Cirrus@Austlit

'With reference to recent debates about the politics of representation, this paper argues that a profound ambivalence about identity, and particularly about Asian Australian identity, is a common characteristic of much recent Asian Australian literary writing. It also asks whether this is the characteristic that marks this writing as specifically Australian. Tracing cultural contexts from the 'pathologies' of Australian multicultural debates to other transnational literary traditions, the paper uses examples from the writing of Brian Castro, Alice Pung, Ouyang Yu, Nam Le, Shaun Tan, and Tom Cho to speculate on the emergence of a new and distinct phase of transnational writing in Australia.' (Author's abstract)

'This paper examines Peter Duncan's film Unfinished Sky as an example of post-national Australian cinema. Addressing dominant frameworks in Australian film criticism that focus on the concept of the national, the paper argues that the 'national' has in fact been reconfigured in the cinema of the new millennium, placing it within a post-national or regional environment. In several recent Australian films there has been an increased engagement with the region, both in terms of the representation of regional areas outside Australia, such as Asia and the Middle East, as well as demonstrating a growing sense of openness to global influences and connections in remote or regional settings within the country. Addressing these various shifts, the paper questions how relevant is it to continue to define Australian cinema in terms of the 'national', as has long been dominant in Australian film scholarship, when aiming to take into account different races, ethnicities, and identities appearing on screen today. This is especially worth reconsidering since the demise of multiculturalism from the mid to late 1990s as an official cultural policy situated squarely within the framework of the national.' (Author's abstract)

'East West 101 is a television show that bears the traces of the highly charged social and cultural fields in which it is embedded. At one level, the show bears the traces of recent events such as the war on terror. At another interrelated level, we also find traces of a more long-standing and deeply embedded fantasy of White supremacy that marks Australian culture, even the official policy of multiculturalism. These traces are also entangled with yet another level, the industrial and political context of the show's production through the SBS network. My aim in this paper is to explore these complex entanglements in order to reveal how the challenge to the vilification of Muslims in the show is limited by the production context. Put another way, my aim will be to temper the celebration of the show as 'edgy text'.' (Author's abstract)