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Cultural Studies

The Porn Report by Alan McKee, Katherine Albury and Catharine Lumby & Princesses and Pornstars by Emily Maguire

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June 2008, no. 302

Pornification, The Porn Report and Princesses and Pornstars are three recent entries into the burgeoning academic field known as ‘porn studies’. All three books aim to move beyond the simplistic ‘for’ and ‘against’ arguments that have traditionally surrounded pornography. Instead, each text explores the challenges and complexities of living in a world where sexually explicit material is more prevalent than ever before.

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Britishness Abroad: Transnational Movements and Imperial Cultures edited by Kate Darian-Smith, Patricia Grimshaw and Stuart Macintyre

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June 2008, no. 302

In her contribution to Britishness Abroad, ‘Colonial Enclaves and Domestic Spaces in British New Guinea’, Anne Dickson-Waiko writes that ‘the experiences of the colonised Other in relation to empire and colonisation needs [sic] urgent investigation, so that the colonised other can … move on to the post-colonial’. She shows a touching belief in the usefulness of research in the humanities: I envy her confidence that her efforts will have such a beneficial effect on the world beyond the academy.

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On the front of the only postcard my grandfather kept is a picture of the United States Navy’s ‘great white fleet’ off Australian shores. A Pennsylvanian uncle sent it to the nine-year-old boy in 1908, ‘from one white man to another’. After reading Marilyn Lake’s and Henry Reynolds’s important new book on the transnational assertion of white racial identity in the early twentieth century, I now know that our American relative was merely echoing Rear-Admiral Sperry, who, at a luncheon in Sydney the same year, greeted his Australian hosts as a ‘white man to white men, and I may add, very white men’.

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Selling Sex provides a comprehensive history of prostitution in Australia. In 342 pages, Raelene Frances (currently Dean of Arts at Monash University) describes the changing nature of sex work in Australian society from the colonial period to the present day. Frances’s text is bril­liantly researched and provides many important insights for readers interested in Australian history and culture, as well as the history of sex and gender.

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Other Colours: Essays and a Story by Orhan Pamuk (trans. By Maureen Freely)

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April 2008, no. 300

Media discussion of the 2006 Nobel Prize winner, Orhan Pamuk, tends to focus on his political persecution at the hands of the Turkish state. Pamuk concedes that history has forced him to don a ‘political persona’, one that journalists and literary festival audiences are keen to encounter. Yet Pamuk’s new collection of essays, Other Colours: Essays and a Story, reveals where politics (or political commentary) and the writer of imaginative thinking part company.

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Kingston, Jamaica was scary in early 1985. Asked what reggae track was playing on his shop stereo, a Rastaman retaliated, ‘What the fuck do you want to know for?’ An elderly, one-legged woman maintained a meagre crafts display in a dockside souvenir shed, though no cruise ship had called there in a year. A ‘cheap’ chicken dinner cost more than a waiter earned in a month. A block from the hotel, young men menaced foreigners ‘taking the sights’. Watching Jamaica play Trinidad at Sabina Park involved a gate check by armed police with dogs. A passing motorist picked us up after the game: ‘too dangerous to walk in Kingston now.’ Elsewhere on the island, a gang gathered while we inspected Marcus Garvey’s statue in St Anne (significantly, the birthplace of reggae stars Burning Spear and Bob Marley). One Montego Bay five-star hotel’s driveway was lined with prostitutes; another halved its original price to attract us as its only guests – the pool terrace overlooked a slum worthy of the Rio favelas. A planet away from the postcard Caribbean, it was just as far from other West Indian sites.

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Anyone browsing in bookstores in the past five years has undoubtedly come across one of the dozens of life narratives that emerged in the aftermath of 9/11. The attack on the World Trade Centre and the consequent ‘war on terror’ produced a new market for the publishing industry – and it has deluged us with offerings. Prominent among them are the sensational, eroticised best-sellers by Muslim women recounting their persecution under the Taliban; journalistic accounts of war by ‘embedded’ Western news correspondents from Afghanistan and Iraq; edited oral histories offering testimony by refugees to the trauma of war in the Middle East; and memoirs of exile by Iranian women living in the United States.

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The study of early modern women’s writing is today a thriving field, largely formed by innovative politically and sexually engaged work at the crossroads of historical and theoretical scholarship and teaching. What is often somewhat offhandedly referred to as the work of feminist recovery or canonical revision, an ongoing investigation of the print and manuscript archive of early modern women’s writing, was and is a charged project of materialist intervention and disciplinary critique designed to disturb, rather than simply supplement, the foundations of literary value and its pedagogical reproduction. The study of early modern women’s writing has been especially shaped by its engagements with the insights, assumptions and blindspots of the feminist literary history of post-Enlightenment women’s writing, the provocations and innovations of new historicism and cultural materialism, and the volatile encounter of identity politics, the politics of difference and the history of sexuality.

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In recent years, particularly since the Tampa and children overboard incidents and the 9/11 attacks, there has been a marked change in public and political perceptions of Middle Eastern migrants and the Arab–Australian community. In August 2001, for instance, the chair of a parliamentary inquiry into Australia’s relations with the Middle East, David Jull, introduced the committee’s report with the ‘reassuring’ observation that ‘for the most part, the tensions and conflict in the Middle East have not affected the relations between the various community groups in Australia’.

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There is a curious division evident in Australian politics at the moment. One side wants to talk about history, and the other wants to talk about language.

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