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'Does heat have a cooling effect on culture? Sweat argues the reverse: culture thrives in the subtropical zones. While acknowledging that the subtropical generates ambivalence being cast as alternately idyllic or hellish Sweat nonetheless seeks to develop the specific voices of subtropical cultures. The uneasy place of this sweaty discourse is explored across art, literature, architecture, and the built environment. In particular, Sweat focuses on the most commonly experienced situations, the everyday house. While it addresses subjects from Japan, Brazil, and France, Sweat centres on Brisbane, Queensland long in the shadow of Sydney and Melbourne in the Australian cultural psyche due to its enduring and self-conscious attention to subtropical living.' (Back cover)
Notes
Contents indexed selectively.
Contents
* Contents derived from the Fortitude Valley,Fortitude Valley - New Farm area,Brisbane - North East,Brisbane,Queensland,:Institute of Modern Art,2011 version. Please note that other versions/publications may contain different contents. See the Publication Details.
'Brisbane writers and writing are increasingly represented as important to the city's identity as a site of urban cool, at least in marketing and public relations paradigms. It is therefore remarkable that recent Brisbane fiction clings strongly to a particular relationship to the climatic and built environment that is often located in the past and which seemingly turns away, or at least elides, the 'new' technologically-driven Brisbane. Literary Brisbane is often depicted in the context of nostalgia for the Brisbane that once was—a tropical, timbered, luxuriant city in which sex is associated with heat, and, in particular, sweat. In this writing sweat can produced by adrenaline or heat, but in particular, in Brisbane novels, it is the sweat of sex that characterises the literary city. Given that Brisbane is in fact a subtropical city, it is interesting that metaphors of a tropical climate and vegetation occur so frequently in Brisbane stories (and narratives set in other parts of the state) that writer Thea Astley was prompted at one point to remark that Queensland writing was in danger of developing into a tropical cliché.' Susan Carson.
