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Countercartographies: New (Zealand) cultural studies/geographies and the city

2009; Wiley; Volume: 65; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/j.1745-7939.2009.01143.x

1745-7939

Julie Cupples, Kevin Glynn,

Race, History, and American Society

Heavenly Creatures, Peter Jackson's internationally renowned 1994 film about a horrific 1954 matricide committed by two New Zealand schoolgirls, exquisitely contrasts the official face of respectable Christchurch, site of the murder, with many of the city's darker undercurrents, its overt and covert class, sexual and racial hierarchies and oppressions, and its postcolonial psychodynamics of Anglophilia and repression.1 In the film's representational logic, Englishness signifies both class aspiration and ineffectual, effete decadence. When Pauline and her intimate English expat confidante, Juliet, brutally murder Pauline's mother, Pauline might be seen as at once exterminating her own (somewhat self-loathing) working class identity and intervening disruptively against the rigidly punishing moral geographies of the Anglophilic postcolonial city. Jackson draws upon the schoolgirls’ actual diary entries to develop an elaborate phantasmatic visual countermapping (‘the Fourth World’) of the psychosocial contours of postcolonial space – a kind of countercartography of desire based upon the visual imaginaries recorded in the girls’ diaries. One of the remarkable features of Heavenly Creatures is then its complex exploration of interplays between urban spaces, visual imaginaries, excluded identities, repressed cultural countercurrents and postcolonial social dynamics, a set of interplays that also animates the various contributions to the present issue. Christchurch is home to indigenous people and immigrants from many places around the world. In spite of its postcolonial condition and its geographical location in the South Pacific, its ‘official’ place image draws, as we've suggested, on a dominant Anglophilia. The early European settlers of Christchurch deliberately set out to create a little Albion in the Antipodes and thus attempted to transplant many features of England into their new environment, including whole social, educational and religious institutions, imported flora, fauna and place-names, and a bit of English snobbery. This colonial past has provided a powerful set of images and discourses on which place-promoters can draw to commend the city to locals, tourists and investors. Christchurch has been named the ‘Garden City’ and is a place in which the legacies of its colonial settler histories continue to be highly visible. They can be seen (and heard) in the city's English-style parks and gardens, in its fairly abundant Gothic architecture and private schools, and in many of its everyday discourses and the attitudes they produce and promote. While Christchurch's quaint and tranquil version of Englishness has an appeal, it is of course ideologically driven and works to erase the city's pre-colonial and indigenous histories and identities (Cupples & Harrison 2001). As well, the icons used to promote Christchurch, such as the affluent suburb of Fendalton, the private boy's school Christ's College, and the city's Arts Centre and spectacular new gallery, are those of a hegemonic bourgeois culture that obscures ‘the class divisions and urban wastelands that also characterize the place’ (Pawson 1999: 351). The dominant meanings of place are of course neither fixed, given, nor universally assented to and so must be asserted and struggled for continuously. While Christchurch's harmonious Anglophilic image is vigorously promoted by many residents and officials through various discursive and visual strategies, it is also highly contested by a range of cultural practices and discourses that make social difference and alternative place-meanings and mappings both visible and audible. The six papers in the present issue deal with various cultural dimensions of the city of Christchurch and strive to capture and engage with something of this wide range of meanings and practices. The concept for this special issue began to take shape a number of years ago as a result of research conducted and published in Gender, Place and Culture by Julie Cupples and Jane Harrison (2001) concerning a local and national media event. In 1998, New Zealand's TV3 broadcast two programmes featuring women who alleged that a prominent Christchurch politician and family doctor, Morgan Fahey, had sexually assaulted them while they were patients in his care. One of these programmes used controversial secret camera footage in which we see Fahey pleading for forgiveness when confronted and challenged in a private setting by one of the women. The allegations against Fahey, who publicly asserted his innocence – in part by aligning himself with Christchurch's ‘official’ place image and dominant meanings – unleashed an immediate backlash in the mainstream media. Fahey thus became a media figure (Fiske 1996) who embodied dominant place-meanings and white middle class ideals associated with Christchurch, but who was also a site of heightened discursive contestation generated around the destabilizing impacts of the women's allegations. In the wake of the Fahey affair and Cupples and Harrison's research into it, we came increasingly to recognize that Christchurch possesses a number of alternative and subaltern geographies that work to disrupt and decentre the city's dominant identities but which have thus far been relatively unexplored by scholars. This special issue has several interrelated objectives. The first is to explore some of the countercartographies that destabilize and contest Christchurch's ‘official’ landscapes, media discourses and identities. This is important not just in terms of intellectual endeavour but also because it gives voice to the many human and non-human elements that are an integral part of the city's diverse fabric but which are often excluded from its dominant imagined geographies. Consequently, the articles in this issue pay close attention to Christchurch's Māori population, including those who were incarcerated in Addington Prison; to Asian residents and visitors; to subcultural communities such as skateboarders, graffiti artists and YouTube video makers; to working class suburbs and residents; to refugee high school students; to competing architectural codes and native plants and trees. The alternative perspectives implied by the term countercartographies are crucial to those of us who live and work in Christchurch. We believe that if we want to find more sustainable, cosmopolitan and inclusive modes of coexistence, we need to think about the city's diversity and inequalities in theoretically sophisticated ways. We need to be more aware of the ways in which colonial practices and discourses continue to produce our city and what is at stake when dominant or subordinated points of view are evoked in our landscapes, media, schools, tourist attractions and other sites where cultural meanings circulate. The production of countercartographies and the circulation of excluded perspectives do of course have a wider relevance beyond Christchurch, for they can contribute to the development of our understandings of postcolonialism more broadly. Scholarly discussions of postcolonialism often focus on the so-called third world and tend to neglect English-speaking settler societies such as Canada, Australia and New Zealand (Sidaway 2000). Anglophilia (however contested, evolving and ambivalent it may be) is a key feature of certain cities (including Adelaide, Vancouver and Christchurch) in such societies. While Anglophilia is often cherished and celebrated, it has internally colonizing dimensions that work to exclude people and things that do not fit within its white middle-class discursive remit. Hence the deconstruction of Anglophilia seems a valuable step toward the further decolonization of Christchurch and other postcolonial places. However, Murray notes that there is a frequently unrecognized and poorly understood ‘ongoing colonial politics involved in the production of geographical knowledge’ that minimizes the visibility of research from (and thus of political problematics such as Anglophilia that are prevalent within) certain parts of the world. This colonial politics of knowledge is, ironically, ‘often reproduced through the hierarchies constructed and inhabited by ostensibly ‘post-colonial’ geography journals’ (Murray 2005: 244). We hope the papers in this issue will contribute to a postcolonial reconfiguration of the geography of geographical scholarship (Murray 2005). Our second, related aim is to make an original contribution to the literature on globalization and new urban geography by focusing on a smaller city's experience of globality. Although many scholars have written theoretically informed texts about so-called global cities such as Los Angeles, Paris and London, there is a growing need for work that explores urban cultural processes in other sites that are increasingly shaped by global forces in ways that constitute distinctive new particularities of place. Globalization has, as Sheppard & Lynn (2004: 52) note, ‘opened up cities of all sizes to new and rapidly changing influences’. We concur with García Canclini's (2001: 7) view that both small and large cities outside North America and Europe can constitute sites that are ‘as revealing as New York or London for research that explores the rearticulations between the global and the local, between the flows of deterritorialization and reterritorialization’. Although some analysts have directed attention to smaller cities and suburbia within the United States and Europe (for examples, see McNeill 1999, 2004; Self 2003; Duncan & Duncan 2004), there is a dearth of scholarship on smaller urban centres in postcolonial English settler societies in the Antipodes. Our multidimensional approach to the cultural struggles over and around Christchurch aims to fill this gap by exploring how local elements both draw upon and contribute to the production of the global in a diverse range of ways. By focusing this issue on a small, Antipodean, postcolonial city, we thus hope to contribute to an emergent literature that explores processes of globalization off the beaten track, so to speak, and to demonstrate how similar theoretically informed research could be conducted in other places that may lie beyond the territory of the ‘global cities’ but are no less important to processes of globalization. Our final aim is to explore and promote dialogues between geography and cultural studies. Across the social sciences and humanities there has been a growing theoretical emphasis on both spatiality and culture for more than twenty five years now. Since the 1980s, when cultural studies took off in universities throughout and beyond the Anglophone world and human geography began its cultural turn, both fields have undergone something of a convergence, have increasingly engaged in dialogues with one another and have extensively cross-pollinated. Consequently, cultural studies practitioners have learned to become more spatially sensitive in their analyses, and geographers have developed sophisticated new ways of taking culture seriously. And yet, as Graeme Turner has recently noted, cultural studies and cultural geography (along with certain other fields that have made intensive intellectual investments in the analysis of core cultural problematics) ‘have become quite adjacent disciplines’ but could still learn much by talking to one another more frequently and effectively, for they ‘share a lot of ideas and theory already but not necessarily much institutional space’ (Andrejevic 2008: 221–2). In keeping with our call for attentiveness to the specificities of space and place, we would note that it is a distinctive feature of New Zealand academic life that cultural studies has never achieved the level of institutional visibility, security, or support here that it has enjoyed in Australia, the US and the UK. Moreover, institutional restructuring at the University of Canterbury in recent years has intensified rather than weakened the bureaucratic barriers between Geography and Cultural Studies as administrative units; nevertheless, through our teaching and research we have continuously struggled to overcome these barriers. This special issue is in part a product of our ongoing efforts to surmount what all too often seems to be an unfortunate and counter-productive compartmentalization and ‘rationalization’ of academic programme units and budgets; it is in part an attempt to initiate new dialogues, to enlarge various interstitial institutional spaces and to perhaps forge some new ones. While ongoing restructuring, mergers, academic layoffs and downsizing in Australasian universities increasingly force programmes to protect their disciplinary distinctiveness in a post-disciplinary intellectual world (and UC is no exception here), it is important for us to note that the University of Canterbury has New Zealand's only degree major in Cultural Studies and it is a programme to which the Geography, American Studies and English departments (along with others) have made major contributions over the last few years. Although some geographers have expressed concern at the ‘magpie-like behaviour of Cultural Studies practitioners’ (Stratton 2006: 434), Turner suggests that with its increasing institutionalization, cultural studies has probably passed the point at which it could lay claim to the ‘renegade’ status of a kind of ‘undiscipline’ that raids others for their concepts, theories and methods, often in the name of a committed antidisciplinarity. However comparatively underdeveloped and uneven may be cultural studies’ institutionalization in New Zealand universities, we agree with Turner's proposition that the intensified pursuit of rigorous dialogue across often problematic and counterproductive administrative and intellectual boundaries is perhaps the response to present circumstances that is most in keeping with ‘the tradition of an “undisciplined” cultural studies – the one that was completely contemptuous of disciplinary boundaries because they policed knowledge and how it was traded’ (Andrejevic 2008: 222). The development of theoretically informed and empirically rich understandings of the ways in which culture sustains and reworks spatialized power relations and identities can of course benefit substantially from the intellectual insights of both geography and cultural studies. It is our hope that this special issue will provide a distinctively New Zealand contribution to these intellectual endeavours at the interface of Geography and Cultural Studies and will strengthen the linkages between these fields at Canterbury and beyond. The contributors to this special issue are working in Cultural Studies, Geography, American Studies, Sociology and English in New Zealand, Canada and the UK. Kevin Glynn's paper explores some of the ways in which contemporary media extend the postcolonial city's landscapes, multiply its textured spatiality, and thus expand sites for contestation around the discursive production of Christchurch's visual imaginaries and place-identities. Glynn discusses the use of surveillance media by Christchurch officials and authorities to exert visual control over ‘disruptive youths’, who have in turn made use of media sites such as YouTube to reverse the urban gaze and lay claim to city space. Julie Cupples examines the making of place-based identities in the Christchurch suburb of Halswell through an annual Christmas lights display that draws on an alternative set of global imaginaries and disrupts the city's dominant place-meanings. Franklin Ginn investigates the history of the Christchurch Botanic Gardens and finds that they constituted a ‘contested material landscape’ of ‘negotiation, conflict, and contradictory meaning’, where Western science forged hybrid couplings and linkages with indigenous understandings of the land, where the frequent ‘misuse’ of these public spaces reveals that they functioned not only as sites of refined bourgeois leisure, ‘but also of theft, threat and subversion’, and where even the trees and weeds behaved with a kind of excessive exuberance that ‘pushed back’ against the ‘enlightened rule of European colonial powers over nature’. In his social semiotic study of an urban ‘abject zone’ that has recently been reclaimed as a heritage site, Howard McNaughton uncovers a ‘postcolonial palimpsest’ of multiply layered codes that express competing memories, histories and moralities, ranging from the Christian imperialism articulated through Christchurch's celebrated Gothic Revival architecture to the Māori graffiti preserved within one such ‘civilizing’ Gothic structure, a former prison, where inscriptions left by inmates register ‘the extreme cultural constraints of the urban gaol’ and assert a form of ‘resistance to cultural adaptation’. Audrey Kobayashi analyses the ‘discursive crisis’ that developed around an antiracism rally held in Christchurch in 2004. Kobayashi shows how ‘discourses of denial’ and subsidiary discursive formations participate in the production of a ‘new racism’ in Christchurch that undercuts efforts to transform persistent inequalities associated with ‘established cultures of whiteness’. Finally, Louise Humpage uses the concept of cultural safety to explore the challenges faced by young Somali refugees in Christchurch secondary schools. The editors would like to thank the Geography Department and the College of Arts at the University of Canterbury for providing financial support for this special issue.