Lilydale Research News

Date: 18 February 2010

Time: 12.30pm

Venue: Building LA Room 325

RSVP essential for catering to Nadine White nwhite@swin.edu.au by 15 February

The body of the local and touristic desires: the performance of sex-tourism in Pattaya, Thailand.

Neil Walsh, Lecturer Tourism

...... Tourism is subject to the same process of commodification that defines all modern life, it commodifies people and places. Tourism is thus an integral part of consumer culture. The development of sex tourism in Thailand especially, illustrates how insidious such commodification and consumerism really is. This approach positions tourism as an activity, industry and experience wholly determined by the essential logic of capitalism. Within this political operation the body of the local is controlled, or in the very least, cajoled to perform for the tourist.......

What's colour got to do with it? Negotiating Identity in the new African Diaspora in Australia

The past twenty years has seen a somewhat steady flow of continental Africans into Australia as part of her migration and humanitarian policies. This arrival of continental Africans, often constructed as "Blacks" raises several questions with respect to identity and belonging. For example, what does it mean to be and live "Black" in a society, which, not only abandoned its "White Australia" policy a little over thirty years ago, but must now also grapple with the transnational nature of its citizenry, which includes African Blacks?

In this presentation, we employ a self-reflexive narrative approach within an auto-ethnographic methodological framework to present stories of our everyday lived experiences as Black Africans, negotiating the multiple complex layerings of not just our Blackness, but also our diasporic African existence. Bearing in mind Ibrahim's observation that: 'race is not a category we occupy or slot ourselves into but a performative category that we "do" everyday'.  It is a play, a plot, a representational language that is beyond our control?, we address the challenges and contradictions of negotiating reified and homogenised Black/African migrant/outsider labels and identities. We also reflect on our endeavours to confront distorted interpretations that seek to identify and categorise our existence in terms of victimhood: as the unknowing, uneducated, oppressed, dispossessed persons of colour. Our analysis is not intended as theoretical discussions of race, racism, or race relations in the wider Australian context. Rather, they are "our tales of blackness", of the dilemmas of negotiating subjectivity; the multiple and paradoxical ways of being "other".

Mark Carthew and Mike Spoor presented Witches in britches... click here to view lecture http://il.cc.swin.edu.au/ilectures/ilectures.lasso?ut=538&id=14647