Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Letter from the Editors

2016; Penn State University Press; Volume: 1; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/jasiapacipopcult.1.2.0121

2380-7687

Adam Geczy, Vicki Karaminas, Paul Mountfort,

When the novel Head On (1995) by Australian novelist Christos Tsiolkas was adapted into the 1998 film Loaded (dir. Ana Kokkinos), it spoke to a generation of young Australians locked in a battle with the values of their immigrant parents and the quest for belonging in a multicultural society where racism and homophobia were still firmly entrenched in barriers of social difference. The novel further complicates this fissue between Greek immigrants and their Australian-born children by the film’s narrator Ari, who is secretly gay. Trying to escape from the pressures and expectations placed on his identity, Ari begins a 24-hour, drug-and-alcohol-fueled quest across Melbourne from the immigrant east to the affluent north accompanied by his transvestite friend. Ari’s nihilism is manifested in the annonymous and unprotected sex that he has with other men and his use of language such as the slang perjoritive words “wog” (“foreigner”) or “faggot” or the greek word “pousti” (“homosexual”) that he subverts and makes meaningful to his own identity. The “skip” versus “wog” tension is further explored by Tsiolkas in The Slap (2008), a novel that centers on an affluent community of second-generation Greek Australians, white Australians, Aborigines, Serbs, Jews, and ethnic Indians. The characters in the novel depict the cultural and ethnic cringe that is still a dominant aspect of Australian society. The Greek Australian’s call the non-whites “wogs,” disapprove of Hector who has an Indian wife, and hail the macho and successful businessman, Harry, who is a sexist bigot and refers to women as “whores.” And then there is the youngest member of the family, Lou, who is gay. Cultural discomfort and alienation and the quest for a piece of the Australian pie are made familiar in the novels Jesus Man (1999), the story of the Greek-Italian Stephanos family trying to find a place of belonging in the Australian dream; Dead Europe (2005) with its reoccuring themes of racism and antisemitism; and Barracuda (2013) the story of Danny, the child of a Scottish and Greek working-class family whose talent in swimming secures him a scolarship at a prestigious Melbourne private school that he refers to as “Cunts” College. In this issue of JAPPC, Nikos Papastergiadis examines the radical political ideologies and cultural bonds that are made prevalent in Tsiolkas’s novels. Papastergiadis writes that in Tsiolkas’s earlier novels, multiculturalism and Marxism were initially seen as failures that resulted in a narrative of nihilism, unlike his more recent work that offers a form of embodied solidarity with the Other. By contrasting Tsiolkas’s ambivalent resort to nihilism with the theoretical commentary of Peter Sloterdijk and Slavoj Žižek, Papastergiadis offers readers a scathing critique of the conditions of globalization and multiculturalism.Sexual and cultural hybrity are common tropes across the articles in this issue of the journal. As one of the most widely used and disputed terms in postcolonial theory, hybridity has become a site of struggle and resistance against the dominating forces of (postcolonial) culture. Hybridity belongs to the slippery domain of identities that opens up a space where the construction of a subject is neither colonized or colonizer, animal or human, (as in the case of the vampires) straight or gay (sailors) but creates a new political identity. The sailor produces such a space of sexual ambiguity that slips between the categories of gay and straight and can be read against the grain of a sexuality that does not fit into a “norm” but instead occupies a queer space. Young and forced into celibacy during long months at sea, the sailor has become the archetype of sexual availability and a stable feature of film, pornography, literature, art, and contemporary fashion. Adam Geczy, Vicki Karaminas, and Justine Taylor’s article traces the emergence of the sailor’s uniform as a form of differentiation in the navy to its adaptation in contemporary fashion design. The article also looks at the sailor’s representation as a gay fantasy hero in in the illustrations of Tom of Finland, whose drawings repeatedly display sailors with hard bodies and oversized genitalia to the writings of Jean Genet and Thomas Mann. Beginning with a critical examination of Bronek Koska’s photograph “Shore Leave,” which depicts two sailors in a sexually suggestive position, Geczy, Karaminas, and Taylor argue that the representation of men (in this case sailors) in sexually provocative positions produces a space that encourages women and men to desire the male image. A queer space that allows heterosexual men to indulge and participate in homosocial/homoerotic behavior in culturally acceptable ways.Like the sailor who roams the open seas never quite at home (or at rest) in any port, the vampire is a hybrid identity existing on the borders between life and death, human and animal, masculinity and femininity, heterosexuality and homosexuality. The vampire is a subversive figure that transgresses gender roles and disturbs sexual boundaries. Considered to be the most suductive of all fictional monsters, the vampire is often depicted as queer, possessing hypnotic powers that make their charms irresistable to its victims, men and women alike. Kimberley McMahon-Coleman explores representations of vampirism through the lens of acquired disability, paying particular attention to the notion of the Temporarily Abled Bodied, the implications of a search for a cure and how these impact on identities. The article focuses on Elenor Gilbert, the central character in L. J. Smith’s young adult novels The Vampire Diaries and the complicated love triangle between Elena, the 162-year-old vampire Stephan Salvatore, and his malevolent brother Damon. The novels, later adapted to a televison series of the same name, is set in the fictional town of Mystic Falls that is haunted and surrounded by witches, werewoves, vampires, and the undead.Monsters appear at times of crisis and are often representations of difference where boundaries of race, sexuality, or national identity are challenged. Simply put, the us-versus-them narrative, or the West and the rest. The historical vampire figure Dracula, based on the Transylvanian prince Vlad the Impaler, who fought against the Ottoman invasion, represents the dark (and dangerous) Eastern European who threatened the advancement of the British Empire. The zombie, originally from the Carribean island of Haiti, is embedded in the African slave trade narrative of freedom from misery and subjugation and was inflected by the island’s voodoo religious practices. A hybrid offshoot of a variety of religious African belief practices transported to Haiti during the slave trade, voodoo religion believed that zombies were corpses reanimated by voodoo priests and shamen through magic. Appropriated by American popular culture, the grand colonial narrative of the zombie has come to represent postcolonial anxieties of slavery and the demonization of the Other. Like the vampire, the zombie represents a transitional state between the dead and the undead, between capital and labor, and, in a Marxist postindustrialist world, has come to signify the alienation of the worker from the twin forces of capitalist production and consumption. In this context, the zombie is reduced to an instrument of production, a souless worker, and the vampire’s insatiable thirst for blood lends itself to the metaphor of material consumption.The recent spate of zombie movies and television series tells us something about cultural anxiety and the fear of the Other that is manifested in the spread of a contagious virus that threatens to obliterate entire nations. Take World War Z (2013), starring Brad Pitt playing the former United Nations investigator Gerry Lane who leads a worldwide search to find the source of a lethal virus that is spread by a single bite and turns people into zombies. Or, most recently, the American televison series The Walking Dead (2010) developed by Frank Darabont and based on the comic book series of the same name by Robert Kirkman, Tony Moore, and Charlie Adlard. Sherrif’s Deputy Rick Grimes wakes up from a deep coma only to discover that the world is overun by zombies, known as “walkers.” Christian Long’s article, “Infrustrature after the Zombie Aplocalypse,” examines not just fighting the zombie horde and its threat of contamination, but also the rebuilding of material infrustracture such as transportation systems that are important in maintaining order during the chaos. Long argues that the disorder and destruction caused by a zombie “takeover” highlights the importance of addressing emergent infrustructure problems collectively.Apocalypse and capitalist systems also find their way in Colin/Ciara Cremin’s article “Eros and Apocalypse: Herbert Marcuse in the Age of Austerity.” Cremin says that Herbert Marcuse’s influence on students in the Sixties is comparable to the influence and popularity that Slavoj Žižek enjoys today. He writes that both philosophers have invoked the idea of liberal tolerance and the need for revolutionary violence, and the idea of utopia against the ideology that there is no alternative to the market. Making comparisons to Žižek, he argues that Marcuse’s critique is particularly relevant now given that the logic of austerity impacts on politics, society, and subjectivity and calls for a rethinking of the relevance of Marcuse’s thoughts in today’s economic climate.Moving from Marxist materialsim to the Heideggerian notion of “Dasein,” Joe Balay’s article examines the representational image of the tree of life in Terrence Malik’s 2011 film, The Tree of Life. Balay argues that traditional depictions of the tree of life, such as those found in Genesis in the Bible and Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species (1859), face a representational challenge with abstract ideas of interdependence and spiritual unity, ideas that are challenged by Malik’s film. Representational images contain multiple readings and are affected by changing social and political forces. The same can be said about a literary genre that adapts and reinvents itself in response to social changes. In “True Crime: The Regular Reinvention of a Genre,” Rachel Franks looks at how true crime has maintained its popularity over time and captured the public imagination through the act of reinvention. Using three examples of print-based reinterventions that have served as watershed moments in the genre’s history, Franks effectively argues that these changes have secured true crime’s place in popular culture.We hope that you enjoy this issue of JAPPC.