Copyright (c) 2008 All rights reserved. http://works.bepress.com/gturcotte Recent documents in Professor Gerry Turcotte en-us Fri, 30 May 2008 02:53:34 PDT 3600 http://works.bepress.com/gturcotte/13 http://works.bepress.com/gturcotte/13 Wed, 28 May 2008 13:50:59 PDT [Extract] This paper takes as its starting point Joy Kogawa's 1981 novel Obasan, a story which revolves around what McFarlane has called "arguably the most documented instance of ethnic civil rights abuse in Canadian history" ("Covering Obasan" 401): the internment of the Japanese Canadians during and after the Second World War and their subsequent dispossession and exile. It also takes as one point of intersection the Japanese Canadian Redress Agreement--the decision of the Mulroney Government on 22 September 1988 to offer an apology and restitution to the Japanese Canadians for their suffering and unjust treatment. More specifically, this reading is located in the way Freud's analysis of "The Uncanny" (1956) can be brought to bear on an understanding of these events. G. Turcotte http://works.bepress.com/gturcotte/12 http://works.bepress.com/gturcotte/12 Wed, 28 May 2008 13:50:57 PDT This chapter introduces the volume and discusses related theoretical issues. This volume seeks to map an understanding of the Italian experience onto the broader picture of diasporic stories, though with an anchor in the Australian-Italian experience. It brings together key essays and testimonials that frame a picture of Italy's rich legacy at "home", in Europe more widely, and in the (post)colonial sphere, with a particular emphasis on the Australian experience. The essays collected here focus on the way an Italian Australian story has emerged and evolved in its own unique way. In some respects it might be possible to defi ne Australia, through this community, as an Italian space, very much inscribed and described by the many voices that characterise it. What is clear throughout these pages is that past, present and future circulate through and around each other, just as notions of nation - colonial, postcolonial, emigrant and immigrant - jostle for purchase in what is in fact a contested space always under negotiation. G. Turcotte http://works.bepress.com/gturcotte/11 http://works.bepress.com/gturcotte/11 Wed, 28 May 2008 13:50:55 PDT [Extract] Long before the fact of Australia was ever confirmed by explorers and cartographers it had already been imagined as a grotesque space, a land peopled by monsters. The idea of its existence was disputed, was even heretical for a time, and with the advent of the transportation of convicts its darkness seemed confirmed. The Antipodes was a world of reversals, the dark subconscious of Britain. It was, for all intents and purposes, Gothic par excellence, the dungeon of the world. It is perhaps for this reason that the Gothic as a mode has been a consistent presence in Australia since European settlement. Certainly the fact that settlement began in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, during the rise of the Gothic as a sensationalist and resonantly influential form, contributes to its impact on the literature of Australia. There may be other reasons for its appeal. It is certainly possible to argue that the generic qualities of the Gothic mode lend themselves to articulating the colonial experience inasmuch as each emerges out of a condition of deracination and uncertainty, of the familiar transposed into unfamiliar space. It is this very quality which Freud identified as the condition of the uncanny, where the home is unhomely -- where the heimlich becomes unheimlich -- and yet remains sufficiently familiar to disorient and disempower. All migrations represent a dislocation of sorts, but Australia posed particularly vexing questions for its European immigrants. Nature, it seemed to many, was out of kilter. To cite the familiar cliches: its trees shed their bark, swans were black rather than white, and the seasons were reversed. And while these features represented a physical perversion, it was widely considered to be metonymic of an attendant spiritual dis/ease. G. Turcotte http://works.bepress.com/gturcotte/10 http://works.bepress.com/gturcotte/10 Wed, 28 May 2008 13:50:52 PDT This paper provides a critical introduction to a special issue of Australian Canadian Studies 23(2) 2005 - "Diasporic Spectrality: Minorities and cultural Assertions in Canada, Australia and Beyond" - guestedited by Gerry Turcotte and Gaetano Rando. The paper discusses the selection of papers that produced a coherent, though not uniform, picture of minority interests that examine the complex ways culture is "asserted" in contemporary times, primarily in the Canadian context, but understood within the larger story of migration, plurality and diaspora. As we worked through the contributions we found not only that they represented a wide variety of fields -- from broadcast policy to Italian migration as expressed in literary texts; from Caribbean-Canadian literature to a wider Caribbean language of exile internationally; to notions of Indigenous diaspora as reflected in the life and work of Canada's Alootook Ipellie -- but also that key threads connected the material in "uncanny" ways. G. Turcotte http://works.bepress.com/gturcotte/9 http://works.bepress.com/gturcotte/9 Wed, 28 May 2008 13:50:50 PDT The field of Italian Australian studies is both diverse and dynamic. It has embraced topics from outside its "traditional" ambit and has identified new areas of concern to scholars in the field. This volume examines from a post-colonial perspective one of the many and varied cultural practices -- the creation of literary texts -- established by migrants from Sicily and Calabria who constitute the two major Italian regional groups in Australia. In re-creating aspects of their inhabited past in their new frontier thereby lessening the threat of loss and reconciling their past with their present, these migrants have created a dynamic hybrid culture which is both Italian and Australian. What this volume makes clear is that a distinctive profile, like any great cultural force, is always in a state of transformation and self-interrogation. In this way a culture is never stable, never predictable and never complacent G. Rando http://works.bepress.com/gturcotte/8 http://works.bepress.com/gturcotte/8 Wed, 28 May 2008 13:50:47 PDT [Extract] "Sex", my father said, "isn't all that it's made out to be. People talk about it as though they know what it is. Well don't be fooled. No one's really an expert ... unless they're French Canadian". He nodded seriously, and then smiled. "Like father like son, eh?" I agreed, gulping, wondering what my mother thought of all this. For the moment she was holding her peace. My father spread the Men's magazine on the table. "This, though. This isn't sex. These are pictures. It's not real life." I knew there was a moral in all this. I was hoping it would be expressed entirely in words. I'd put them on the table earlier in the day, my guilt forcing me to confess that a friend had given them to me. I was eight years old. I'd never seen such things before..... G. Turcotte http://works.bepress.com/gturcotte/7 http://works.bepress.com/gturcotte/7 Wed, 28 May 2008 13:50:43 PDT In my novel, Flying in Silence, set in both Australia and Canada, my principal character is a French Canadian man torn between landscapes, languages and allegiances. To represent what was for me the central dilemmas of the novel -- reconciling memory and migration -- I used the metaphor of Persistence of Vision, that process in film through which we physiologically make sense of, or hold together, what should be a blurred, segmented and impartial sequence of frequently unrelated images. *** Persistence of vision is all about the eye, the way it follows a film, remembers an image, holds on to it, until the next one appears to replace it, so that we are never conscious of the stutter of frames -- the space between. Image after image flows past us leaving ghostly fingerprints on shellshocked retinas. Our mind races, slower than light, and we see through the past into the present, just as that present no longer exists. And so we imagine the future. With the old projectors, a glitch could shake that sequence free. Suddenly, we might glimpse a momentary stutter that we'd suppressed -- a mother, torn and fractured by a creeping darkness, a loved one felled by another's lifelong expectations, violence inflicted on a child so that he turns himself inward and disappears. G. Turcotte http://works.bepress.com/gturcotte/6 http://works.bepress.com/gturcotte/6 Wed, 28 May 2008 13:50:41 PDT [Extract] The act of colonisation is articulated through the language of Western epistemology: through "scientific" discourses and reasonings -- such as cartography, historiography, law and taxonomy -- and through the language and practices of Christianity: collectively what Stephen Slemon has termed the "cognitive legacies of imperialism". The inevitability and rightness of this on-going act -- this "false totalization" -- have been recorded, perpetuated and naturalised through a series of Master Narratives which organise and police the boundaries of the tale. Those who seek to resist being interpellated into such narratives frequently find that they are called upon to engage in a counter-discursive battle whose terms and conditions -- even the language of the battle -- have been predetermined by the very structures they seek to oppose. Like all sophisticated and organic structures, after all, imperialism has known how to bend and incorporate that which opposes it -- to mask, absorb, transform or elide contradictory accounts -- so that not all counter-discursive gestures against it are successful. G. Turcotte http://works.bepress.com/gturcotte/5 http://works.bepress.com/gturcotte/5 Wed, 28 May 2008 13:50:38 PDT [Extract] This paper discusses the question of the Gothic mode as it has been used to construct a eurocentric notion of Aboriginality, though its emphasis is on the way the mode has been turned on its head, as it were, by Mudrooroo, to produce an oppositional, revisionist discourse that works to undermine European historiography. The principal examples in this reading will be Master of the Ghost Dreaming (1991) and The Undying (1998), which locate their ghost and vampire tales at the site of the invasion of Australia by Europeans, and around a battle which was frequently effected through missionary activities. Particularly fascinating is Mudrooroo's rewriting of the 'conciliating' efforts of George Augustus Robinson, in what was then called Van Diemen's Land (until 1855 - now Tasmania), and his disastrous attempts to establish a 'Friendly Mission' that would effectively rid the small island of its Aboriginal inhabitants and so leave it free for white settlement. This mission would see the death of most of its inhabitants, including that of "Truganini [...] regarded at the time as 'the last of her race'." G. Turcotte http://works.bepress.com/gturcotte/4 http://works.bepress.com/gturcotte/4 Wed, 28 May 2008 13:50:33 PDT [Extract] Long before the fact of Australia was ever confirmed by explorers and cartographers it had already been imagined as a grotesque space, a land peopled by monsters.1 The idea of its existence was disputed, was even heretical for a time, and with the advent of the transportation of convicts its darkness seemed confirmed. The Antipodes was a world of reversals, the dark subconscious of Britain. It was, for all intents and purposes, Gothic par excellence, the dungeon of the world. It is perhaps for this reason that the Gothic as a mode has been a consistent presence in Australia since European settlement. Certainly the fact that settlement began in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, during the rise of the Gothic as a sensationalist and resonantly influential form, contributes to its impact on the literatures of Australia. There are other reasons for its appeal. It is certainly possible to argue that the generic qualities of the Gothic mode lend themselves to articulating the colonial experience inasmuch as each emerges out of a condition of deracination and uncertainty, of the familiar transposed into unfamiliar space, and then forcibly 'naturalised'. It is this very quality which Freud identified as the condition of the uncanny, where the home becomes unhomely--where the heimlich becomes unheimlich--and yet remains sufficiently familiar to disorient and disempower.2 All migrations represent a dislocation of sorts, but Australia posed particularly vexing questions for its European immigrants. Nature, it seemed to many, was out of kilter. To cite the familiar clichés: its trees shed their bark, swans were black rather than white, and the seasons were reversed. And while these features represented a physical perversion, it was widely considered to be metonymic of an attendant spiritual dis/ease. This sense of spiritual malaise is often communicated through the Gothic mode, that is, through a literary form that emphasises the horror, uncertainty and desperation of the human experience, and represents the solitariness of that experience through characters trapped in a hostile environment, or pursued by an unspecified or unidentifiable danger. From its inception the Gothic has dealt with fears and themes that are endemic in the colonial experience: isolation, entrapment, fear of pursuit and fear of the unknown. The Gothic, moreover, is itself a hybrid form--a mode delineated by borrowings and conflations, by fragmentation and incompletion, by a rejection of set values and yet a dependence on establishment. In this sense it is ideal to articulate the colonial condition. G. Turcotte http://works.bepress.com/gturcotte/3 http://works.bepress.com/gturcotte/3 Wed, 28 May 2008 13:50:31 PDT [Extract] .... the Canadian-Australian Prize may well be celebrating a shaky reality indeed, if the premise for the award is merely to showcase a mythical uniformity of landscape. The wide variety of winners over what is almost two decades contests this reading, if only because it continually redefines and problematizes what it means to be Australian or Canadian. In doing so it encourages its readers to acknowledge, and hopefully to celebrate, the value of multiplicity and difference. Despite this, as the prize approaches its second decade, and as its administrators in both countries decide whether or not the award will continue beyond this time frame, they will have serious questions to ask. Not just questions about whether the prize has achieved sufficient publicity, or successfully promoted the respective countries to each other (a legitimate enough query given the "goal" of the prize), but also whether it should continue to exclude French Canadian writers (or indeed any non-English writers in translation), whether indigenous writers have been given significant opportunity to be short-listed for the prize (none have won in eighteen years), and, in Australia's case, whether women writers have had that opportunity as well (only two in nine years). Essentially, the question will be, has the Canadian-Australian Prize Committee done everything in their power to articulate the diversity of voices which speak beneath the aegis of Canadian and Australian nationalisms? G. Turcotte http://works.bepress.com/gturcotte/2 http://works.bepress.com/gturcotte/2 Wed, 28 May 2008 13:50:28 PDT [Extract] In the process of retrieving female writing from patriarchal control, women writers have focussed on a number of sites for re-vision. This article is concerned with two areas which have received sustained critical and creative attention. The first is language itself and the possibility for underscoring this "politicized" subject--and here, in particular, the way generic categories such as the Gothic have been destabilized or re-appropriated in order to comment on those "systems" which institutionalize and perpetuate imperialist, sexist or so-called "normative" values. The second is sexuality and the body. Specifically, Canadian and Australian Gothic women's writings have shown marked interest in expressing the physical side of feminine experience, although, it should be stressed, the two--language and body--are invariably connected. G. Turcotte http://works.bepress.com/gturcotte/1 http://works.bepress.com/gturcotte/1 Wed, 28 May 2008 13:50:24 PDT The title of this paper is drawn from a conference of the same name that I co-organized in 1999 at the University of Wollongong in Australia (see Radcliffe and Turcotte). Although the general aim of the conference was to interrogate the notions of the postcolonial, it originally began as a wider discussion about the way postcolonialism had developed as a worldwide industry, and the growing sense that the pioneering efforts of Canadian and Australian scholars in shaping this field had been marginalized. My fear with this juggernaut of an academic industry was that the so-called fringe or peripheral celebration of the field was being recolonized by the old empires. The United States and Britain, somehow, were buying up this potentially radical, interrogative area of academic studies, so that it began not only to speak a centralist agenda, but more alarmingly, the modes of its production were once again made to reside in, and so shape more than ever the interests of, the traditional centres. Routledge, for example, in setting itself up as a monolith, and Carfax, by buying up the key journals in the field and then insisting that scholars sign away their authorial rights in order to be published in these strategic sites, were in a sense, it seemed to me, returning us to the paradigms of old. So that while arguments about the flaws, and even exclusions, of what some critics termed the "failures" of postcolonialism were undeniable, the ex-centric force that allowed for an often profound radicalism to take place was diminished. G. Turcotte