery can function in a politically ‘disruptive’ manner on MySpace? My purpose in this paper is not to answer such questions definitively, but firstly to describe and examine the hetero-sexy imagery found in my sample, and secondly to raise the questions above in relation to the theories put forth about female-authored performance art by feminist scholars such as Schneider. In doing so I highlight some areas of feminist performance analysis in which I contend that more, or new attention is warranted, because of this new medium (MySpace) for performative, self-representation.

Under Construction | Julia Vassilieva My Own Private Kazakhstan: The Body, Borders and Bio-Politics in Borat Julia Vassilieva Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s, Kazakhstan, the second largest republic of the former USSR, emerged from the shadow of its Big Russian Brother and claimed its presence on screen, as a range of films by Kazak, Russian and Western filmmakers demonstrate: Ulzhan (2007), Mongol (2007), Paper Soldier (2008), Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2006). While the romantic figurations of Kazakhstan offered in both Ulzhan and Mongol delivered a new take on Orientalism, and Paper Soldier re-articulated Kazakhstan’s pivotal role in the Soviet space program, Borat resonated with the most controversial and repressed side of Kazak history – the fact that, for almost 200 years, Kazakhstan functioned as a site where the darker aspects of biopolitics, or the management of a population’s ‘life’, was played out. Both through its imperial and totalitarian (or Czarist and Soviet) stages of history, Kazakhstan was repeatedly used for the mass relocation of people selected on the basis of their ethnic, racial, political and/or religious characteristics, with the aim of  radically transforming those people or sacrificing them to Kazakhstan’s harsh and unforgiving land. As an ethnic Russian who — like Sasha Baron Cohen’s satirical alter ego, Borat Sagdiev Kazakh — was born in Kazakhstan, I consider it no accident that this location (albeit thoroughly fictionalised) should have been used as a setting for a film that explores multiple aspects of the regulation of the body through attitudes to issues ranging from feminism to homosexuality, and through norms governing practices of family life, child-rearing, eating, hygiene, sex and prostitution. In this paper I offer a biopolitical reading of Borat and assess the degree to which the film’s powerful impact rests on a positioning of the body as both a site of normalisation and a site of resistance, imbued with the potential to subvert  political systems.

Lev Manovich observes in The Language of New Media that digital cinema operates as a function of the pictorial—a subset of animation, a medium whose “distinct logic” “subordinates the photographic and the cinematic to the painterly and the graphic, destroying cinema’s identity as a media art”. He thus contrasts the graphic methods of digital cinema against the recording process of (photochemical) film cinema, the latter which he describes as “the art of the index… an attempt to make art out of a footprint.” The digital is pit against the analogue: one in a painterly mode, the other an indexical trace—light on film—with all the associated temporal and spatial logic of a specific object recorded in a specific place and time. However, machinima—films made by 3-dimensional graphics rendering engines in virtual worlds—represent a realm of moving images which amalgamates precisely the oppositional graphic and recording processes: digital images as recorded by a virtual camera without lens, light or film stock, with all objects existing and filmed not in the real world but via a graphics rendering engine. While Manovich’s definition of digital cinema incorporates the real world (“digital film = live action material + painting + image processing + compositing + 2-D computer animation + 3-D computer animation”), machinima has no need for physical reality, object, light, camera or lens. Being neither hand-made imagery nor filmed live action, it eschews the binary of the graphic and the recorded. Machinima is images recorded from objects generated in virtual worlds—cinema in total virtuality. This seminar discusses machinima in the light of its problematic ontology and relationship to other media forms: how may we think about machinima in terms of the classifications between animation, digital and film cinema? In the process, we open up fundamental questions about the definition and/or re-definition of cinema: what is was cinema? What is a virtual film? What is an object? What is an image? What is a camera? “Look, Ma, no lens” is a take on the colloquial phrase for pride at a particular achievement. This seminar is about whether machinima really is so.

They All Forsook ME!: Family in Scandalous Women’s Memoirs 1765-1801 | Caroline Breashears In the last two decades, scholars have recovered the life-writings of many eighteenth-century women, including the memoirs of scandalous women. Criticism of these memoirs has often focused on the authors’ sexual escapades and their exposure of social problems. James Treadwell, for instance, describes the “courtesan autobiographies” of women such as Catherine Jemmat and Elizabeth Gooch: “Their narratives consist largely of recorded transactions, governed by sexual and economic pragmatism.” Such readings have deepened our understanding of these texts and have laid the foundation for further analysis of their apparent oddities. One such puzzle is the memoirists’ obsessive attention to family both before and after their sexual “fall.” Why, for instance, does Mary Robinson describe three visits to her husband’s family? Why must Catherine Jemmat dwell on the machinations of her sister-in-law? And why does Elizabeth Gooch repeatedly wail about her family: “They all forsook ME”? Such details seem irrelevant in narratives traditionally read in relation to sexual scandal, prostitution, and proto-feminist resistance to the double standard.

To Deprave and Corrupt: Forbidden, Hidden and Censored Books | Geoffrey Cains Self censorship by an author, especially of their early work, is common but when Australia's only Nobel prize winning author engages in such obvious and not so obvious measures then comments and investigation are justified. Patrick White would not allow any form of reproduction of his first two books of poetry; Thirteen Poems, (1929/30) and The Ploughman and Other Poems (1935). Indeed he was said to actively sought and subsequently destroyed by burning, a suitcase full before leaving Castle Hill in October 1964. ( Hubber & Smith, Bibliography). White would not permit reprinting of his first published novel, Happy Valley (1939), partly for fear of a libel suit from a family depicted in the novel (op cit). The novel was also omitted from his publishers uniform edition of his works after his receiving the Nobel Prize indicating his failure to recognise the novel. White asked all his correspondents to destroy his letters as he had theirs, ( Marr Letters, 1994) and on one occasion burnt over 400 he written to his cousin in England whilst he had been a jackaroo in his 20's. Such a loss severely limits the investigation by a potential biographer. Not only did White request his letters be burnt but specifically directed his agent to destroy all of his material in her possession. Ten years after his death the National Library in Canberra revealed it had acquired from Barbara Mobbs, White's literary agent a large collection of manuscript and related material including letters. Again White had apparently attempted to frustrate investigation of his life and literary work. During his lifetime White donated the only extant manuscript of his work, Memoirs of Many in One to raise money for the anti-apartheid movement. Auctioned in London in 1991 it was bought jointly by the NSW State Library and the National Library. In !992 it was suggested by Paul Brunton, Curator of Manuscripts at the Mitchell Library in Sydney that the manuscript was was a hoax and devised by White as an elaborate joke on the academic community. ( Hubber & Smith, op cit) Perhaps this was Patrick White's final way of obscuring close investigation of his life and works.

To Deprave and Corrupt: Forbidden, Hidden and Censored Books | Denise Formica Archival research into the Italian translation of Australian literary fiction in the period 1945- 2005 highlights the role of translation in the ‘censoring’ of imaginings of Australia for the Italian reader. What prompts the selection of texts? Why, for example, were none of the social realists of the 1950s – writers such as Judah Waten, K.S.Prichard and Frank Hardy – translated into Italian? Why have even acclaimed writers/titles been overlooked? What cultural dynamics informed the selection of Patrick White’s Voss (1957) for translation while overlooking, for example, The Tree of Man (1955)? My investigation of some of these issues begins with the notion of agency in the culture and society of origin, with examples of how literary production in Australia in the past sixty years has been ‘censored’ through the intervention – or lack of it – of government and their funding bodies, publishing houses and academic institutions. My focus then moves to the receiving culture, examining the power exercised by the Italian publishing industry, translators and academia in the selection and translation of Australian literary texts. In foregrounding the complexity of the relationship between translated literature as cultural artifact and commodity, I show how some Australian texts have been subjected to translation practices which are aimed at positioning the reader to receive the text in a specific manner and confirming the minority role of Australian narratives within the wider Anglo-American tradition.

To Deprave and Corrupt: Forbidden, Hidden and Censored Books | Leah Gerber Anna Funder’s debut publication Stasiland was published by Text in 2002, with an American edition (Granta Books, New York) following in 2003. Stasiland won the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction in 2004 and has been published in Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, Turkey and the UK. Stasiland was one of the first books to provide a generalist English-speaking audience with a stimulating account of life in East Germany under the watchful eye of the Stasi (the East German secret police). Funder explored the untold stories of those who had fallen victim to the regime, as well as those of its various collaborators. Yet German publishers were uneasy with the prospect of publishing a book – written by a ‘non-German’ – that dealt with a particularly sensitive aspect of Germany’s past. When it was eventually translated into German in 2004, Funder came under considerable attack, particularly by East Germans who failed to grasp why she, as an ‘outsider’, had the ‘right’ to write about ‘us’. Funder then made various attempts, via the German print media, to mediate the conflict between ‘us’ and ‘them’, commenting: “Where I come from, writers can write about almost anything they choose” and, furthermore, “From what authority should I have sought permission?” (Funder 2004). Much more serious were threats posted by a group of former Stasi members, affiliated to the so-called ‘Society for the Protection of Civil Rights and the Dignity of Man’, which took offence at particular ‘allegations’ Funder had made in Stasiland (about their behaviour post-Wende). Rather than enduring legal proceedings, the offending passage was simply removed from the German translation. An analysis of these issues highlights issues of agency, authorship and censorship in translation, drawing on the notion of patronage (Lefevere), whereby outside forces; societal forces, generally driven by ideological concerns, influence the nature of the translation produced.

To Deprave and Corrupt: Forbidden, Hidden and Censored Books | Kevin Patrick The Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand (BSANZ) 2010 conference Books have long attracted an array of legal, religious and cultural prohibitions. Most spectacularly, specific books have been decried, seized and publicly destroyed by state and religious institutions. Likewise, there is a long history of conflict over the availability and matter of children's and young adult literature. But 21st-century prohibitions also extend well beyond fiction genres, with anti-terrorism legislation and bans on euthanasia criminalising possession and sale of specific 'how-to' handbooks, or even their consultation in academic research libraries.

To Deprave and Corrupt: Forbidden, Hidden and Censored Books | Paul Ashton The transformation of the global publishing industry in the second half of the twentieth century has seen a near complete consolidation of all publishing activity into the diamond net of a handful of multinational corporations. The concentration of power and activity has led to a situation where the very idea of publishing, and what is published, is not unsurprisingly shaped by the form of its production. This is not simply the case for mainstream or consumer publishing: it is equally true of academic publishing as it is of any other sector of the industry. However, with the development of digital technologies that reduce the barriers of both the production and—more importantly—distribution of published materials, small presses and publishing collectives now have renewed capacity to re-enter the process. Drawing on a long history of radical publishing, re.press, a publisher of contemporary philosophy and literature, has developed an open-access publishing model that attempts to liberate the form and content of publishing from many of its present constraints. By taking advantage of open- access technologies and philosophies, re.press has been able to offer a model of publishing that circumvents the control of multinational capital, while creating content that is meaningfully connected to its producers. In this presentation I will outline the ‘re.press model’; a model of open-access publishing that, rather than being something completely new, draws on a history of publishing in which the production of ideas is the manifestation of the community itself.

To Deprave and Corrupt: Forbidden, Hidden and Censored Books | David Ottina Public discussion surrounding book censorship has mostly followed the popular historical mode of moral panic. In the context of the internet, the primary threats seem to be specific technological and legal issues. At root, however, we are engaged in a set of large-scale re- negotiations of the social contract under which the book has flourished. Property, authority and authorship are all on the table. Paradoxically, the technologies of the internet include both the promise of free-flowing cultural exchange as well as the spectre of the pan-opticon. Several movements - free-libre software, copyfight, open access and net neutrality, loosely clustered under the banner of "free culture" - have arisen as important actors in this critical negotiation. While these movements are independent, their mutual awareness of each other effects a kind of coordination, mimicking the technical conditions of the internet itself. In this presentation, I discuss how the seemingly isolated concerns of academic publishing are at the very nexus of this struggle over the book's social contract, and how Open Humanities Press is using internet technologies to create thriving spaces for the book-length argument that is rapidly being foreclosed in the commercial academic publishing sphere.

To Deprave and Corrupt: Forbidden, Hidden and Censored Books | Sigi Jottkandt Will transformations in technology, media and scholarly cultures lead to the declining importance or ‘irrelevance’ of the library, or can these changes be envisioned in terms of what cultural critic Ajit Pyati has called a greater “democratic participation of libraries”? By this, Pyati has in mind the library as an “active shaper” of technology for the progressive end of increased information access for all. Integral to this vision is an expansion rather than contraction in library roles, particularly in the arena of knowledge dissemination. In this view, libraries could assume a role and responsibility further up the research chain and participate in the scholarly communication taking place during the research process itself rather than, as presently, “sitting at the end of the line.” In this presentation, I explore a role for university libraries as active producers of scholarly knowledge. Using a case study of a faculty-library publishing partnership, the Open Humanities Press, I describe how scholars, librarians and library developers of open source publishing technologies such as the Public Knowledge Project are creatively transforming the scholarly communications landscape and generating innovative solutions to the current crisis in humanities publishing.

To Deprave and Corrupt: Forbidden, Hidden and Censored Books | Brigid Magner The BookScan system has revolutionised the ways in which the Australian booktrade has operated following its introduction in 2000. As Booksellers have zeroed in on what BookScan tells them is hot and selling fast, there has been a dramatic rise in demand for new books and a steep decline in demand for backlist titles. This is also partly due to the ways in which new books from the bestseller lists are promoted and displayed in department, discount and chainstores, while independent bookshops often encourage the sale of a range of titles, including books from the midlist and the backlist. Arguably, the use of BookScan figures by chainstores has encouraged a form of censorship by omission since bestsellers are generally foregrounded at the expense of older, or less popular titles. Based on primary research undertaken in local bookstores, this paper explores the current trends in retail display - in both chainstores and independents - and how this might affect the habits of book buyers as a result.

To Deprave and Corrupt: Forbidden, Hidden and Censored Books | Elizabeth Caplice and Julianne Miller Major libraries in Australia, which hold collections for perpetuity rather than for circulation and subsequent de-acquisition dependant on users and trends, have historically not provided sufficient subject headings on fiction monographs. The question this presentation will raise is whether or not this is preventing libraries from doing what needs to be done to ensure adequate access to fiction collections. There is a great irregularity in the coding of subject headings for Australian fiction titles in legal deposit libraries in Australia. Subject headings, coded in the 600 fields of MARC records, provide library users with metadata relating to the subject matter of material. Without them, the collection materials are accessible only through information such as the title, publisher, author and date of publication. In accessing library collection material, the more metadata about collection materials provided by the library catalogue, the more accessible and useable a collection can be. To investigate this issue, we will discuss in our presentation:  The history of subject heading application policy in cataloguing, relation to fiction cataloguing in Australia  The historic bias against works of fiction both socially and academically, and the reflection of this in both subject headings, and library policy  The separate issues of historic records, and contemporary cataloguing  Undertake a qualitative and quantitative investigation of the MARC records across multiple institutions to contextualise Legal Deposit catalogue records, and evaluate the scope of the issue We will conclude with the discussion and evaluation of a range of possible solutions to this problem, including:  Web 2.0 functionality (as is present in TROVE)  The introduction and implementation of RDA  Digitisation  Collaboration  Retrospective cataloguing projects  A combination of all of the above.

To Deprave and Corrupt: Forbidden, Hidden and Censored Books | Mary Russell and Max McMaster By leaving information out of an index, you effectively censor the contents of the text. So the ultimate degree of censorship is not to have an index at all! However, we are concerned with the different types of censorship within indexes. This may be deliberately at the behest of the editor or author, bias on the part of the indexer, lack of understanding of the subject matter of the text by the indexer, or due to insufficient allocation of space for the index by the publisher.