International conference: "Bharat Britain: South Asians Making Britain 1870-1950" at London [26.08.2010]
Please see flyer for details. Please note that the conference is not organized by the Institute.
News
Opening Address of Brook Andrew's Exhibition [10.09.2009]
Address given by Phillip Darby, Director of the Institute of Postcolonial Studies in Melbourne, to open Brook Andrew’s “Eight Months of War: A Public Archive” at Detached in Hobart on 30th July 2009.
Thank you very much for those words of welcome. I am honoured to be asked to be here today. I must confess to being somewhat daunted by finding from the invitation that I was to deliver a “discourse”. In the course of preparing this short talk, I built up a little archive of my own and I found that some of the postcolonial pieces were the least intelligible. I hope that what I have to say this evening will not be of that ilk.
I wish very briefly to develop three themes that I think might reflect back on this archive. The key words are: connection combination interaction.
First, connection between here and there, between what happened overseas and what happens at home – most of all with respect to Aboriginal people – and between then and now.
It is remarkable how much we have separated the politics of home from the politics of overseas. Nowhere is this more apparent than in those academic disciplines whose province is theorising the international. I refer in particular to international relations and security studies. For thirty nine years I taught an international relations course at the University of Melbourne and it was only late in the day that we began to grapple with internal colonialism in Australia – perhaps over the last ten years. We examined colonialism in Asia and Africa but such were the conventions of the discipline that colonialism within Australia was not seen as being on the agenda. It was thanks to my friendship with Marcia Langton that we put this right.
It was Edward Said’s great contribution to show how closely the two spheres – the international the national – were interwoven. As Said put it, the linkage between the two was of such a nature that by reading novels of domestic life set in Britain or in France you could tell a story about colonialism in Africa or the Caribbean. How far one would wish to take this depends on one’s own perspective. To give a contemporary and very contentious illustration: might we see the Federal Government’s intervention in Northern Territory in much the same terms as Western intervention in Iraq, Afghanistan or the Pacific?
I do not know whether Brook Andrew has been directly influenced by Said’s work in this respect. What is clear, however, is that Brook’s work in this exhibition and more generally speaks to the connectedness between the overseas and the local. Yet he leaves it to us, the viewers, to decide just what this means in particular cases.
The same can be said of his work with respect to the connectedness of the then and now; of the continuities and the parallels between colonialism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the colonialism of thought and culture that is all around us now.
I will add a couple of footnotes to these comments in the light of conversations I have had this afternoon. The site of this public archive – Detached’s deconsecrated church – lends itself to thinking about connection. As many of you would know, St. David’s mission church was an offshoot of St. David’s Cathedral. On one telling, the establishment of the mission church was a way of keeping the poor out of the cathedral. On another, it represented a way of reaching out to an existing community and strengthening it. Perhaps there were elements of both lines of thought – which would not be surprising because so often connection and disconnection are entangled.
The other thought arose in a conversation this afternoon with Penny Clive. I was telling Penny that at a workshop I attended recently Kerrie Tim, a senior executive in Indigenous Affairs in the Commonwealth Public Service, cut through a lot of meandering by saying “what matters is relationships, relationships, relationships!” Perhaps catching something of an Aboriginal world view, what is missing in so much of our thinking about both international and national is a recognition of the centrality of building relationships with the other.
Second, combination. Brook is able to bring out the importance of connectedness by taking things out of context, by disturbing the order of things, by mixing things up. And this he does through his very personal understanding – through his mind’s eye, as it were. The diversity of his media – screenprints, photography, music, neon-installations and so on, also works to this end. Much, of course, is drawn from popular culture. A politics is given to objects in everyday life that we take for granted. Think, for instance, of the black and white tobacco tins and the cigarette packets and chewing gum wrappers in his Hope and Peace Series. We are thus led to reflect on the ways in which colonialism and militarism remain embedded in the culture, and on how ordinary people are implicated in decisions made at the top.
So we can’t simply blame John Howard and Kevin Rudd. As Slavoj Zižek once observed, “ruling ideas are never directly the ideas of the ruling class.” Leaders pick up on the fears, insecurities and intolerance of their peoples. This has been so in Australia with the massacres of Aboriginal people, decisions to go to war and, most recently, the iron-fisted approach to asylum-seekers.
The idea of combination relates not only to bringing together different kinds of materials and artefacts but to linking things over time. Usually an archive is understood to look to the past but it can also look to the future. In Brook’s work often fragments of the past are used to envisage a different future; there is an optimism of spirit that somehow we can move beyond the categories of racial confinement and endless war. In a very different register, John Howard goes back to the past, most obviously to Gallipoli, to project a future cast in the sameness of the past.
It is my hope that over the coming months people will add material to this public archive that will help us think about what we can do now and in the future to move away from the economies and cultures of war and violence. It is not enough to add items or exhibits relating to say new technologies of war – important though that is. We also need to be alert to developments that are camouflaged, things that at first sight may appear innocent, even progressive. I have an example in mind and I will add the text to the archive. It is the agreement signed on the 30th April this year between the Australian Defence Department and Ausaid for closer co-operation between the two bodies and to recognize their “shared strategic interests”. As I see it, the securitisation of development is a profoundly regressive move. Certainly it is a subject that needs to be brought to people’s attention and widely debated.
Third, there is interaction. This is an archive that invites the participation of the public – for instance by lighting a candle, by depositing material, by connecting exhibits with a length of red cotton. In other words, the exhibition has a performative dimension. It is not enough simply to look; one is encouraged to actively participate.
I would go further and say it is an archive which invites people to intervene politically. I am not entirely sure that the Detached Cultural Organisation would put it quite like this but to my mind that is the logic of the exhibition and how it is being presented.
To set this in a broader context, there is a growing feeling in some quarters that if we are to have a new politics, we need to turn to artists and performers of various kinds to provide a lead. Some of you may have read the piece in the Guardian Weekly earlier this month (17th July) by Madeleine Bunting, entitled “Can art shift the mood on climate change?” In the article Bunting argues that curators are searching for an iconic image that might smash through our indifference in a way that science cannot.
In 2006 the Institute of Postcolonial Studies ran a year long programme on performance and politics that addressed the same basic issues. It was our contention that the political as we have traditionally understood it has come to be associated with closure. This has led people to look for politics in different guises and in alternative sites. Hence the turn to the creative and visual arts and to an understanding of the political that embraces poetics. In the programme we had performances and talks by people such as the dancers Chandrabanu and Russell Dumas, Margaret Cameron, the experimental actor and director, and of course we had Brook Andrew.
The blurb for Brook’s presentation concluded with these lines. Might it be suggested that his whole practice is performance? Does his work animate the viewer to perform as well? These are the questions I leave you with, not simply to think about but also to act upon.
I declare “Eight Months of War” A Public Archive” open.
Special presentation by John von Sturmer [28.07.2009]
The text and the provocative presentation by the Institute's Senior Fellow John von Sturmer on 5th June 2009 is now available for download. A video recording of the event will soon be uploaded.
The Institute mourns Devika Goonewardene [21.07.2009]
It is with great sadness that we record the death of Devika Goonewardene on Monday 6th July after a brave battle against cancer. An inter-faith memorial service was held on Thursday 9th July to pay tribute to a life of rich promise that was cut short. The following is the eulogy delivered by Phillip Darby, Director of the Institute of Postcolonial Studies, and supervisor of Devika’s Ph.D thesis.
We are here this afternoon to pay tribute to the life of Devika Goonewardene. It was a life of rich promise that was cut short. When Shelagh telephoned me on Monday to tell me of Devika’s death, she quoted that powerful line from Hamlet – “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune”. And so it was.
Thinking of what I might say today got me pondering on how it would be if people wrote their eulogies. Don’t laugh, self-promotion is so much the order of the day that we are almost at that stage. But Devika would have done poorly in this respect. She was far too modest.
You will understand that in this eulogy I can only catch parts of Devika’s life. There are many stories to be told and I can only tell a few. Still I hope that what I say may connect with other parts of Devika’s life that many of you will know more about than I.
Devika was born in Colombo. She spent two years of her childhood in Georgetown, Guyana in South America where her father had an assignment with the Commonwealth Secretariat. The family moved to Australia in 1986. I need hardly say that Devika grew up in a household with lots of books and an appreciation of the creative and performative arts. So she started with that great advantage. She went on to Monash where she took degrees in law and arts. On the arts side, she majored in politics and history. This was a time when both departments at Monash were leaders in their fields. In politics she came under the influence of David Goldsworthy and Chris Reu Smit. Her B.A. thesis was entitled Freedom at Midnight; Darkness at Dawn: The Partition of India – an interest she maintained for the rest of her life.
I first met Devika a little more than a decade ago when she came to enquire whether I would supervise her Ph.D thesis. I read her honours thesis and of course said yes. Thereafter our lives became intertwined in various ways. There was the thesis. It was inevitable, given her interests, that she became heavily involved with the Institute of Postcolonial Studies. There was the added attraction – as Marcia Langton who is with us today, often says that the Institute is a “safe” place – meaning in part that one could feel at ease. Then she took up tutorship in the Department of Politics at the University of Melbourne.
So Devika became part of an extended family of my Ph.D students and tutors – all of whom were involved with the Institute. To mention only a few: Edgar Ng with whom she struck up a close and comfortable friendship, Simon Obendorf who is now in the UK, Carlos Morreo who is in Caracas, Christine Deftereos, Adam Driver and David Martin who are with us today. And then there was Albert Paolini – another much loved person who was struck down by leukaemia and did in 1996 at the age of 33. I have become wary of taking on new Ph.D students because, healthwise, the record is not encouraging.
To say a little about Devika’s thesis. It was about the intersection of International Relations and postcolonialism in South Asia. It had three prongs: • politics – especially about decolonizing International Relations • history – about the various ways of remembering the past and how they relate to contemporary politics • culture – focussing particularly on literature and film, with Bollywood receiving extensive treatment. I have slabs of Devika’s writing on various sections of the thesis – a point to which I will return.
In a time of extremely competitive self-interest, what stands out in my remembrance is how much she gave to others and to the improvement of projects that was not hers in any proprietary sense. Think of the contribution she made to the writing and related work of the late Vin D’Cruz. I was thrilled when she was acknowledged as one of the co-editors of his book As Others See Us that pays tribute to the thought of Ashis Nandy – one of Devika’s heroes. Think of the work she did for the postcolonial bibliographical project of the Centre for Postcolonial Writing at Monash. Then there was her teaching at the University of Melbourne, her sense of commitment and the care she took with students, I have in mind most of all the contribution she made to my IR and its Others course which challenged the mainstream Eurocentric narratives of the receiving end, starting in Asia and Africa instead of in Europe.
I should add that in the last two years our reading pack begins with a wonderful essay by Devika on this theme. It was originally given at a conference in Calcutta, jointly sponsored by the University of Calcutta and Monash to celebrate the University of Calcutta’s 150th year. Ashis Nandy was present and much admired Devika’s paper.
Devika was greatly respected by her students, although it must be said that some found her daunting because she expected them to read whole books and to know that mostly sentences should have a verb – which cuts across the grain of the contemporary university. In these respects, she followed in the footsteps of her brother Antony whom she revered. He taught in the course some years before. Both shared these somewhat unworldly expectations.
Then there was Devika’s work at the Institute as executive office, along with Edgar. She contributed so much and always put down the most modest hours, although she needed the money. She played a crucial role in advocating that our postcolonialism must go out into the world and not be yet another academic exercise, cut off from daily life. In the phrase that now badges the Institute: “knowledge to change the way we are”.
Finally I will mention the work she did for me and the influence she had on my thinking. She convinced me that International Relations was too important to cast aside and she helped to bring me back at least to the edge of the discipline. In recent years – until the last six months – everything I wrote I vetted with her first. Her encyclopaedic knowledge and her editorial skills have greatly strengthened my writing.
In short, Devika had integrity; she was committed to principled scholarship; she showed little regard for her own self-advancement.
It was my great good fortune to travel twice in south Asia with Devika. The first was a visit to India and Bangladesh in the company of Simon Obendorf. The second was also to India with Simon – the conference in Calcutta I have mentioned – on this occasion enriched by Marcia’s presence. Now Devika wrote a great deal about everyday life but it was another thing to confront it in the reality of India – the cheap hotels of our first visit, the difficulty of crossing Chowringhee Road in Calcutta, the stomach problems and the peering into toilet bowls.
I could go on but I will just give one snippet. You can imagine my dismay when I went out to the airport in Delhi to meet Devika. She arrived, not with a rucksack that she couldn’t have managed anyway but, with various suitcases and dilly bags containing a veritable library. And of course in Delhi we collected more books. And then when we reached Calcutta, Devika was in her seventh heaven. It was February and it was the book fair in the maidan. so she purchased more and more, and we trekked up to the post office in Park Street to see an old man I have known for many years (come to think of it, he is probably younger than I am) who sits cross-legged on the pavement and stitches up the piles of books in cloth parcels, ties them with string and seals the ends with hot wax affixed with a distinctive stamp. They duly arrive by seamail six months later.
I will conclude by saying there is much in Devika’s life that needs to be followed up – no doubt in different ways by different people. A number of my former students have suggested that we make a book out of our International Relations course. A year or so ago I discussed something of this nature with Devika. Perhaps it should be rather different kind of book, drawing not only on Devika’s work but the knowledge and experience of others who have nothing to do with International Relations and postcolonialism as disciplinary formations. Some poetry written by Shelagh, for instance. I intend to make the time to think through the possibilities and it would be good to hear from others who would like to be involved. I know Devika would have been deeply touched by a project of this kind.
May I express, on behalf of us all, our heartfelt condolences to Devinda; to Antony who has provided such wonderful support; and to Shelagh who has been a towering strength from the beginning and most of all through the final chapter.
Institute Farewells Inaugural Patrons [19.04.2009]
On the evening of Friday 7th November the Institute fare-welled its inaugural Patrons, Justice Michael Kirby and Professor Lowitja O'Donoghue at a buffet dinner. It was a memorable night: important things were said; swansongs were sung and there was much camaraderie.
Lowitja O'Donoghue and Michael Kirby at their farewell function
Lowitja spoke of her elation over Barack Obama's recent election and reflected on the challenges she herself faced having one black and one white parent and the expectations this created for her. Lowitja spoke of the importance of the stories people tell, which shape how they perceive themselves and the worlds they inhabit, and the challenge which these stories can pose to dominant conceptions and ideals.
Michael spoke about the power of ideas that, over time, can work fundamental change. He spoke of the use of international human rights law developed in the UN system and how this has been put into effect in cases in Bangalore, India and within the Mabo judgement in Australia.
Lowitja gave the audience pause for thought with a rendition of 'Whiter than Snow' a song she had been taught at Colebrook Home, the institution she was placed in after being removed from her mother at the age of two. Michael responded by saying that within his life although he was not taught to be 'whiter than snow', he was encouraged to be 'straighter than straight.'
They both spoke of the idea to be co-runners in the 2009 Australian Idol series. “Now, that really would offer a great representation of difference, identity and culture, wouldn’t it?”
Phillip Darby thanked the patrons for how much they have contributed to the life of the Institute, particularly how they encouraged us to reach out to a broader constituency and to apply postcolonial theory to the problems at hand. “We hope”, he said, “that as you go out into the sunset together – to use Michael’s phrase – you have the satisfaction of knowing that you have left the Institute better placed than before to make, at least, a modest difference.”
New Patrons Appointed to the Institute [08.03.2009]
The Institute is delighted to welcome Robyn Archer, AO, and Justice Anthony North as its new patrons.
The inaugural patrons of the Institute, Justice Michael Kirby and Professor Lowitja O'Donoghue, were farewelled by members at a dinner on Friday 7th November 2008. It was a memorable night: important things were said; swansongs were sung; there was much camaraderie.
Read more about the event and the biographies of our new patrons in the IPCS February 2009 Newsletter.
Older:
- 1