Journal articles: 'Public spaces – British Columbia – New Westminster' – Grafiati (2024)

Abstract:

Background: Greenspace is a very important component of a healthy built environment. It can provide many benefits which include mitigating the effects of climate change, improving air quality, and enhancing mental and physical health. However, it has been shown that health promoting resources such as green spaces are often unequally distributed among different socioeconomic classes. The objective of this study was to identify disparities in proportional greenspace access between different income categories among the residents of three cities in Metro Vancouver, British Columbia. The mapping tool ArcGIS was used to visualize patterns of greenspace distribution and median household income. Methods: Green space was classified as recreational parks within the cities of New Westminster, Vancouver and Burnaby in Metro Vancouver. Income and green space data were gathered from Statistics Canada and the Municipalities’ websites for mapping in ArcGIS respectively. This data was then exported, and a correlation analysis was performed to identify any relationship between green space and median household income of census tract divisions. Results: Out of 248 data points, 90 census tracts were analyzed in Burnaby, 145 in Vancouver and 13 in New Westminster. Patterns in the maps indicated that higher income census tracts had lower proportional access to green space. Statistical results demonstrated that a negative correlation exists between greenspace and median household income. Higher income households have less access to green space across all three Metro Vancouver cities; New Westminster (p = 0.33), Vancouver (p = 0.02) and Burnaby (p = 0.03) a negative correlation was also found in a combined analysis across all three cities (p=0.0013). Conclusion: Green space is undeniably important to all individuals within a city as it can provide recreational opportunities, improve physical and mental health, temper climate change, improve air quality and provide cooling effects. There may be substitutes to recreational activities that green space can provide, but there are none for the overall benefits that it can provide. This study calls for policy makers and planners to consider greater investments in green space and recreational parks in all census tracts including wealthier neighbourhoods, where smaller proportions of greenspace were identified. Programs such as the City of Vancouver’s “Greenest City Action Plan” whose goal is to encourage green initiatives including situating all residents within a five minute distance of greenspace should be implemented across all three cities.

Abstract:

IntroductionIn Britain, hunger is often hidden in the privacy of the home. Yet otherwise private hunger is currently being rendered public and visible in the growing queues at charity-run food banks, where emergency food parcels are distributed directly to those who cannot afford to feed themselves or their families adequately (Downing et al.; Caplan). Food banks, in providing emergency relief to those in need, are responses to crisis moments, actualised through an embodied feeling of hunger that cannot be alleviated. The growing queues at food banks not only render hidden hunger visible, but also serve as reminders of the corporeal vulnerability of the human body to political and socio-economic shifts.A consideration of corporeality allows us to view the world through the lived experiences of the body. Human beings are “creatures of the flesh” who understand and reason, act and interact with their environments through the body (Johnson 81). The growing academic interest in corporeality signifies what Judith Butler calls a “new bodily ontology” (2). However, as Butler highlights, the body is also vulnerable to injury and suffering. An application of this ontology to hunger draws attention to eating as essential to life, so the denial of food poses an existential threat to health and ultimately to survival. The body’s response to threat is the physiological experience of hunger as a craving or longing that is the “most bodily experience of need […] a visceral desire locatable in a void” in which an empty stomach “initiates” a series of sounds and pangs that “call for action” in the form of eating (Anderson 27). Food bank queues serve as visible public reminders of this precariousness and of how social conditions can limit the ability of individuals to feed themselves, and so respond to an existential threat.Corporeal vulnerability made visible elicits responses that support societal interventions to feed the hungry, or that stigmatise hungry people by withdrawing or disparaging what limited support is available. Responses to vulnerability therefore evoke nurture and care or violence and abuse, and so in this sense are ambiguous (Butler; Cavarero). The responses are also normative, shaped by social and cultural understandings of what hunger is, what its causes are, and whether it is seen as originating in personal or societal failings. The stigmatising of individuals by blaming them for their hunger is closely allied to the feelings of shame that lie at the “irreducible absolutist core” of the idea of poverty (Sen 159). Shame is where the “internally felt inadequacies” of the impoverished individual and the “externally inflicted judgments” of society about the hungry body come together in a “co-construction of shame” (Walker et al. 5) that is a key part of the lived experience of hunger. The experience of shame, while common, is far from inevitable and is open to resistance (see Pickett; Foucault); shame can be subverted, turned from the hungry body and onto the society that allows hunger to happen. Who and what are deemed responsible are shaped by shifting ideas and contested understandings of hunger at a particular moment in time (Vernon).This exploration of corporeal vulnerability through food banks as a historically located response to hunger offers an alternative to studies which privilege representations, objectifying the body and “treating it as a discursive, textual, iconographic and metaphorical reality” while neglecting understandings derived from lived experiences and the responses that visible vulnerabilities elicit (Hamilakis 99). The argument made in this paper calls for a critical reconsideration of classic political economy approaches that view hunger in terms of a class struggle against the material conditions that give rise to it, and responses that ultimately led to the construction of the welfare state (Vernon). These political economy approaches, in focusing on the structures that lead to hunger and that respond to it, are more closed than Butler’s notion of ambiguous and constantly changing social responses to corporeal vulnerability. This paper also challenges the dominant tradition of nutrition science, which medicalises hunger. While nutrition science usefully draws attention to the physiological experiences and existential threat posed by acute hunger, the scientific focus on the “anatomical functioning” of the body and the optimising of survival problematically separates eating from the social contexts in which hunger is experienced (Lupton 11, 12; Abbots and Lavis). The focus in this article on the corporeal vulnerability of hunger interweaves contested representations of, and ideas about, hunger with the physiological experience of it, the material conditions that shape it, and the lived experiences of deprivation. Food banks offer a lens onto these experiences and their complexities.Food Banks: Deprivation Made VisibleSince the 1980s, food banks have become the fastest growing charitable organisations in the wealthiest countries of North America, Europe, and Australasia (Riches), but in Britain they are a recent phenomenon. The first opened in 2000, and by 2014, the largest operator, the Trussell Trust, had over 420 franchised food banks, and more recently was opening more than one per week (Lambie-Mumford et al.; Lambie-Mumford and Dowler). British food banks hand out emergency food relief directly to those who cannot afford to feed themselves or their families adequately, and have become new sites where deprivation is materialised through a congregation of hungry people and the distribution of food parcels. The food relief parcels are intended as short-term immediate responses to crisis moments felt within the body when the individual cannot alleviate hunger through their own resources; they are for “emergency use only” to ameliorate individual crisis and acute vulnerability, and are not intended as long-term solutions to sustained, chronic poverty (Perry et al.). The need for food banks has emerged with the continued shrinkage of the welfare state, which for the past half century sought to mediate the impact of changing individual and social circ*mstances on those deemed to be most vulnerable to the vicissitudes of life. The proliferation of food banks since the 2009 financial crisis and the increased public discourse about them has normalised their presence and naturalised their role in alleviating acute food poverty (Perry et al.).Media images of food bank queues and stacks of tins waiting to be handed out (Glaze; Gore) evoke collective memories from the early twentieth century of hunger marches in protest at government inaction over poverty, long queues at soup kitchens, and the faces of gaunt, unemployed war veterans (Vernon). After the Second World War, the spectre of communism and the expansionist agenda of the Soviet Union meant such images of hunger could become tools in a propaganda war constructed around the failure of the British state to care for its citizens (Field; Clarke et al; Vernon). The 1945 Labour government, elected on a social democratic agenda of reform in an era of food rationing, responded with a “war on want” based on the normative premise that no one should be without food, medical care, shelter, warmth or work. Labour’s response was the construction of the modern welfare state.The welfare state signified a major shift in ideational understandings of hunger. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, ideas about hunger had been rooted in a moralistic account of divine punishment for individual failure (Vernon). Bodily experiences of hunger were seen as instruments for disciplining the indigent into a work ethic appropriate for a modern industrialised economy. The infamous workhouses, finally abolished in 1948, were key sites of deprivation where restrictions on how much food was distributed served to punish or discipline the hungry body into compliance with the dominant work ethic (Vernon; Foucault). However, these ideas shifted in the second half of the nineteenth century as the hungry citizen in Britain (if not in its colonies) was increasingly viewed as a victim of wider forces beyond the control of the individual, and the notion of disciplining the hungry body in workhouses was seen as reprehensible. A humanitarian treatment of hunger replaced a disciplinarian one as a more appropriate response to acute need (Shaw; Vernon). Charitable and reformist organisations proliferated with an agenda to feed, clothe, house, and campaign on behalf of those most deprived, and civil society largely assumed responsibility for those unable to feed themselves. By the early 1900s, ideas about hunger had begun to shift again, and after the Second World War ideational changes were formalised in the welfare state, premised on a view of hunger as due to structural rather than individual failure, hence the need for state intervention encapsulated in the “cradle to grave” mantra of the welfare state, i.e. of consistent care at the point of need for all citizens for their lifetime (see Clarke and Newman; Field; Powell). In this context, the suggestion that Britons could go to bed hungry because they could not afford to feed themselves would be seen as the failure of the “war on want” and of an advanced modern democracy to fulfil its responsibilities for the welfare of its citizens.Since the 1980s, there has been a retreat from these ideas. Successive governments have sought to rein in, reinvent or shrink what they have perceived as a “bloated” welfare state. In their view this has incentivised “dependency” by providing benefits so generous that the supposedly work-shy or “skivers” have no need to seek employment and can fund a diet of takeaways and luxury televisions (Howarth). These stigmatising ideas have, since the 2009 financial crisis and the 2010 election, become more entrenched as the Conservative-led government has sought to renew a neo-liberal agenda to shrink the welfare state, and legitimise a new mantra of austerity. This mantra is premised on the idea that the state can no longer afford the bloated welfare budget, that responsible government needs to “wean” people off benefits, and that sanctions imposed for not seeking work or for incorrectly filling in benefit claim forms serve to “encourage” people into work. Critics counter-argue that the punitive nature of sanctions has exacerbated deprivation and contributed to the growing use of food banks, a view the government disputes (Howarth; Caplan).Food Banks as Sites of Vulnerable CorporealityIn these shifting contexts, food banks have proliferated not only as sites of deprivation but also as sites of vulnerable corporeality, where people unable to draw on individual resources to respond to hunger congregate in search of social and material support. As growing numbers of people in Britain find themselves in this situation, the vulnerable corporeality of the hungry body becomes more pervasive and more visible. Hunger as a lived experience is laid bare in ever-longer food bank queues and also through the physiological, emotional and social consequences graphically described in personal blogs and in the testimonies of food bank users.Blogger Jack Monroe, for example, has recounted giving what little food she had to her child and going to bed hungry with a pot of ginger tea to “ease the stomach pains”; saying to her curious child “I’m not hungry,” while “the rumblings of my stomach call me a liar” (Monroe, Hunger Hurts). She has also written that her recourse to food banks started with the “terrifying and humiliating” admission that “you cannot afford to feed your child” and has expressed her reluctance to solicit the help of the food bank because “it feels like begging” (Monroe, Austerity Works?). Such blog accounts are corroborated in reports by food bank operators and a parliamentary enquiry which told stories of mothers not eating for days after being sanctioned under the benefit system; of children going to school hungry; of people leaving hospital after a major operation unable to feed themselves since their benefits have been cut; of the elderly having to make “hard choices” between “heat or eat” each winter; and of mixed feelings of relief and shame at receiving food bank parcels (All-Party Parliamentary Inquiry; Beattie; Cooper and Dumpleton; Caplan; Perry et al.). That is, two different visibilities have emerged: the shame of standing or being seen to stand in the food bank queue, and blogs that describe these feelings and the lived experience of hunger – both are vulnerable and visible, but in different ways and in different spaces: the physical or material, and the virtual.The response of doctors to the growing evidence of crisis was to warn that there were “all the signs of a public health emergency that could go unrecognised until it is too late to take preventative action,” that progress made against food poverty since the 1960s was being eroded (Ashton et al. 1631), and that the “robust last line of defence against hunger” provided by the welfare state was failing (Loopstra et al. n.p). Medical professionals thus sought to conscript the rhetorical resources of their professional credibility to highlight that this is a politically created public health crisis.This is not to suggest that acute hunger was absent for 50 years of the welfare state, but that with the closure of the last workhouses, the end of hunger marches, and the shutting of the soup kitchens by the 1950s, it became less visible. Over the past decade, hunger has become more visible in images of growing queues at food banks and stacked tins ready to be handed out by volunteers (Glaze; Gore) on production of a voucher provided on referral by professionals. Doctors, social workers or teachers are therefore tasked with discerning cases of need, deciding whose need is “genuine” and so worthy of food relief (see Downing et al.). The voucher system is regulated by professionals so that food banks are open only to those with a public identity constructed around bodily crisis. The sense of something as intimate as hunger being defined by others contrasts to making visible one’s own hunger through blogging. It suggests again how bodies become caught up in wider political struggles where not only is shame a co-construction of internal inadequacies and external judgements, but so too is hunger, albeit in different yet interweaving ways. New boundaries are being established between those who are deprived and those who are not, and also between those whose bodies are in short-term acute crisis, and those whose bodies are in long-term and chronic crisis, which is not deemed to be an emergency. It is in this context that food banks have also become sites of demarcation, shame, and contestation.Public debates about growing food bank queues highlight the ambiguous nature of societal responses to the vulnerability of hunger made visible. Government ministers have intensified internal shame in attributing growing food bank queues to individual inadequacies, failure to manage household budgets (Gove), and profligate spending on luxury (Johnston; Shipton). Civil society organisations have contested this account of hunger, turning shame away from the individual and onto the government. Austerity reforms have, they argue, “torn apart” the “basic safety net” of social responses to corporeal vulnerability put in place after the Second World War and intended to ensure that no-one was left hungry or destitute (Bingham), their vulnerability unattended to. Furthermore, the benefit sanctions impose punitive measures that leave families with “nothing” to live on for weeks. Hungry citizens, confronted with their own corporeal vulnerability and little choice but to seek relief from food banks, echo the Dickensian era of the workhouse (Cooper and Dumpleton) and indict the UK government response to poverty. Church leaders have called on the government to exercise “moral duty” and recognise the “acute moral imperative to act” to alleviate the suffering of the hungry body (Beattie; see also Bingham), and respond ethically to corporeal vulnerability with social policies that address unmet need for food. However, future cuts to welfare benefits mean the need for relief is likely to intensify.ConclusionThe aim of this paper was to explore the vulnerable corporeality of hunger through the lens of food banks, the twenty-first-century manifestations of charitable responses to acute need. Food banks have emerged in a gap between the renewal of a neo-liberal agenda of prudent government spending and the retreat of the welfare state, between struggles over resurgent ideas about individual responsibility and deep disquiet about wider social responsibilities. Food banks as sites of deprivation, in drawing attention to a newly vulnerable corporeality, potentially pose a threat to the moral credibility of the neo-liberal state. The threat is highlighted when the taboo of a hungry body, previously hidden because of shame, is being challenged by two new visibilities, that of food bank queues and the commentaries on blogs about the shame of having to queue for food.ReferencesAbbots, Emma-Jayne, and Anna Lavis. Eds. Why We Eat, How We Eat: Contemporary Encounters between Foods and Bodies. Farnham: Ashgate, 2013.All-Party Parliamentary Inquiry. “Feeding Britain.” 2014. 6 Jan. 2016 <https://foodpovertyinquiry.files.wordpress.com/2014/12/food>.Anderson, Patrick. “So Much Wasted:” Hunger, Performance, and the Morbidity of Resistance. Durham: Duke UP, 2010.Ashton, John R., John Middleton, and Tim Lang. “Open Letter to Prime Minister David Cameron on Food Poverty in the UK.” The Lancet 383.9929 (2014): 1631.Beattie, Jason. “27 Bishops Slam David Cameron’s Welfare Reforms as Creating a National Crisis in Unprecedented Attack.” Mirror 19 Feb. 2014. 6 Jan. 2016 <http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/27-bishops-slam-david-camerons-3164033>.Bingham, John. “New Cardinal Vincent Nichols: Welfare Cuts ‘Frankly a Disgrace.’” Telegraph 14 Feb. 2014. 6 Jan. 2016 <http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/religion/10639015/>.Butler, Judith. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? London: Verso, 2009.Cameron, David. “Why the Archbishop of Westminster Is Wrong about Welfare.” The Telegraph 18 Feb. 2014. 6 Jan. 2016 <http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/david-cameron/106464>.Caplan, Pat. “Big Society or Broken Society?” Anthropology Today 32.1 (2016): 5–9.Cavarero, Adriana. Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence. New York: Columbia UP, 2010.Chase, Elaine, and Robert Walker. “The Co-Construction of Shame in the Context of Poverty: Beyond a Threat to the Social Bond.” Sociology 47.4 (2013): 739–754.Clarke, John, Sharon Gewirtz, and Eugene McLaughlin (eds.). New Managerialism, New Welfare. London: Sage, 2000.Clarke, John, and Janet Newman. The Managerial State: Power, Politics and Ideology in the Remaking of Social Welfare. London: Sage, 1997.Cooper, Niall, and Sarah Dumpleton. “Walking the Breadline.” Church Action on Poverty/Oxfam May (2013): 1–20. 6 Jan. 2016 <http://policy-practice.oxfam.org.uk/publications/walking-the-breadline-the-scandal-of-food-poverty-in-21st-century-britain-292978>.Crossley, Nick. “The Politics of the Gaze: Between Foucault and Merleau-Ponty.” Human Studies 16.4 (1996): 399–419.Downing, Emma, Steven Kennedy, and Mike Fell. Food Banks and Food Poverty. London: House of Commons, 2014. 6 Jan. 2016 <http://www.parliament.uk/briefing-papers/SN06657/food-banks-and-food-poverty>.Field, Frank. “The Welfare State – Never Ending Reform.” BBC 3 Oct. 2011. 6 Jan. 2016 <http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/modern/field_01.shtml>.Foucault, Michel. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in an Age of Reason. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Random House, 1996.Glaze, Ben. “Tens of Thousands of Families Will Only Eat This Christmas Thanks to Food Banks.” The Mirror 23 Dec. 2015. 6 Jan. 2016 <http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/tens-thousands-families-only-eat-705>.Gore, Alex. “Schools Teach Cookery on Fridays So Hungry Children from Families Too Poor to Eat Have Food for the Weekend.” The Daily Mail 28 Oct. 2012. 6 Jan. 2016. <http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2224304/Schools-teach-cookery-Friday>.Gove, Michael. “Education: Topical Questions.” Oral Answers to Questions 2 Sep. 2013.Hamilakis, Yannis. “Experience and Corporeality: Introduction.” Thinking through the Body: Archaeologies of Corporeality. Eds. Yannis Hamilakis, Mark Pluciennik, and Sarah Tarlow. New York: Kluwer Academic, 2002. 99-105.Howarth, Anita. “Hunger Hurts: The Politicization of an Austerity Food Blog.” International Journal of E-Politics 6.3 (2015): 13–26.Johnson, Mark. “Human Beings.” The Journal of Philosophy LXXXIV.2 (1987): 59–83.Johnston, Lucy. “Edwina Currie’s Cruel Jibe at the Poor.” Sunday Express Jan. 2014. 6 Jan. 2016 <http://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/454730/Edwina-Currie-s-cruel-jibe-at-poor>.Lambie-Mumford, Hannah, Daniel Crossley, and Eric Jensen. Household Food Security in the UK: A Review of Food Aid Final Report. February 2014. Food Ethics Council and the University of Warwick. 6 Jan. 2016 <https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/283071/household-food-security-uk-140219.pdf>.Lambie-Mumford, Hannah, and Elizabeth Dowler. “Rising Use of ‘Food Aid’ in the United Kingdom.” British Food Journal 116 (2014): 1418–1425.Loopstra, Rachel, Aaron Reeves, David Taylor-Robinson, Ben Barr, Martin McKee, and David Stuckler. “Austerity, Sanctions, and the Rise of Food Banks in the UK.” BMJ 350 (2015).Lupton, Deborah. Food, the Body and the Self. London: Sage, 1996.Monroe, Jack. “Hunger Hurts.” A Girl Called Jack 30 July 2012. 6 Jan. 2016 <http://agirlcalledjack.com/2012/07/30/hunger-hurts/>.———. “Austerity Works? We Need to Keep Making Noise about Why It Doesn’t.” Guardian 10 Sep. 2013. 6 Jan. 2016 <http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/sep/10/austerity-poverty-frugality-jack-monroe>.Perry, Jane, Martin Williams, Tom Sefton and Moussa Haddad. “Emergency Use Only: Understanding and Reducing the Use of Food Banks in the UK.” Child Poverty Action Group, The Church of England, Oxfam and The Trussell Trust. Nov. 2014. 6 Jan. 2016 <http://www.cpag.org.uk/sites/default/files/Foodbank Report_web.pdf>.Pickett, Brent. “Foucault and the Politics of Resistance.” Polity 28.4 (1996): 445–466.Powell, Martin. “New Labour and the Third Way in the British Welfare State: A New and Distinctive Approach?” Critical Social Policy 20.1 (2000): 39–60. Riches, Graham. “Food Banks and Food Security: Welfare Reform, Human Rights and Social Policy: Lessons from Canada?” Social Policy and Administration 36.6 (2002): 648–663.Sen, Amartya. “Poor, Relatively Speaking.” Oxford Economic Papers 35.2 (1983): 153–169. Shaw, Caroline. Britannia’s Embrace: Modern Humanitarianism and the Imperial Origins of Refugee Relief. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2015.Shipton, Martin. “Vale of Glamorgan MP Alun Cairns in Food Bank Row after Claims Drug Addicts Use Them.” Wales Online Sep. 2015. 6 Jan. 2016. <http://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/vale-glamorgan-tory-mp-alun-6060730>. Vernon, James. Hunger: A Modern History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2009.Walker, Robert, Sarah Purcell, and Ruth Jackson “Poverty in Global Perspective: Is Shame a Common Denominator?” Journal of Social Policy 42.02 (2013): 215–233.

Abstract:

Introduction Artist: June 2 at 11.26pm:‘To be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing.’ - Raymond Williams. (Singaporean Artists’ public Facebook Post) Can the critical arts exist without ‘place’?There is an ongoing debate on ‘place’ and where it begins and ends; on the ways that cities exist in both material and immaterial forms, and thereby, how to locate and understand place as an anchoring point amidst global flows (Massey; Merrifield). This debate extends to the global art- scape, as traditional conceptions of art and art-making attached to place require re-thinking in a paradigm where digital and immaterial networks, symbols and forums both complement and complicate the role that place has traditionally played (Luger, “Singaporean ‘Spaces of Hope?”). The digital art-scape has allowed for art-led provocations, transformations and disturbances to traditional institutions and gatekeepers (see Hartley’s “ Communication, Media, and Cultural Studies” concept of ‘gatekeeper’) of the art world, which often served as elite checkpoints and way-stations to artistic prominence. Still, contradictory and paradoxical questions emerge, since art cannot be divorced of place entirely, and ‘place’ often features as a topic, subject, or site of critical expression for art regardless of material or immaterial form. Critical art is at once place-bound and place-less; anchored to sites even as it transcends them completely.This paper will explore the dualistic tension – and somewhat contradictory relationship – between physical and digital artistic space through the case study of authoritarian Singapore, by focusing on a few examples of art-activists and the way that they have used and manipulated both physical and digital spaces for art-making. These examples draw upon research which took place in Singapore from 2012-2014 and which involved interviews with, and observation of, a selected sample (30) of art-activists (or “artivists”, to use Krischer’s definition). Findings point to a highly co-dependent relationship between physical and digital art places where both offer unique spaces of possibility and limitations. Therefore, place remains essential in art-making, even as digital avenues expand and amplify what critical art-practice can accomplish.Singapore’s Place-Bound and Place-Less Critical Art-Scape The arts in Singapore have a complicated, and often tense relationship with places such as the theatre, the gallery, and the public square. Though there has been a recent push (in the form of funding to arts groups and physical arts infrastructure) to make Singapore more of an arts and cultural destination (see Luger “The Cultural Grassroots and the Authoritarian City”), the Singaporean arts-scape remains bound by restrictions and limitations, and varying degrees of de facto (and de jure) censorship and self-policing. This has opened up spaces for critical art, albeit in sometimes creative and surprising forms. As explained to me by a Singaporean playwright,So they’re [the state] making venues, as well as festival organizers, as well as theatre companies, to …self-police, or self-censor. But for us on the ground, we use that as a way to focus on what we still want to say, and be creative about it, so that we circumvent the [state], with the intention of doing what we want to do. (Research interview, Singaporean playwright)Use of cyber-spaces is one way that artists circumvent repressive state structures. Restrictions on the use of place enliven cyberspace with an emancipatory and potentially transformative potential for the critical arts. Cyber-Singapore has a vocal art-activist network and has allowed some artists (such as the “Sticker Lady”) to gain wide national and even international followings. However, digital space cannot exist without physical place; indeed, the two exist, simultaneously, forming and re-forming each other. The arts cannot ‘happen’ online without a corresponding physical space for incubation, for practice, for human networking.It is important to note that in Singapore, art-led activism (or ‘artivism’) and traditional activism are closely related, and research indicated that activist networks often overlap with the art world. While this may be the case in many places, Singapore’s small geography and the relatively wide-berth given to the arts (as opposed to political activism) make these relationships especially strong. Therefore, many arts-spaces (theatres, galleries, studios) function as activist spaces; and non-art spaces such as public squares and university campuses often host art events and displays. Likewise, many of the artists that I interviewed are either directly, or indirectly, involved in more traditional activism as well.Singapore is an island-nation-city-state with a carefully planned urban fabric, the vast majority of which is state-owned (at least 80 % - resulting from large-scale land transfers from the British in the years surrounding Singapore’s independence in 1965). Though it has a Westminster-style parliamentary system (another colonial vestige), a single ruling party has commanded power for 50 years (the People’s Action Party, or PAP). Despite free elections and a liberal approach toward business, foreign investment and multiculturalism, Singapore retains a labyrinthine geography of government control over free expression, dictated through agencies such as the Censorship Review Committee (CRC); the Media Development Authority (MDA), and the National Arts Council (NAC) which work together in a confusing grid of checks and balances. This has presented a paradoxical and often contradictory approach to the arts and culture in which gradual liberalisations of everything from gay nightlife to university discourse have come hand-in-hand with continued restrictions on political activism and ‘taboo’ artistic / cultural themes. These ‘out of bounds’ themes (see Yue) include perceived threats to Singapore’s racial, religious, or political harmony – a grey area that is often at the discretion of particular government bureaucrats and administrators.Still, the Singaporean arts place (take the theatre, for example) has assumed a special role as a focal point for not only various types of visual and performance art, but also unrelated (or tangentially-related) activist causes as well. I asked a theatre director of a prominent alternative theatre where, in Singapore’s authoritarian urban fabric, there were opportunities for provocation? He stressed the theatres’ essential role in providing a physical platform for visual tensions and disturbance:You know, and on any given evening, you’ll see some punks or skinheads hanging outside there, and they kind of – create this disturbance in this neighbourhood, where, you know a passer-by is walking to his posh building, and then suddenly you know, there’s this bunch of boys with mohawks, you know, just standing there – and they are friendly! There’s nothing antagonistic or threatening, whatever. So, you know, that’s the kind of tension that we actually love to kind of generate!… That kind of surprise, that kind of, ‘oh, oh yes!’ we see this nice, expensive restaurant, this nice white building, and then these rough edges. And – that is where uh, those points where – where factions, where the rough edges meet –are where dialogue occurs. (Theatre Director, Singapore)That is not to say that the theatre comes without limits and caveats. It is financially precarious, as the Anglo-American model of corporate funding for the arts is not yet well-established in Singapore; interviews revealed that even much of the philanthropic donating to arts organizations comes from Singapore’s prominent political families and therefore the task of disentangling state interests from non-ideological arts patronage becomes difficult. With state - funding come problems with “taboo” subjects, as exemplified by the occasional banned-play or the constant threat of budget cuts or closure altogether: a carrot and stick approach by the state that allows arts organizations room to operate as long as the art produced does not disturb or provoke (too) much.Liew and Pang suggest that in Singapore, cyberspace has allowed a scale, a type of debate and a particularly cross-cutting conversation to take place: in a context where there are peculiar restrictions on the use and occupation of the built environment. They [ibid] found an emerging vocal, digital artistic grassroots that increasingly challenges the City-State’s dominant narratives: my empirical research therefore expands upon, and explores further, the possibility that Singapore’s cyber-spaces are both complementary to, and in some ways, more important than its material places in terms of providing spaces for political encounters.I conducted ‘netnography’ (see Kozinets) across Singapore’s web-scape and found that the online realm may be the ‘… primary site for discursive public activity in general and politics in particular’ (Mitchell, 122); a place where ‘everybody is coming together’ (Merrifield, 18). Without fear of state censorship, artists, activists and art-activists are not bound by the (same) set of restrictions that they might be if operating in a theatre, or certainly in a public place such as a park or square. Planetary cyber-Singapore exists inside and outside the City-State; it can be accessed remotely, and can connect with a far wider audience than a play performed in a small black box theatre.A number of blogs and satirical sites – including TheOnlineCitizen.sg, TheYawningBread.sg, and Demon-Cratic Singapore, openly criticize government policy in ways rarely heard in-situ or in even casual conversation on the street. Additionally, most activist causes and coalitions have digital versions where information is spread and support is gathered, spanning a range of issues. As is the case in material sites of activism in Singapore, artists frequently emerge as the loudest, most vocal, and most inter-disciplinary digital activists, helping to spearhead and cobble together cultural-activist coalitions and alliances. One example of this is the contrast between the place bound “Pink Dot” LGBTQ event (limited to the amount of people that can fit in Hong Lim Park, a central square) and its Facebook equivalent, We are Pink Dot public ‘group’. Pink Dot occurs each June in Singapore and involves around 10,000 people. The Internet’s representations of Pink Dot, however, have reached millions: Pink Dot has been featured in digital (and print) editions of major global newspapers including The Guardian and The New York Times. While not explicitly an art event, Pink Dot is artistic in nature as it uses pink ‘dots’ to side-step the official designation of being an LGBTQ pride event – which would not be sanctioned by the authorities (Gay Pride has not been allowed to take place in Singapore).The street artist Samantha Lo – also known as “Sticker Lady” – was jailed for her satirical stickers that she placed in various locations around Singapore. Unable to freely practice her art on city streets, she has become a sort of local artist - Internet celebrity, with her own Facebook Group called Free Sticker Lady (with over 1,000 members as of April, 2016). Through her Facebook group, Lo has been able to voice opinions that would be difficult – or even prohibited – with a loudspeaker on the street, or expressed through street art. As an open lesbian, she has also been active (and vocal) in the “Pink Dot” events. Her speech at “Pink Dot” was heard by the few-thousand in attendance at the time; her Facebook post (public without privacy settings) is available to the entire world:I'll be speaking during a small segment at Pink Dot tomorrow. Though only two minutes long, I've been spending a lot of time thinking about my speech and finding myself at a position where there's just so much to say. All my life, I've had to work twice as hard to prove myself, to be taken seriously. At 18, I made a conscious decision to cave in to societal pressures to conform after countless warnings of how I wouldn't be able to get a job, get married, etc. I grew my hair out, dressed differently, but was never truly comfortable with the person I became. That change was a choice, but I wasn't happy.Since then, I learnt that happiness wasn't a given, I had to work for it, for the ability to be comfortable in my own skin, to do what I love and to make something out of myself. (Artists’ Facebook Post)Yet, without the city street, Lo would not have gained her notoriety; without use of the park, Pink Dot would not have a Facebook presence or the ability to gather international press. The fact that Singaporean theatre exists at all as an important instigator of visual and performative tension demonstrates the significance of its physical address. Physical art places provide a crucial period of incubation – practice and becoming – that cannot really be replicated online. This includes schools and performance space but also in Singapore’s context, the ‘arts-housing’ that is provided by the government to small-scale, up-and-coming artists through a competitive grant process. Artists can receive gallery, performance or rehearsal space for a set amount of time on a rotating basis. Even with authoritarian restrictions, these spaces have been crucial for arts development:There’s a short-term [subsidised] residency studio …for up to 12 months. And so that –allows for a rotating group of artists to come with an idea in mind, use it for whatever- we’ve had artists who were preparing for a major show, and say ‘my studio space, my existing studio space is a bit too tiny, because I’m prepping for this show, I need a larger studio for 3 months. (Arts Administrator, Singapore)Critical and provocative art, limited and restricted by place, is thus still intrinsically bound to it. Indeed, the restrictions on artistic place allow cyber-art to flourish; cyber-art can only flourish with a strong place- based anchor. Far from supplanting place-based art, the digital art-scape forms a complement; digital and place-based art forms combine to form new hybridities in which local context and global forces write and re-write each other in a series of place and ‘placeless’ negotiations. Conclusion The examples that have been presented in this paper paint a picture of a complex landscape where specific urban sites are crucial anchoring nodes in a critical art ecosystem, but much artistic disturbance actually occurs online and in immaterial forms. This may hint at the possibility that globally, urban sites themselves are no longer sufficient for critical art to flourish and reach its full potential, especially as such sites have increasingly fallen prey to austerity policies, increasingly corporate and / or philanthropic programming and curation, and the comparatively wider reach and ease of access that digital spaces offer.Electronic or digital space – ranging from e-mail to social media (Twitter, blogs, Facebook and many others) has opened a new frontier in which, “… material public spaces in the city are superseded by the fora of television, radio talk shows and computer bulletin boards” (Mitchell. 122). The possibility now emerges whether digital space may be even more crucial than material public spaces in terms of emancipatory or critical potential– especially in authoritarian contexts where public space / place comes with particular limits and restrictions on assembling, performance, and critical expression. These contexts range from Taksim Square, Istanbul to Tiananmen Square, Beijing – but indeed, traditional public place has been increasingly privatized and securitized across the Western-liberal world as well. Where art occurs in place it is often stripped of its critical potential or political messages, sanctioned or sponsored by corporate groups or sanitized by public sector authorities (Schuilenburg, 277).The Singapore case may be especially stark due to Singapore’s small size (and corresponding lack of visible public ‘places’); authoritarian restrictions and correspondingly (relatively) un-policed and un-censored cyberspace. But it is fair to say that at a time when Youtube creates instant celebrities and Facebook likes or Instagram followers indicate fame and (potential) fortune – it is time to re-think and re-conceptualise the relationship between place, art, and the place-based institutions (such as grant-funding bodies or philanthropic organizations, galleries, critics or dealers) that have often served as “gatekeepers” to the art-scape. This invites challenges to the way these agents operate and the decision making process of policy-makers in the arts and cultural realm.Mitchell (124) reminded that there has “never been a revolution conducted exclusively in electronic space; at least not yet.” But that was 20 years ago. Singapore may offer a glimpse, however, of what such a revolution might look like. This revolution is neither completely place bound nor completely digital; it is one in which the material and immaterial interplay and overlap in post-modern complexity. Each platform plays a role, and understanding the way that art operates both in place and in “placeless” forms is crucial in understanding where key transformations take place in both the production of critical art and the production of urban space.What Hartley (“The Politics of Pictures”) called the “space of citizenry” is not necessarily confined to a building, the city street or a public square (or even private spaces such as the home, the car, the office). Sharon Zukin likewise suggested that ultimately, a negotiation of a city’s digital sphere is crucial for current-day urban research, arguing that:Though I do not think that online communities have replaced face to face interaction, I do think it is important to understand the way web-based media contribute to our urban imaginary. The interactive nature of the dialogue, how each post feeds on the preceding ones and elicits more, these are expressions of both difference and consensus, and they represent partial steps toward an open public sphere. (27)Traditional gatekeepers such as the theatre director, the museum curator and the state or philanthropic arts funding body have not disappeared, though they must adapt to the new cyber-reality as artists have new avenues around these traditional checkpoints. Accordingly – “old” problems such as de-jure and de-facto censorship reappear in the cyber art-scape as well: take the example of the Singaporean satirical bloggers that have been sued by the government in 2013-2016 (such as the socio-political bloggers and satirists Roy Ngerng and Alex Au). No web-space is truly open.A further complication may be the corporate nature of sites such as Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, or Twitter: far from truly democratic platforms or “agoras” in the traditional sense, these are for-profit (massive) corporations – which a small theatre is not. Singapore’s place based authoritarianism may be multiplied in the corporate authoritarianism or “CEO activism” of tech titans like Mark Zuckerberg, who allow for diverse use of digital platforms and encourage open expression and unfettered communication – as long as it is on their terms, within company policies that are not always transparent.Perhaps the questions then really are not where ‘art’ begins and ends, or where a place starts or stops – but rather where authoritarianism, state and corporate power begin and end in the hyper-connected global cyber-scape? And, if these power structures are now stretched across space and time as Marxist theorists such as Massey or Merrifield claimed, then what is the future for critical art and its relationship to ‘place’?Despite these unanswered questions and invitations for further exploration, the Singapore case may hint at what this emerging geography of place and ‘placeless’ art resembles and how such a new world may evolve moving forward. ReferencesHartley, John. The Politics of Pictures: the Creation of the Public in the Age of Popular Media. Perth: Psychology Press, 1992.———. Communication, Media, and Cultural Studies: The Key Concepts. Oxford: Routledge, 2012. Kozinets, Robert. Netnography: Doing Ethnographic Research Online. New York: Sage, 2010. Krischer, Oliver. “Lateral Thinking: Artivist Networks in East Asia.” ArtAsia Pacific 77 (2012): 96-110. Liew, Kai Khiun. and Natalie Pang. “Neoliberal Visions, Post Capitalist Memories: Heritage Politics and the Counter-Mapping of Singapore’s City-Scape.” Ethnography 16.3 (2015): 331-351.Luger, Jason. “The Cultural Grassroots and the Authoritarian City: Spaces of Contestation in Singapore.” In T. Oakes and J. Wang, eds., Making Cultural Cities in Asia: Mobility, Assemblage, and the Politics of Aspirational Urbanism. London: Routledge, 2015: 204-218. ———. “Singaporean ‘Spaces of Hope?' Activist Geographies in the City-State.” City: Analysis of Urban Trends, Culture, Theory, Policy, Action 20.2 (2016): 186-203. Massey, Doreen. Space, Place and Gender. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995. Merrifield, Andy. The Politics of the Encounter: Urban Theory and Protest under Planetary Urbanization. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2013. Mitchell, Don. “The End of Public Space? People’s Park, Definitions of the Public, and Democracy.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 85.1 (1996): 108-133. Schuilenburg, Marc. The Securitization of Society: Crime, Risk and Social Order. New York: New York University Press, 2015. Shirky, Clay. Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations. New York: Penguin, 2008. Yue, Audrey. “Hawking in the Creative City: Rice Rhapsody, Sexuality and the Cultural Politics of New Asia in Singapore. Feminist Media Studies 7.4 (2007): 365-380. Zukin, Sharon. The Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places. London and New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.

Abstract:

Neil Jordan’s Breakfast on Pluto (2005) reconceives transience and domesticity together. This queer Irish road film collapses opposition between mobility and home by uncoupling them from heteronormative structures of gender, desire, and space—male/female, public/private. The film’s protagonist, Patrick “Kitten” Braden (Cillian Murphy), wanders in search of a loved one without whom she does not feel at home. Along the way, the film exposes and exploits the doubleness of both “mobility” and “home” in the traditional road narrative, queering the conventions of the road film to convey the desire and possibilities for an alternative domesticity. In its rerouting of the traditional road plot, Breakfast on Pluto does not follow a hero escaping the obligations of home and family to find autonomy on the road. Instead, the film charts Kitten’s quest to realise a sense of home through trans-domesticity—that is, to find shelter in non-heteronormative, mutual care while in both transient and public spaces.I affix “trans-” to “domesticity” to signal both the queerness and mobility that transform understandings of domestic spaces and practices in Breakfast on Pluto. To clarify, trans-domesticity is not queer assimilation to heteronormative domesticity, nor is it a relegation of queer culture to privatised and demobilised spaces. Rather, trans-domesticity challenges the assumption that all forms of domesticity are inherently normalising and demobilising. In other words, trans-domesticity uncovers tensions and violence swept under the rugs of hegemonic domesticity. Moreover, this alternative domesticity moves between and beyond the terms of gender and spatial oppositions that delimit the normative home.Specifically, “trans-domesticity” names non-normative homemaking practices that arise out of the “desire to feel at home”, a desire that Anne-Marie Fortier identifies in queer diasporic narratives (1890-90). Accordingly, “trans-domesticity” also registers the affective processes that foster the connectedness and belonging of “home” away from private domestic spaces and places of origin, a “rethinking of the concept of home”, which Ed Madden traces in lesbian and gay migrant narratives (175-77). Building on the assumption of queer diaspora theorists “that not only can one be at home in movement, but that movement can be one’s very own home” (Rapport and Dawson 27), trans-domesticity focuses critical attention on the everyday practices and emotional labour that create a home in transience.As Breakfast on Pluto tracks its transgender protagonist’s movement between a small Irish border town, Northern Ireland, and London, the film invokes both a specifically Irish migration and the broader queer diaspora of which it is a part. While trans-domesticity is a recurring theme across a wide range of queer diasporic narratives, in Breakfast on Pluto it also simultaneously drives the plot and functions as a narrative frame. The film begins and ends with Kitten telling her story as she wanders through the streets of Soho and cares for a member of her made family, her friend Charlie’s baby.Although I am concerned with the film adaptation, Patrick McCabe’s “Prelude” to his novel, Breakfast on Pluto (1998), offers a useful point of departure: Patrick “puss*” Braden’s dream, “as he negotiates the minefields of this world”, is “ending, once and for all, this ugly state of perpetual limbo” and “finding a map which might lead to that place called home” (McCabe x). In such a place, McCabe’s hero might lay “his head beneath a flower-bordered print that bears the words at last ‘You’re home’”(McCabe xi). By contrast, the film posits that “home” is never a “place” apart from “the minefields of this world”, and that while being in transit and in limbo might be a perpetual state, it is not necessarily an ugly one.Jordan’s film thus addresses the same questions as does Susan Fraiman in her book Extreme Domesticity: “But what about those for whom dislocation is not back story but main event? Those who, having pulled themselves apart, realize no timely arrival at a place of their own, so that being not-unpacked is an ongoing condition?” (155). Through her trans-domestic shelter-making and caregiving practices, Kitten enacts “home” in motion and in public spaces, and thereby realises the elision in the flower-bordered print in McCabe’s “Prelude” (xi), which does not assure “You are at home” but, rather, “You are home”.From Housed to Trans-Domestic SubjectivitySelf and home are equated in the dominant cultural narratives of Western modernity, but “home” in such formulations is assumed to be a self-owned, self-contained space. Psychoanalytic theorist Carl Jung describes this Ur-house as “a concretization of the individuation process, […] a symbol of psychic wholeness” (225). Philosopher Gaston Bachelard sees in the home “the topography of our intimate being”, a structure that “concentrates being within limits that protect” (xxxii). However, as historian Carolyn Steedman suggests, the mythic house that has become “the stuff of our ‘cultural psychology,’ the system of everyday metaphors by which we see ourselves”, is far from universal; rather, it reflects “the topography of the houses” of those who stand “in a central relationship to the dominant culture” (75, 17).For others, the lack of such housing correlates with political marginalisation, as the house functions as both a metaphor and material marker for culturally-recognised selfhood. As cultural geographer John Agnew argues, in capitalist societies the self-owned home is both a sign of autonomous individuality and a prerequisite for full political subjectivity (60). Philosopher Rosi Braidotti asserts that this figuration of subjectivity in “the phallo-Eurocentric master code” treats as “disposable” the “bodies of women, youth, and others who are racialised or marked off by age, gender, sexuality, and income” (6). These bodies are “reduced to marginality” and subsequently “experience dispossession of their embodied and embedded selves, in a political economy of repeated and structurally enforced eviction” (Braidotti 6).To shift the meaning of “home” and the intimately-linked “self” from a privately-owned, autonomous structure to trans-domesticity, to an ethos of care enacted even, and especially in, transient and public spaces, is not to romanticise homelessness or to deny the urgent necessity of material shelter. Breakfast on Pluto certainly does not allow viewers to do either. Rather, the figure of a trans-domestic self, like Braidotti’s “nomadic subject”, has the potential to challenge and transform the terms of power relations. Those now on the margins might then be seen as equally-embodied selves and full political subjects with the right to shelter and care.Such a political project also entails recognising and revaluing—without appropriating and demobilising—existing trans-domesticity. As Fraiman argues, “domesticity” must be “map[ped] from the margins” in order to include the homemaking practices of gender rebels and the precariously housed, of castaways and outcasts (4-5). This alternative map would allow “outsiders to normative domesticity” to “claim domesticity while wrenching it away from such things as compulsory heterosexuality […] and the illusion of a safely barricaded life” (Fraiman 4-5). Breakfast on Pluto shares in this re-mapping work by exposing the violence embedded in heteronormative domestic structures, and by charting the radical political potential of trans-domesticity.Unsettling HousesIn the traditional road narrative, “home” tends to be a static, confining structure from which the protagonist escapes, a space that then functions as “a structuring absence” on the road (Robertson 271). Bachelard describes this normative structure as a “dream house” that constitutes “a body of images that give mankind proofs or illusions of stability” (17); the house functions, Henri Lefebvre argues, as “the epitome of immobility” (92). Whether the dream is to escape and/or to return, “to write of houses”, as Adam Hanna asserts, “is to raise ideas of shelters that are fixed and secure” (113).Breakfast on Pluto quickly gives lie to those expectations. Kitten is adopted by Ma Braden (Ruth McCabe), a single woman who raises Kitten and her adopted sister in domestic space that is connected to, and part of, a public house. That spatial contiguity undermines any illusion of privacy and security, as is evident in the scene in which a school-aged Kitten, who thought herself safely home alone and thus able to dress in her mother’s and sister’s clothes, is discovered in the act by her mother and sister from the pub’s street entrance. Further, the film lays bare the built-in mechanisms of surveillance and violence that reinforce heteronormative, patriarchal structures. After discovering Kitten in women’s clothes, Ma Braden violently scrubs her clean and whacks her with a brush until Kitten says, “I’m a boy, not a girl”. The public/house space facilitates Ma Braden’s close monitoring of Kitten thereafter.As a young writer in secondary school, Kitten satirises the violence within the hegemonic home by narrating the story of the rape of her biological mother, Eily Bergin (Eva Birthistle), by Kitten’s father, Father Liam (Liam Neeson) in a scene of hyper-domesticity set in the rectory kitchen. As Patrick Mullen notes, “the rendition of the event follows the bubble-gum logic and tone of 1950s Hollywood culture” (130). The relationship between the ideal domesticity thereby invoked and the rape then depicted exposes the sexual violence for what it is: not an external violation of the double sanctity of church and home space, but rather an internal and even intrinsic violence that reinforces and is shielded by the power structures from which normative domesticity is never separate.The only sense of home that seems to bind Kitten to her place of origin is based in her affective bonds to friends Charlie (Ruth Negga) and Lawrence (Seamus Reilly). When Lawrence is killed by a bomb, Kitten is no longer at home, and she leaves town to search for the “phantom” mother she never knew. The impetus for Kitten’s wandering, then, is connection rather than autonomy, and neither the home she leaves, nor the sense of home she seeks, are fixed structures.Mobile Homes and Queering of the Western RoadBreakfast on Pluto tracks how the oppositions that seem to structure traditional road films—such as that between home and mobility, and between domestic and open spaces—continually collapse. The film invokes the “cowboy and Indian” mythology from which the Western road narrative descends (Boyle 19), but to different ends: to capture a desire for non-heteronormative affective bonds rather than “lone ranger” autonomy, and to convey a longing for domesticity on the trail, for a home that is both mobile and open. Across the past century of Irish fiction and film, “cowboy and Indian” mythology has often intersected with queer wandering, from James Joyce’s Dubliners story “An Encounter” (1914) to Lenny Abrahamson’s film Adam & Paul (2004). In this tradition, Breakfast on Pluto queers “cowboy and Indian” iconography to convey an alternative conception of domesticity and home. The prevailing ethos in the film’s queered Western scenes is of trans-domesticity—of inclusion and care during transience and in open spaces. After bar bouncers exclude Kitten and friends because of her transgenderism and Lawrence’s Down syndrome, “The Border Knights” (hippie-bikers-cum-cowboys) ride to their rescue and bring them to their temporary home under the stars. Once settled around the campfire, the first biker shares his philosophy with a cuddled-up Kitten: “When I’m riding my hog, you think I’m riding the road? No way, man. I’m travelling from the past into the future with a druid at my back”. “Druid man or woman?” Kitten asks. “That doesn’t matter”, the biker clarifies, “What matters is the journey”. What matters is not place as fixed destination or gender as static difference, but rather the practice of travelling with open relationships to space, to time, and to others. The bikers welcome all to their fire and include both Kitten and Lawrence in their sharing of jokes and joints. The only exclusion is of reference to political violence, which Charlie’s boyfriend, Irwin (Laurence Kinlan), tries to bring into the conversation.Further, Kitten uses domesticity to try to establish a place for herself while on the road with “Billy Hatchett and The Mohawks”, the touring band that picks her up when she leaves Ma Braden’s. As Mullen notes, “Kitten literally works herself into the band by hand sewing a ‘squaw’ outfit to complement the group’s glam-rock Native American image” (Mullen 141). The duet that Kitten performs with Billy (Gavin Friday), a song about a woman inviting “a wandering man” to share the temporary shelter of her campfire, invokes trans-domesticity. But the film intercuts their performance with scenes of violent border-policing: first, by British soldiers at a checkpoint who threaten the group and boast about the “13 less to deal with” in Derry, and then by members of the Republican Prisoners Welfare Association, who throw cans at the group and yell them off stage. A number of critics have noted the postcolonial implications of Breakfast on Pluto’s use of Native American iconography, which in these intercut scenes clearly raises the national stakes of constructions of domestic belonging (see, for instance, Winston 153-71). In complementary ways, the film queers “cowboy and Indian” mythology to reimagine “mobility” and “home” together.After Kitten is forced out by the rest of the band, Billy sets her up in a caravan, a mobile home left to him by his mother. Though Billy “wouldn’t exactly call it a house”, Kitten sees in it her first chance at a Bachelardian “dream house”: she calls it a “house of dreams and longing” and cries, “Oh, to have a little house, to own the hearth, stool, and all”. Kitten ecstatically begins to tidy the place, performing what Fraiman terms a “hyper-investment in homemaking” that functions “as compensation for domestic deprivation” (20).Aisling Cormack suggests that Kitten’s hyper-investment in homemaking signals the film’s “radical disengagement with politics” to a “femininity that is inherently apolitical” (169-70). But that reading holds only if viewers assume a gendered, spatial divide between public and private, and between the political and the domestic. As Fraiman asserts, “the political meaning of fixating on domestic arrangements is more complex […] For the poor or transgendered person, the placeless immigrant or the woman on her own, aspiring to a safe, affirming home doesn’t reinforce hierarchical social relations but is pitched, precisely, against them” (20).Trans-Domesticity as Political ActEven as Kitten invokes the idea of a Bachelardian dream house, she performs a trans-domesticity that exposes the falseness of the gendered, spatial oppositions assumed to structure the normative home. Her domesticity is not an apolitical retreat; rather, it is pitched, precisely, against the violence that public/private and political/domestic oppositions enable within the house, as well as beyond it. As she cleans, Kitten discovers that violence is literally embedded in her caravan home when she finds a cache of Irish Republican Army (IRA) guns under the floor. After a bomb kills Lawrence, Kitten throws the guns into a reservoir, a defiant act that she describes to the IRA paramilitaries who come looking for the guns as “spring cleaning”. Cormack asserts that Kitten “describing her perilous destruction of the guns in terms of domestic labor” strips it “of all political significance” (179). I argue instead that it demonstrates the radical potential of trans-domesticity, of an ethos of care-taking and shelter-making asserted in public and political spaces. Kitten’s act is not apolitical, though it is decidedly anti-violence.From the beginning of Breakfast on Pluto, Kitten’s trans-domesticity exposes the violence structurally embedded in heteronormative domestic ideology. Additionally, the film’s regular juxtaposition of scenes of Kitten’s homemaking practices with scenes of political violence demonstrates that no form of domesticity functions as a private, apolitical retreat from “the minefields of this world” (McCabe x). This latter counterpoint throws into relief the political significance of Kitten’s trans-domesticity. Her domestic practices are her means of resisting and transforming the structural violence that poses an existential threat to marginalised and dispossessed people.After Kitten is accused of being responsible for an IRA bombing in London, the ruthless, violent interrogation of Kitten by British police officers begins to break down her sense of self. Throughout this brutal scene, Kitten compulsively straightens the chairs and tidies the room, and she responds to her interrogators with kindness and even affection. Fraiman’s theorisation of “extreme domesticity” helps to articulate how Kitten’s homemaking in carceral space—she calls it “My Sweet Little Cell”—is an “urgent” act that, “in the wake of dislocation”, can mean “safety, sanity, and self-expression; survival in the most basic sense” (25). Cormack reads Kitten’s reactions in this scene as “masoch*stic” and the male police officers’ nurturing response as of a piece with the film’s “more-feminine-than-feminine disengagement from political realities” (185-89). However, I disagree: Kitten’s trans-domesticity is a political act that both sustains her within structures that would erase her and converts officers of the state to an ethos of care and shelter. Inspector Routledge, for example, gently carries Kitten back to her cell, and after her release, PC Wallis ensures that she is safely (if not privately) housed with a cooperatively-run peep show, the address at which an atoning Father Liam locates her in London.After Kitten and a pregnant Charlie are burned out of the refuge that they temporarily find with Father Liam, Kitten and Charlie return to London, where Charlie’s baby is born soon after into the trans-domesticity that opens the film. Rejoining the story’s frame, Breakfast on Pluto ends close to where it begins: Kitten and the baby meet Charlie outside a London hospital, where Kitten sees Eily Bergin with her new son, Patrick. Instead of meeting where their paths intersect, the two families pass each other and turn in opposite directions. Kitten now knows that hers is both a different road and a different kind of home. “Home”, then, is not a place gained once and for all. Rather, home is a perpetual practice that does not separate one from the world, but can create the shelter of mutual care as one wanders through it.The Radical Potential and Structural Limits of Trans-DomesticityBreakfast on Pluto demonstrates the agency that trans-domesticity can afford in the lives of marginalised and dispossessed individuals, as well as the power of the structures that militate against its broader realisation. The radical political potential of trans-domesticity manifests in the transformation in the two police officers’ relational practices. Kitten’s trans-domesticity also inspires a reformation in Father Liam, the film’s representative of the Catholic Church and a man whose relationship to others transmutes from sexual violence and repressive secrecy to mutual nurturance and inclusive love. Although these individual conversions do not signify changes in structures of power, they do allow viewers to imagine the possibility of a state and a church that cherish, shelter, and care for all people equally. The film’s ending conveys this sense of fairy-tale-like possibility through its Disney-esque chattering birds and the bubble-gum pop song, “Sugar Baby Love”.In the end, the sense of hopefulness that closes Breakfast on Pluto coexists with the reality that dominant power structures will not recognise Kitten’s trans-domestic subjectivity and family, and that those structures will work to contain any perceived threat, just as the Catholic Church banishes the converted Father Liam to Kilburn Parish. That Kitten and Charlie nevertheless realise a clear contentment in themselves and in their made family demonstrates the vital importance of trans-domesticity and other forms of “extreme domesticity” in the lives of those who wander.ReferencesAgnew, John. “Home Ownership and Identity in Capitalist Societies.” Housing and Identity: Cross Cultural Perspectives. Ed. James S. Duncan. New York: Holmes and Meier, 1982. 60–97.Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. 1957. Trans. Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon Press, 1969.Boyle, Kevin Jon, ed. Rear View Mirror: Automobile Images and American Identities. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.Braidotti, Rosi. Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory. 2nd ed. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011.Breakfast on Pluto. Dir. Neil Jordan. Pathé Pictures International, 2005.Cormack, Aisling B. “Toward a ‘Post-Troubles’ Cinema? The Troubled Intersection of Political Violence and Gender in Neil Jordan’s The Crying Game and Breakfast on Pluto.” Éire-Ireland 49.1–2 (2014): 164–92.Fortier, Anne-Marie. “Queer Diaspora.” Handbook of Lesbian and Gay Studies. Eds. Diane Richardson and Steven Seidman. London: Sage Publishing, 2002. 183–97.Fraiman, Susan. Extreme Domesticity: A View from the Margins. New York: Columbia University Press, 2017.Hanna, Adam. Northern Irish Poetry and Domestic Space. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Jung, Carl. Memories, Dreams, Reflections. 1957. Ed. Aniela Jaffe. Trans. Clara Winston and Richard Winston. New York: Vintage Books, 1989.Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Social Space. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.Madden, Ed. “Queering the Irish Diaspora: David Rees and Padraig Rooney.” Éire-Ireland 47.1–2 (2012): 172–200.McCabe, Patrick. Breakfast on Pluto. London: Picador, 1998.Mullen, Patrick R. The Poor Bugger’s Tool: Irish Modernism, Queer Labor, and Postcolonial History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.Rapport, Nigel, and Andrew Dawson. Migrants of Identity: Perceptions of ‘Home’ in a World of Movement. Oxford: Berg, 1998.Robertson, Pamela. “Home and Away: Friends of Dorothy on the Road in Oz.” The Road Movie Book. Eds. Steven Cohen and Ina Rae Hark. London: Routledge, 1997. 271–306.Steedman, Carolyn. Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987.Winston, Greg. “‘Reluctant Indians’: Irish Identity and Racial Masquerade.” Irish Modernism and the Global Primitive. Eds. Maria McGarrity and Claire A. Culleton. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. 153–71.

Abstract:

In the last three years a new filthy vocabulary of social class has emerged in Britain. The word “chav”, and its various synonyms and regional variations, has become a ubiquitous term of abuse for white working class subjects. An entire slang vocabulary has emerged around chav. Acronyms, such as “Council Housed and Vile” have sprung up to explain the term. Folk etymologies and some scholarly sources suggest that the term chav might derive from a distortion of a Romany word for a child, while others suggests it is a derivative of the term charver, long used in the North East of England to describe the disenfranchised white poor (see Nayak). In current parlance, the term chav is aligned “with stereotypical notions of lower-class” and is above all “a term of intense class-based abhorrence” (Haywood and Yar 16). Routinely demonized within news media, television comedy programmes, and internet sites (such as the chavscum) the level of disgust mobilized by the figure of the chav is suggestive of a heightened class antagonism that marks a new episode of class struggle in Britain. Social class is often represented through highly caricatured figures—the toff, the chav—figures that are referred to in highly emotive terms. One of the ways in which social class is emotionally mediated is through repeated expressions of disgust at the habits and behaviour of those deemed to belong to a lower social class. An everyday definition of disgust would be: an emotion experienced and expressed as a sickening feeling of revulsion, loathing, or nausea. The physicality of disgust reactions means that the communication of disgust draws heavily on metaphors of sensation. As William Miller notes, disgust “needs images of bad taste, foul smells, creepy touchings, ugly sights, bodily secretions and excretions to articulate the judgments it asserts” (218). Our disgust reactions are often revealing of wider social power relations. As Sara Ahmed notes: When thinking about how bodies become objects of disgust, we can see that disgust is crucial to power relations. … Disgust at “that which is below” functions to maintain the power relations between above and below, through which “aboveness” and “belowness” become properties of particular bodies, objects and spaces (89). Ahmed’s account of the connection between disgust and power relations echoes Beverly Skeggs’ influential account of “class making”. As Skeggs suggests, class as a concept, and as a process of classification and social positioning, is not pre-given but is always in production and is continually re-figured (3). Social class virtually disappeared as a central site of analysis within cultural and media studies in the late 1980s, a disappearance that was mirrored by a similar retreat from the taxonomy of class within wider social and political discourse (Skeggs 45). This is not to say that class distinctions, however we measure them, have been eroded or are in decline. On the contrary, class disappeared as a central site of analysis at precisely the same time that “economic polarization” reached “unparalleled depths” in Britain (ibid.). As the term “working class” has been incrementally emptied of meaning, teaching and researching issues of class inequality is now often seen as “paranoid” and felt to be embarrassing and shameful (see Sayer). (Roland Barthes uses the concept of ‘ex-nomination’ to explain how (and why) social class is emptied of meaning in this way. According to Barthes, this process is one of the central mechanisms through which dominant classes naturalise their values.) In the last two decades academics from working class backgrounds and, perhaps most perversely, those who work within disciplines that were founded upon research on class, have increasingly experienced their own class origins as a “filthy secret”. If social class “directly articulated” and as “the object of analysis, has largely disappeared” (Skeggs 46) within the academy and within wider social and political discourses, portrayals of class differences have nevertheless persisted within popular media. In particular, the emergence of the grotesque and comic figure of the chav within a range of contemporary British media, primarily television comedy, reality-genre television, Internet forums and newspapers, has made class differences and antagonisms explicitly visible in contemporary Britain. Class-based discrimination and open snobbery is made socially acceptable through claims that this vicious name-calling has a ‘satirical’ function. Laughing at something is “an act of expulsion” that closely resembles the rejecting movement of disgust reactions (Menninghaus 11). In the case of laughter at those of a lower class, laughter is boundary-forming; it creates a distance between “them” and “us”, and asserts moral judgments and a higher class position. Laughter at chavs is a way of managing and authorizing class disgust, contempt, and anxiety. Popular media can be effective means of communicating class disgust and in so doing, work to produce ‘class communities’ in material, political and affective senses. In the online vocabulary of chav hate, we can further discern the ways in which class disgust is performed in ways that are community-forming. The web site, urbandictionary.com is an online slang dictionary that functions as an unofficial online authority on English language slang. Urbandictionary.com is modelled on an internet forum in which (unregistered) users post definitions of new or existing slang terms, which are then reviewed by volunteer editors. Users vote on definitions by clicking a thumb up or thumb down icon and posts are then ranked according to the votes they have accrued. Urbandictionary currently hosts 300,000 definitions of slang terms and is ranked as one of the 2000 highest web traffic sites in the world. There were 368 definitions of the term chav posted on the site at the time of writing and I have extracted below a small number of indicative phrases taken from some of the most highly ranked posts. all chavs are filth chavs …. the cancer of the United Kingdom filthy, disgusting, dirty, loud, ugly, stupid arseholes that threaten, fight, cause trouble, impregnate 14 year olds, ask for money, ask for fa*gs, ….steal your phones, wear crap sports wear, drink cheap cider and generally spread their hate. A social underclass par excellence. The absolute dregs of modern civilization The only good chav is dead one. The only thing better than that is a mass grave full of dead chavs and a 24 hour work crew making way for more… This disgust speech generates a set of effects, which adhere to and produce the filthy figure and qualities of chav. The dictionary format is significant here because, like the accompanying veneer of irony, it grants a strange authority to the dehumanising bigotry of the posts. Urbandictionary illustrates how class disgust is actively made through repetition. Through the repetition of disgust reactions, the negative properties attributed to chav make this figure materialize as representative of a group who embodies those disgusting qualities – a group who are “lower than human or civil life” (Ahmed 97). As users add to and build the definition of “the chav” within the urban dictionary site, they interact with one another and a conversational environment emerges. The voting system works on this site as a form of peer authorization that encourages users to invoke more and more intense and affective disgust reactions. As Ngai suggests, disgust involves an expectation of concurrence, and disgust reactions seek “to include or draw others into its exclusion of its object, enabling a strange kind of sociability” (336). This sociability has a particular specificity within online communities in which anonymity gives community members license to express their disgust in extreme and virulent ways. The interactivity of these internet forums, and the real and illusory immediacy they transmit, makes online forums intensely affective communal spaces/places within which disgust reactions can be rapidly shared and accrued. As the web becomes more “writable”, through the development and dissemination of shared annotation software, web users are moving from consuming content to creating it ‘in the form of discussion boards, weblogs, wikis, and other collaborative and conversational media” (Golder 2). Within new media spaces such as urbandictionary, we are not only viewers but active users who can go into, enter and affect representational spaces and places. In the case of chavs, users can not only read about them, but have the power to produce the chav as a knowable figure. The chav thread on urbandictionary and similar chav hate forums work to constitute materially the exaggerated excessive corporeality of the chav figure. These are spaces/places in which class disgust is actively generated – class live. With each new post, there is an accruement of disgust. Each post breathes life into the squalid and thrillingly affective imaginary body of the filthy chav. Class disgust is intimately tied to issues of racial difference. These figures constitute an unclean “sullied urban “underclass”“, “forever placed at the borders of whiteness as the socially excluded, the economically redundant” (Nayak 82, 102-3). Whilst the term chav is a term of abuse directed almost exclusively towards the white poor, chavs are not invisible normative whites, but rather hypervisible “filthy whites”. In a way that bears striking similarities to US white trash figure, and the Australian figure of the Bogan, the chav figure foregrounds a dirty whiteness – a whiteness contaminated with poverty. This borderline whiteness is evidenced through claims that chavs appropriate black American popular culture through their clothing, music, and forms of speech, and have geographical, familial and sexual intimacy with working class blacks and Asians. This intimacy is represented by the areas in which chavs live and their illegitimate mixed race children as well as, more complexly, by their filthy white racism. Metaphors of disease, invasion and excessive breeding that are often invoked within white racist responses to immigrants and ethnic minorities are mobilized by the white middle-class in order to differentiate their “respectable whiteness” from the whiteness of the lower class chavs (see Nayak 84). The process of making white lower class identity filthy is an attempt to differentiate between respectable and non-respectable forms of whiteness (and an attempt to abject the white poor from spheres of white privilege). Disgust reactions work not only to give meaning to the figure of the chav but, more complicatedly, constitute a category of being – chav being. So whilst the figures of the chav and chavette have a virtual existence within newspapers, Internet forums and television shows, the chav nevertheless takes symbolic shape in ways that have felt material and physical effects upon those interpellated as “chav”. We can think here of the way in which” signs of chavness”, such as the wearing of certain items or brands of clothing have been increasingly used to police access to public spaces, such as nightclubs and shopping centres since 2003. The figure of the chav becomes a body imbued with negative affect. This affect travels, it circulates and leaks out into public space and shapes everyday perceptual practices. The social policing of chavs foregrounds the disturbing ease with which imagined “emotional qualities slide into corporeal qualities” (Ngai 573). Chav disgust is felt and lived. Experiencing the frisson of acting like a chav has become a major leisure occupation in Britain where middle class students now regularly hold “chav nites”, in which they dress up as chavs and chavettes. These students dress as chavs, carry plastic bags from the cut-price food superstores, drink cider and listen to ‘chav music’, in order to enjoy the affect of being an imaginary chav. In April 2006 the front page of The Sun featured Prince William dressed up as a chav with the headline, “Future Bling of England”, The story details how the future king: “joined in the fun as his platoon donned chav-themed fancy dress to mark the completion of their first term” at Sandhurst military academy. William, we were told, “went to a lot of trouble thinking up what to wear” (white baseball cap, sweatshirt, two gold chains), and was challenged to “put on a chavvy accent and stop speaking like a royal”. These examples of ironic class–passing represent a new era of ‘slumming it’ that recalls the 19th century Victorian slummers, who descended on the East End of London in their many thousands, in pursuit of abject encounters – touristic tastes of the illicit pleasures associated with the immoral, urban poor. This new chav ‘slumming it’ makes no pretence at any moral imperative, it doesn’t pretend to be sociological, there is no “field work”, no ethnography, no gathering of knowledge about the poor, no charity, no reaching out to touch, and no liberal guilt, there is nothing but ‘filthy pleasure’. The cumulative effect of disgust at chavs is the blocking of the disenfranchised white poor from view; they are rendered invisible and incomprehensible. Nevertheless, chav has become an increasingly complex identity category and some of those interpellated as filthy chavs have now reclaimed the term as an affirmative sub-cultural identity. This trans-coding of chav is visible within popular music acts, such as white teenage rapper Lady Sovereign and the acclaimed pop icon and urban poet Mike Skinner (who releases records as The Streets). Journalist Julie Burchill has repeatedly attempted both to defend, and claim for herself, a chav identity and in 2005, the tabloid newspaper The Sun, a propagator of chav hate, ran a ‘Proud to be Chav’ campaign. Nevertheless, this ‘chav pride’ is deceptive, for like the US term ‘white trash’ – now widely adopted within celebrity culture – this ‘pride’ works as an enabling identity category only for those who have acquired enough cultural capital and social mobility to ‘rise above the filth’. Since the publication in English of Julia Kristeva’s Power’s of Horror: An Essay on Abjection in 1982, an entire theoretical paradigm has emerged that celebrates the ‘transgressive’ potential of encounters with filth. Such theoretical ‘abject encounters’ are rarely subversive but are on the contrary an increasingly normative and problematic feature of a media and cultural studies devoid of political direction. Instead of assuming that confrontations with ‘filth’ are ‘necessarily subversive and disruptive’ we need to rethink abjection as a violent exclusionary social force. As Miller notes, ‘disgust does not so much solve the dilemma of social powerlessness as diagnose it powerfully’ (353). Theoretical accounts of media and culture that invoke ‘the transformative potential of filth’ too often marginalize the real dirty politics of inequality. References Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP and New York: Routledge, 2004. Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Trans. Annette Lavers. New York: Hill and Wang, 1972 [1949]. Birchill, Julie. “Yeah But, No But, Why I’m Proud to Be a Chav.” The Times 18 Feb. 2005. Chav Scum. 31 Oct. 2006 http://www.chavscum.co.uk>. Golder, Scott. “Webbed Footnotes: Collaborative Annotation on the Web.” MA Thesis 2003. 31 Oct. 2006 http://web.media.mit.edu/~golder/projects/webbedfootnotes/ golder-thesis-2005.pdf>. Hayward, Keith, and Majid Yar. “The ‘Chav’ Phenomenon: Consumption, Media and the Construction of a New Underclass.” Crime, Media, Culture 2.1 (2006): 9-28. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1982. Larcombe, Duncan. “Future Bling of England.” The Sun 10 April 2006. Menninghaus, Winfried. Disgust: Theory and History of a Strong Sensation. Trans. Howard Eiland and Joel Golb. State University of New York Press, 2003. Miller, William. The Anatomy of Disgust. Harvard UP, 1998. Nayak, Anoop. Race, Place and Globalization: Youth Cultures in a Changing World. Oxford: Berg, 2003. Ngai, Sianne. Ugly Feelings: Literature, Affect, and Ideology. Harvard UP, Cambridge, 2005. “Proud to be Chav.” The Sun. 31 Oct. 2006 http://www.thesun.co.uk>. Sayer, Andrew. “What Are You Worth? Why Class Is an Embarrassing Subject.” Sociological Research Online 7.3 (2002). 31 Oct. 2006 http://www.socresonline.org.uk/7/3/sayer.html>. Skeggs, Beverly. Class, Self and Culture. London. Routledge, 2005. Urbandictionary. “Chav.” 31 Oct. 2006 http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=chav>. Wray, Matt, and Annalee Newitz, eds. White Trash: Race and Class in America. London: Routledge, 1997. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Tyler, Imogen. "Chav Scum: The Filthy Politics of Social Class in Contemporary Britain." M/C Journal 9.5 (2006). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0610/09-tyler.php>. APA Style Tyler, I. (Nov. 2006) "Chav Scum: The Filthy Politics of Social Class in Contemporary Britain," M/C Journal, 9(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0610/09-tyler.php>.

Abstract:

Introduction Let me start by telling you about my “first-world problem”: I study girls’ autobiographical practice in digital spaces but the conceptual tools in my field have been developed chiefly in order to read and analyse printed books. Girls’ digital engagements with self-representation—such as web comics and blogs—are fascinating texts and I want to know what they can tell us about how girls’ written selves connect in complex ways to broader cultural constructions of girlhood. The Greek roots of the word autobiography autos, bios, and graphe (self, life, writing) inform the kinds of approaches that have been taken to address the relationship between an autobiographical text and its author (Smith and Watson, Reading 1). Further, the understanding of autobiography as “self life writing” has shaped what kinds of texts get to be called autobiography and what texts are something else—identity work, media-making, or marginal textual practice. Fortunately, due to the proliferation of online activity that engages autobiographical modes of textual practice, life writing scholars are beginning to develop new tools in order to address these “texts”—blogs, tweets, status updates, avatars, and a variety of digital personas—to find out what they can tell us about cultural understandings of selfhood and what it means to communicate “real” life through media. One of these tools under construction is the idea of “automedia,” which I will elaborate on below. The same integration of digital spaces and platforms into daily life that is prompting the development of new tools in autobiography studies—which P. David Marshall has described as “the proliferation of the public self”—has also given rise to the field of persona studies, which addresses the ways in which individuals engage in practices of self-presentation in order to form commoditised identities that circulate in affective communities (Marshall 163). To the field of persona studies, this essay contributes an approach to the author website as a site of self-presentation that works to “package” an authorial persona for circulation within contemporary literary marketplaces. Significantly, I address these websites not as direct representations of a pre-existing self, but as automedial texts that need to be read and interpreted, and which work to construct the authorial self or persona. I draw on theories of authorship to propose the “author website” as a genre of automedial representation that creates authorial personas for public consumption. Specifically, I consider the website of Erika Moen—a young, female author working in the medium of autobiographical comics—as a case study in order to explore the tensions between Moen’s authorial self (as produced in the digital elements of erikamoen.com) and the other, more deliberately autobiographical, renderings of her self that appear in her comics. Although young cartoonists tend to position themselves as artists rather than authors, the recent academic and critical interest in the “graphic novel” form has resulted in a growing sense of these works as literary and their makers as authors. In thinking through this distinction, Andrew Bennett’s suggestion that “asking ‘what is an author?’ is intimately related to the question ‘what is literature?’” (118) points to why cartoonists, whose texts are part image and part text and only sometimes bound up as books, have not always been contextualised as authors. Contemporary Authors and the Impetus to “Connect” To have an identity as an author is distinct from being an author. It is one thing to sit at a desk doing the work of writing a book. Making oneself visible as an author is a very different kind of work. Writers are asked to present themselves as authors in a range of contexts such as writers’ festivals, readings, book signings, interviews and book promotion tours, and this demand has increased with the rise of social media: writers are now expected to represent themselves across a variety of digital platforms, which currently include Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. These events and spaces reflect changing reading practices in which readers wish to move beyond the “solitary act of reading” and to participate in literary communities (Johanson and Freeman, 304). Within these communities authors occupy a role that is part celebrity, part guru, and part (imagined) close friend. Johanson and Freeman, in considering the appeal of writers’ festivals, argue “audiences seek genuine relationships with artists […] and are sensitive to a lack of authenticity on the part of the artist in the relationship” (306). Readers want to have access to authors: to get near them, the real them. And this sets up the expectation of a two-way street in which there is pressure on authors to also be participants and to grant readers the access they desire. Author websites are one way that writers respond to the call to make themselves visible and accessible as authors within literary communities, and this call is often framed as an impetus to “connect with” an audience. But the primary function of the author website is to exploit readers’ fascination with the author in order to sell books. In neoliberal cultures the pressure is on for all kinds of people to use online tools and spaces to commoditise their self-representation by cultivating a “self-brand,” and, to varying degrees of alarm, disgust, or pragmatism, this is certainly one way that the author is conceptualised: as a brand name (See Australian Society of Authors; Evers; Force; and Rankin). The author as brand name guarantees and markets a reading experience particular to that brand. As with many other commodities, author brands are a mechanism for organising books into categories with identifiable traits in order that readers/consumers may identify which books appeal to their reading tastes and choose their purchases accordingly. It is as Michel Foucault remarks in answer to the question “What is an Author?”: it is “a certain functional principle by which, in our culture, one limits, excludes and chooses” (159). Digital spaces in particular are seen as opportunities for authors to create an “online presence” by communicating themselves as a brand on a website. I am proposing that we might look at how these websites draw on intimate modes of self-representation to create an author-subject that is knowable to a reading public, and to think about how the features of these sites and their digital contexts shape the kinds of authorial personas that can be produced in the medium of the author website. In order to do this, I now want to turn to the field of auto/biography studies in which there is a growing body of work that considers a range of online modes of self-representation as texts that can be read, analysed and understood within a broader framework of auto/biographical practices (autobiography is sometimes written with a slash, as in, auto/biography in order to acknowledge both biography and autobiography within a range of textual practices that broadly deal with life narrative). It is worth mentioning here that there is much diversity within author websites, and not all of them work to facilitate a connection with the reader. In fact, some work conversely to distance the author or to shroud them in mystery, among a range of other functions and formats. These sites of resistance to the pressure to “connect” are just as interesting in the context of finding out how online spaces are used to construct authors, however, there is not room to explore them here. The Author Website: An Automedial Genre In order to address new forms of (chiefly digital) self-representation that go beyond the printed book, scholars working in the field of auto/biography studies have proposed the concept of “automedia” as an alternative to terms such as autobiography, life writing or life narrative. Leading memoir and life narrative theorist Julie Rak (2013) argues that the concept of autobiography—and the ways that scholars have approached the genre—has been dominated by ideas of “narrative” and “writing” that are ill-suited to reading and analysing many online modes of self-representation. For example, although we might have trouble trying to read a Facebook wall or a Second Life avatar as “an autobiography” in the traditional sense, these performances of self-identity demonstrate ways in which users are taking up technology in order to engage in the business of autobiographical representation. And they are interesting for what they might be able to tell us about cultural understandings of selfhood and what it means to “live” a “life.” Rak proposes that these texts, which move beyond the medium of the written word, and which are not necessarily crafted (or read) as a story or narrative, might be studied not as autobiography but instead as automedia. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson also point to automedia as a way of approaching autobiographical texts in a way that emphasizes how the telling or mediation of a life actually shapes the kind of story that can be told about it. They state that “media cannot simply be conceptualized as “tools” for presenting a preexisting, essential self. … Media technologies do not just transparently present the self. They constitute and expand it” (“Virtually Me” 77). So we might understand an automedial approach as a way of studying auto/biographical texts (of a variety of forms) that take into account how the effects of media shape the kinds of selves that can be represented, and which understands the self not as a preexisting subject that might be distilled into story form but as an entity that is brought into being through the processes of mediation. In my conceptualisation, this approach understands that the self does not exist outside of mediation, and it seeks to comprehend how the processes of (auto-)mediation shape selfhood both in individual terms (by analysing a particular automedial text to understand how it constructs the specific subject of that text) and in more general terms (how conventions and practices of different kinds of media shape and reflect cultural ideas of the self). As such, I do not think that automedia as an approach to autobiographical texts need be limited to digital media—after all, books are still media. But the modes of self-representation being taken up in online contexts present scholars with urgent questions about what it means to represent life and the self in increasingly social, networked, multi-media ways. The author website is an increasingly valuable tool for making writers visible as authors in online environments; but how are they automedial? By creating a mediated construction of an authorial persona that functions as a space in which readers (or to be more inclusive, internet users) can move around and experience the author’s mediated persona, the author website draws on strategies of auto/biographical representation in order to respond to a demand for personal access to the author. The author website works to create an often interactive space of contact between the writer as author and the public, where an audience (or internet user) is able to explore the author as he or she is constructed by his or her website. In order to explore how this kind of analysis might begin, I will turn to comics artist Erika Moen and her website erikamoen.com. Case Study: Erika Moen’s Authorial Persona Erika Moen is a self-published comics author based in the US. Her online diary comic DAR!: A Super-Girly Top Secret Comic Diary (2003-2009) grew out of her printed mini comics about coming out as lesbian. Moen’s website erikamoen.com is a good example of a highly developed automedial space, and it works to construct her as a comics author by offering for public consumption an authorial persona that functions as a brand, packaging and marketing her work. This case study is compelling for two reasons. Firstly, the graphic medium that Moen works in is particularly suited to the current moment in Web 2.0 history in which images—often in conjunction with words—are increasingly central. Secondly, the autobiographical nature of her work makes for interesting tensions between the authorial persona that is represented on her website and the autobiographical subject of her comics. For autobiographical authors, the call for them to be accessible to the public takes on an extra dimension. A consistent author brand should maintain an alignment between the kind of work they produce and their persona. In the case of autobiographical writers, their persona is anchored in a textual representation of their real-life self, so this allows us to think about the different functions of these two constructions, and the ways they speak to each other (or don’t). Moen is credited with generating the content of the site; however, her website was designed by a web designer and is based on a blog format. Although Moen’s site is much more than a blog, the blog format is evident as an influence on the design of the site which comprises nine pages: “Home,” “Art Portfolio,” “Comics,” “About,” “Events and Appearances,” “Press,” “Blog,” “Shop,” and “Contact.” In a broader consideration of this kind of author website, the four pages Home, About, Shop, and Contact, represent the key functions that these sites perform. The home page grounds the site, giving the user a first impression and overview of the author brand. “About” is the place that users can find biographical information. The site’s shop indicates the context of the space as a site that occurs within commercial networks of production and consumption, and which also works to disguise the commoditisation of the author by delineating a separate space for commerce that focuses on their work as the object for sale. The “Contact” page provides further channels for “connecting” with the author. The focus of this essay is Moen’s “Home” page (Figure 1). The home page anchors the site and works to create a professional persona for Moen that draws heavily on her autobiographical voice and cartoon style (which she has honed in her works DAR! and Oh Joy Sex Toy). It is highly significant that the face that welcomes the user to the site is not a photographic image of Moen but rather her cartoon avatar, which greets users with an assured and friendly smile. Those familiar with her work will recognise this picture as Moen. If readers fail to make this connection, there are clickable headings immediately to the right of the figure that use the first-person voice: the headings invite the user to “check out my work” and ask them “what am I up to?” (my emphasis). Taking a cue from the comic medium, the user might associate the proximity of the image of the cartoon girl to these statements, and read the two elements cohesively like a comics panel, understanding that the girl is the speaker, and the speaker is the author Erika Moen. Moen, as the author constructed by the website, almost always addresses the reader in this chatty, informal voice which echoes the voice she uses in her comics. On the home page, the reader is asked several questions and all of these appear in close proximity to the drawing of Moen. In addition to the one mentioned above, the reader is asked if they are “Looking to purchase some art?” and whether they “Want to see what I’ve created?” Instead of using labels here, the website uses questions addressed to the reader, and these appear clustered around the cartoon image of Moen which is rendered in her style. These questions draw the reader into an implied conversation, and they also suggest a presence or speaker behind the screen which, prompted by the cartoon Erika, the reader is encouraged to imagine as Erika Moen. This illusion of two-way communication invites the reader to experience the site as a personal encounter, and Moen’s perky, friendly voice that speaks intimately to her readers about her latest activities, products and appearances is the thread that sews together the different spaces of the site as well as Moen’s published work. Above the drawn image of Moen appear the words “Erika Moen” in a large “handwritten” font that dominates the screen. The illusion of handwriting here is significant. Hilary Chute, a scholar of autobiographical comics, in her book Graphic Women argues that handwriting constitutes an important autobiographical act on the part of the comic memoirist. She states that handwriting “underscores the subjective personality of the author” and acts as “a trace of autobiography in the mark of its maker” (10-11). Indeed, handwriting is often read as a sign of humanity and authenticity that is understood in opposition to the machined construction of computer generated fonts. The idea that handwriting can be traced back to an individual and that personal traits can be discovered by decoding a person’s handwriting are ideas that reflect an autobiographical reading of handwriting and its place within textual culture. In this context, on the website of a comics artist, in addition to referencing the medium of cartoons, it also signals these ideas about authenticity and autobiography, and it implies the human behind the digital text. Everything on the home page is a product of Moen herself and each element communicates her persona as an indie, DIY, self-published cartoonist: each image that appears on the home page is drawn by her hand; her voice inflects the majority of the text on the page; some of the writing appears in a handwritten font; even, the bio states, her degree from Pitzer College is “self-made.” Moen’s Home page is an automedial space that facilitates a connection between author and reader that is grounded in the commoditised networks of persona production and consumption: the site serves not only to encourage the reader to buy Moen’s autobiographical comics, but effectively to “buy into” her personal brand. It constructs a persona that draws on a combination of visual and textual signals which at once connect Moen to her comics works and also encourage readers to feel as if they “know” Erika: her name in handwriting, her comics portrait which welcomes the reader, and the subheadings that draw the reader into a conversation. Although there is much more to explore on Moen’s website, in order to demonstrate some key considerations of an automedial approach I have examined several significant elements of the homepage which form the basis for a fuller reading of the site. Conclusion This essay sits at the burgeoning intersection of autobiography studies and digital media studies, and is part of an attempt to understand how digital media practices impact on what kinds of self-representation are produced and consumed. In this way, it contributes to the field of persona studies, which is also invested in exploring systems that facilitate the “presentation of the self that are now ubiquitous in contemporary culture” (Barbour & Marshall). I have suggested that the author website can be read as a genre of automedia in order to explore how these digital spaces—which are embedded in networks of literary production and consumption—draw on auto/biographical strategies to construct an authorial persona that works to sell books by connecting with an audience. This essay works towards further research on paratextual sites that can tell us more about how writers are constructed as authors in the contemporary literary landscape, and I have proposed that a consideration of the deployment and construction of authorial personas is integral to understanding “the author” in this cultural moment. References Anderson, Hephzibah. “How Authors Become Mega-Brands.” BBC. British Broadcasting Corporation. 19 Feb. 2014. 15 Apr. 2014. Australian Society of Authors. “Marketing: The Author as Brand Name.” DVD. Australian Society of Authors, n.d. 15 Apr. 2014. Barbour, Kim, and David Marshall. “The Academic Online: Constructing Persona through the World Wide Web.” First Monday 17.9 (2012). 19 May 2014. Bennett, Andrew. The Author. Abingdon: Routledge, 2005. Chute, Hilary L. Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. Evers, Stuart. “Bestselling Authors, or Branding Machines?” The Guardian 12 June 2008. 15 Apr. 2014. Force, Marie. “A Finger on the Pulse of Readers – New Survey Confirms Reader Passion for e-Books, But Half Still Want Paperbacks.” PR Newswire 1 Aug. 2013. 14 Apr. 2014. Johanson, Katya, and Robin Freeman. “The Reader as Audience: The Appeal of the Writers’ Festival to the Contemporary Audience.” Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 26.2 (2012): 303-314. Marshall, P David. “Persona Studies: Mapping the Proliferation of the Public Self.” Journalism 15.2 (2014): 153-170. Moen, Erika. DAR!: A Super-Girly Top Secret Comic Diary. 2003-2009. 10 Apr. 2014. Moen, Erika. Erika Moen. c. 2014. 22 Apr. 2014. Moen, Erika. Oh Joy Sex Toy. 2011-2014. 10 Apr. 2014. Pitsaki, Irini. “Strategic Brand Management Tools in Publishing.” The International Journal of the Book 8.3 (2008): 103-112. Rak, Julie. “First Person? Life Writing versus Automedia.” Beyond the Subject: New Developments in Life Writing: IABA Europe 2013. 31 Oct. - 3 Nov. 2013. Rankin, Jennifer. “Publish and Be Branded: The New Threat to Literature’s Laboratory.” The Guardian 14 Jan. 2014. 15 Apr. 2014. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography: A Guide to Interpreting Life Narratives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. Smith, Sidonie and Julia Watson. “Virtually Me: A Toolbox about Online Self-Presentation.” Identity Technologies: Constructing the Self Online. Eds. Anna Poletti and Julie Rak. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2014. 70-95.

Abstract:

One of the greatest joys in watching Foxtel is to see all the crazy people who run talk shows. Judgement, ridicule and generalisations slip from their tongues like overcooked lamb off a bone. From Oprah to Rikki, from Jerry to Mother Love, the posterior of pop culture claims a world-wide audience. Recently, a new talk diva was added to the pay television stable. Dr Laura Schlessinger, the Mother of Morals, prowls the soundstage. attacking 'selfish acts' such as divorce, de facto relationships and voting Democrat. On April 11, 2001, a show aired in Australia that added a new demon to the decadence of the age. Dr Laura had been told that a disgusting video clip, called 'Rock DJ', had been televised at 2:30pm on MTV. Children could have been watching. The footage that so troubled our doyenne of daytime featured the British performer Robbie Williams not only stripping in front of disinterested women, but then removing skin, muscle and tissue in a desperate attempt to claim their gaze. This was too much for Dr Laura. She was horrified: her strident tone became piercing. She screeched, "this is si-ee-ck." . My paper is drawn to this sick masculinity, not to judge - but to laugh and theorise. Robbie Williams, the deity of levity, holds a pivotal role in theorising the contemporary 'crisis' of manhood. To paraphrase Austin Powers, Williams returned the ger to singer. But Williams also triumphed in a captivatingly original way. He is one of the few members of a boy band who created a successful solo career without regurgitating the middle of the road mantras of boys, girls, love, loss and whining about it. Williams' journey through post-war popular music, encompassing influences from both Sinatra and Sonique, forms a functional collage, rather than patchwork, of masculinity. He has been prepared to not only age in public, but to discuss the crevices and cracks in the facade. He strips, smokes, plays football, wears interesting underwear and drinks too much. My short paper trails behind this combustible masculinity, focussing on his sorties with both masculine modalities and the rock discourse. My words attack the gap between text and readership, beat and ear, music and men. The aim is to reveal how this 'sick masculinity' problematises the conservative rendering of men's crisis. Come follow me I'm an honorary Sean Connery, born '74 There's only one of me … Press be asking do I care for sodomy I don't know, yeah, probably I've been looking for serial monogamy Not some bird that looks like Billy Connolly But for now I'm down for ornithology Grab your binoculars, come follow me. 'Kids,' Robbie Williams Robbie Williams is a man for our age. Between dating supermodels and Geri 'Lost Spice' Halliwell [1], he has time to "love … his mum and a pint," (Ansen 85) but also subvert the Oasis co*ck(rock)tail by frocking up for a television appearance. Williams is important to theories of masculine representation. As a masculinity to think with, he creates popular culture with a history. In an era where Madonna practices yoga and wears cowboy boots, it is no surprise that by June 2000, Robbie Williams was voted the world's sexist man [2]. A few months later, in the October edition of Vogue, he posed in a British flag bikini. It is reassuring in an era where a 12 year old boy states that "You aren't a man until you shoot at something," (Issac in Mendel 19) that positive male role models exist who are prepared to both wear a frock and strip on national television. Reading Robbie Williams is like dipping into the most convincing but draining of intellectual texts. He is masculinity in motion, conveying foreignness, transgression and corruption, bartering in the polymorphous economies of sex, colonialism, race, gender and nation. His career has spanned the boy bands, try-hard rock, video star and hybrid pop performer. There are obvious resonances between the changes to Williams and alterations in masculinity. In 1988, Suzanne Moore described (the artist still known as) Prince as "the pimp of postmodernism." (165-166) Over a decade later, the simulacra has a new tour guide. Williams revels in the potency of representation. He rarely sings about love or romance, as was his sonic fodder in Take That. Instead, his performance is fixated on becoming a better man, glancing an analytical eye over other modes of masculinity. Notions of masculine crisis and sickness have punctuated this era. Men's studies is a boom area of cultural studies, dislodging the assumed structures of popular culture [3]. William Pollack's Real Boys has created a culture of changing expectations for men. The greater question arising from his concerns is why these problems, traumas and difficulties are emerging in our present. Pollack's argument is that boys and young men invest energy and time "disguising their deepest and most vulnerable feelings." (15) This masking is difficult to discern within dance and popular music. Through lyrics and dancing, videos and choreography, masculinity is revealed as convoluted, complex and fragmented. While rock music is legitimised by dominant ideologies, marginalised groups frequently use disempowered genres - like country, dance and rap genres - to present oppositional messages. These competing representations expose seamless interpretations of competent masculinity. Particular skills are necessary to rip the metaphoric pacifier out of the masculine mouth of popular culture. Patriarchal pop revels in the paradoxes of everyday life. Frequently these are nostalgic visions, which Kimmel described as a "retreat to a bygone era." (87) It is the recognition of a shared, simpler past that provides reinforcement to heteronormativity. Williams, as a gaffer tape masculinity, pulls apart the gaps and crevices in representation. Theorists must open the interpretative space encircling popular culture, disrupting normalising criteria. Multiple nodes of assessment allow a ranking of competent masculinity. From sport to business, drinking to sex, masculinity is transformed into a wired site of ranking, judgement and determination. Popular music swims in the spectacle of maleness. From David Lee Roth's skied splits to Eminem's beanie, young men are interpellated as subjects in patriarchy. Robbie Williams is a history lesson in post war masculinity. This nostalgia is conservative in nature. The ironic pastiche within his music videos features motor racing, heavy metal and Bond films. 'Rock DJ', the 'sick text' that vexed Doctor Laura, is Williams' most elaborate video. Set in a rollerdrome with female skaters encircling a central podium, the object of fascination and fetish is a male stripper. This strip is different though, as it disrupts the power held by men in phallocentralism. After being confronted by Williams' naked body, the observing women are both bored and disappointed at the lack-lustre deployment of masculine genitalia. After this display, Williams appears embarrassed, confused and humiliated. As Buchbinder realised, "No actual penis could every really measure up to the imagined sexual potency and social or magical power of the phallus." (49) To render this banal experience of male nudity ridiculous, Williams then proceeds to remove skin and muscle. He finally becomes an object of attraction for the female DJ only in skeletal form. By 'going all the way,' the strip confirms the predictability of masculinity and the ordinariness of the male body. For literate listeners though, a higher level of connotation is revealed. The song itself is based on Barry White's melody for 'It's ecstasy (when you lay down next to me).' Such intertextuality accesses the meta-racist excesses of a licentious black male sexuality. A white boy dancer must deliver an impotent, but ironic, rendering of White's (love unlimited) orchestration of potent sexuality. Williams' iconography and soundtrack is refreshing, emerging from an era of "men who cling … tightly to their illusions." (Faludi 14) When the ideological drapery is cut away, the male body is a major disappointment. Masculinity is an anxious performance. Fascinatingly, this deconstructive video has been demeaned through its labelling as p*rnography [4]. Oddly, a man who is prepared to - literally - shave the skin of masculinity is rendered offensive. Men's studies, like feminism, has been defrocking masculinity for some time. Robinson for example, expressed little sympathy for "whiny men jumping on the victimisation bandwagon or playing cowboys and Indians at warrior weekends and beating drums in sweat lodges." (6) By grating men's identity back to the body, the link between surface and depth - or identity and self - is forged. 'Rock DJ' attacks the new subjectivities of the male body by not only generating self-surveillance, but humour through the removal of clothes, skin and muscle. He continues this play with the symbols of masculine performance throughout the album Sing when you're winning. Featuring soccer photographs of players, coaches and fans, closer inspection of the images reveal that Robbie Williams is actually every character, in every role. His live show also enfolds diverse performances. Singing a version of 'My Way,' with cigarette in tow, he remixes Frank Sinatra into a replaying and recutting of masculine fabric. He follows one dominating masculinity with another: the Bond-inspired 'Millennium.' Some say that we are players Some say that we are pawns But we've been making money Since the day we were born Robbie Williams is comfortably located in a long history of post-Sinatra popular music. He mocks the rock ethos by combining guitars and drums with a gleaming brass section, hailing the lounge act of Dean Martin, while also using rap and dance samples. Although carrying fifty year's of crooner baggage, the spicy scent of hom*osexuality has also danced around Robbie Williams' career. Much of this ideology can be traced back to the Take That years. As Gary Barlow and Jason Orange commented at the time, Jason: So the rumour is we're all gay now are we? Gary: Am I gay? I am? Why? Oh good. Just as long as we know. Howard: Does anyone think I'm gay? Jason: No, you're the only one people think is straight. Howard: Why aren't I gay? What's wrong with me? Jason: It's because you're such a fine figure of macho manhood.(Kadis 17) For those not literate in the Take That discourse, it should come as no surprise that Howard was the TT equivalent of The Beatle's Ringo Starr or Duran Duran's Andy Taylor. Every boy band requires the ugly, shy member to make the others appear taller and more attractive. The inference of this dialogue is that the other members of the group are simply too handsome to be heterosexual. This ambiguous sexuality has followed Williams into his solo career, becoming fodder for those lads too unappealing to be hom*osexual: Oasis. Born to be mild I seem to spend my life Just waiting for the chorus 'Cause the verse is never nearly Good enough Robbie Williams "Singing for the lonely." Robbie Williams accesses a bigger, brighter and bolder future than Britpop. While the Gallagher brothers emulate and worship the icons of 1960s British music - from the Beatles' haircuts to the Stones' psychedelia - Williams' songs, videos and persona are chattering in a broader cultural field. From Noel Cowardesque allusions to the ordinariness of pub culture, Williams is much more than a pretty-boy singer. He has become an icon of English masculinity, enclosing all the complexity that these two terms convey. Williams' solo success from 1999-2001 occurred at the time of much parochial concern that British acts were not performing well in the American charts. It is bemusing to read Billboard over this period. The obvious quality of Britney Spears is seen to dwarf the mediocrity of British performers. The calibre of Fatboy Slim, carrying a smiley backpack stuffed with reflexive dance culture, is neither admitted nor discussed. It is becoming increasing strange to monitor the excessive fame of Williams in Britain, Europe, Asia and the Pacific when compared to his patchy career in the United States. Even some American magazines are trying to grasp the disparity. The swaggering king of Britpop sold a relatively measly 600,000 copies of his U.S. debut album, The ego has landed … Maybe Americans didn't appreciate his songs about being famous. (Ask Dr. Hip 72) In the first few years of the 2000s, it has been difficult to discuss a unified Anglo-American musical formation. Divergent discursive frameworks have emerged through this British evasion. There is no longer an agreed centre to the musical model. Throughout 1990s Britain, blackness jutted out of dance floor mixes, from reggae to dub, jazz and jungle. Plied with the coldness of techno was an almost too hot hip hop. Yet both were alternate trajectories to Cool Britannia. London once more became swinging, or as Vanity Fair declared, "the nerve centre of pop's most cohesive scene since the Pacific Northwest grunge explosion of 1991." (Kamp 102) Through Britpop, the clock turned back to the 1960s, a simpler time before race became 'a problem' for the nation. An affiliation was made between a New Labour, formed by the 1997 British election, and the rebirth of a Swinging London [5]. This style-driven empire supposedly - again - made London the centre of the world. Britpop was itself a misnaming. It was a strong sense of Englishness that permeated the lyrics, iconography and accent. Englishness requires a Britishness to invoke a sense of bigness and greatness. The contradictions and excesses of Blur, Oasis and Pulp resonate in the gap between centre and periphery, imperial core and colonised other. Slicing through the arrogance and anger of the Gallaghers is a yearning for colonial simplicity, when the pink portions of the map were the stable subjects of geography lessons, rather than the volatile embodiment of postcolonial theory. Simon Gikandi argues that "the central moments of English cultural identity were driven by doubts and disputes about the perimeters of the values that defined Englishness." (x) The reason that Britpop could not 'make it big' in the United States is because it was recycling an exhausted colonial dreaming. Two old Englands were duelling for ascendancy: the Oasis-inflected Manchester working class fought Blur-inspired London art school chic. This insular understanding of difference had serious social and cultural consequences. The only possible representation of white, British youth was a tabloidisation of Oasis's behaviour through swearing, drug excess and violence. Simon Reynolds realised that by returning to the three minute pop tune that the milkman can whistle, reinvoking parochial England with no black people, Britpop has turned its back defiantly on the future. (members.aol.com/blissout/Britpop.html) Fortunately, another future had already happened. The beats per minute were pulsating with an urgent affirmation of change, hybridity and difference. Hip hop and techno mapped a careful cartography of race. While rock was colonialisation by other means, hip hop enacted a decolonial imperative. Electronic dance music provided a unique rendering of identity throughout the 1990s. It was a mode of musical communication that moved across national and linguistic boundaries, far beyond Britpop or Stateside rock music. While the Anglo American military alliance was matched and shadowed by postwar popular culture, Brit-pop signalled the end of this hegemonic formation. From this point, English pop and American rock would not sail as smoothly over the Atlantic. While 1995 was the year of Wonderwall, by 1996 the Britpop bubble corroded the faces of the Gallagher brothers. Oasis was unable to complete the American tour. Yet other cultural forces were already active. 1996 was also the year of Trainspotting, with "Born Slippy" being the soundtrack for a blissful journey under the radar. This was a cultural force that no longer required America as a reference point [6]. Robbie Williams was able to integrate the histories of Britpop and dance culture, instigating a complex dialogue between the two. Still, concern peppered music and entertainment journals that British performers were not accessing 'America.' As Sharon Swart stated Britpop acts, on the other hand, are finding it less easy to crack the U.S. market. The Spice Girls may have made some early headway, but fellow purveyors of pop, such as Robbie Williams, can't seem to get satisfaction from American fans. (35 British performers had numerous cultural forces working against them. Flat global sales, the strength of the sterling and the slow response to the new technological opportunities of DVD, all caused problems. While Britpop "cleaned house," (Boehm 89) it was uncertain which cultural formation would replace this colonising force. Because of the complex dialogues between the rock discourse and dance culture, time and space were unable to align into a unified market. American critics simply could not grasp Robbie Williams' history, motives or iconography. It's Robbie's world, we just buy tickets for it. Unless, of course you're American and you don't know jack about soccer. That's the first mistake Williams makes - if indeed one of his goals is to break big in the U.S. (and I can't believe someone so ambitious would settle for less.) … Americans, it seems, are most fascinated by British pop when it presents a mirror image of American pop. (Woods 98 There is little sense that an entirely different musical economy now circulates, where making it big in the United States is not the singular marker of credibility. Williams' demonstrates commitment to the international market, focussing on MTV Asia, MTV online, New Zealand and Australian audiences [7]. The Gallagher brothers spent much of the 1990s trying to be John Lennon. While Noel, at times, knocked at the door of rock legends through "Wonderwall," he snubbed Williams' penchant for pop glory, describing him as a "fat dancer." (Gallagher in Orecklin 101) Dancing should not be decried so summarily. It conveys subtle nodes of bodily knowledge about men, women, sex and desire. While men are validated for bodily movement through sport, women's dancing remains a performance of voyeuristic attention. Such a divide is highly repressive of men who dance, with gayness infiltrating the metaphoric masculine dancefloor [8]. Too often the binary of male and female is enmeshed into the divide of rock and dance. Actually, these categories slide elegantly over each other. The male pop singers are located in a significant semiotic space. Robbie Williams carries these contradictions and controversy. NO! Robbie didn't go on NME's cover in a 'desperate' attempt to seduce nine-year old knickerwetters … YES! He used to be teenybopper fodder. SO WHAT?! So did the Beatles the Stones, the Who, the Kinks, etc blah blah pseudohistoricalrockbollocks. NO! Making music that gurlz like is NOT a crime! (Wells 62) There remains an uncertainty in his performance of masculinity and at times, a deliberate ambivalence. He grafts subversiveness into a specific lineage of English pop music. The aim for critics of popular music is to find a way to create a rhythm of resistance, rather than melody of credible meanings. In summoning an archaeology of the archive, we begin to write a popular music history. Suzanne Moore asked why men should "be interested in a sexual politics based on the frightfully old-fashioned ideas of truth, identity and history?" (175) The reason is now obvious. Femininity is no longer alone on the simulacra. It is impossible to separate real men from the representations of masculinity that dress the corporeal form. Popular music is pivotal, not for collapsing the representation into the real, but for making the space between these states livable, and pleasurable. Like all semiotic sicknesses, the damaged, beaten and bandaged masculinity of contemporary music swaddles a healing pedagogic formation. Robbie Williams enables the writing of a critical history of post Anglo-American music [9]. Popular music captures such stories of place and identity. Significantly though, it also opens out spaces of knowing. There is an investment in rhythm that transgresses national histories of music. While Williams has produced albums, singles, video and endless newspaper copy, his most important revelations are volatile and ephemeral in their impact. He increases the popular cultural vocabulary of masculinity. [1] The fame of both Williams and Halliwell was at such a level that it was reported in the generally conservative, pages of Marketing. The piece was titled "Will Geri's fling lose its fizz?" Marketing, August 2000: 17. [2] For poll results, please refer to "Winners and Losers," Time International, Vol. 155, Issue 23, June 12, 2000, 9 [3] For a discussion of this growth in academic discourse on masculinity, please refer to Paul Smith's "Introduction," in P. Smith (ed.), Boys: Masculinity in contemporary culture. Colorado: Westview Press, 1996. [4] Steve Futterman described Rock DJ as the "least alluring p*rn video on MTV," in "The best and worst: honour roll," Entertainment Weekly 574-575 (December 22-December 29 2000): 146. [5] Michael Bracewell stated that "pop provides an unofficial cartography of its host culture, charting the national mood, marking the crossroads between the major social trends and the tunnels of the zeitgeist," in "Britpop's coming home, it's coming home." New Statesman .(February 21 1997): 36. [6] It is important to make my point clear. The 'America' that I am summoning here is a popular cultural formation, which possesses little connection with the territory, institution or defence initiatives of the United States. Simon Frith made this distinction clear, when he stated that "the question becomes whether 'America' can continue to be the mythical locale of popular culture as it has been through most of this century. As I've suggested, there are reasons now to suppose that 'America' itself, as a pop cultural myth, no longer bears much resemblance to the USA as a real place even in the myth." This statement was made in "Anglo-America and its discontents," Cultural Studies 5 1991: 268. [7] To observe the scale of attention paid to the Asian and Pacific markets, please refer to http://robbiewilliams.com/july13scroll.html, http://robbiewilliams.com/july19scroll.html and http://robbiewilliams.com/july24scroll.html, accessed on March 3, 2001 [8] At its most naïve, J. Michael Bailey and Michael Oberschneider asked, "Why are gay men so motivated to dance? One hypothesis is that gay men dance in order to be feminine. In other words, gay men dance because women do. An alternative hypothesis is that gay men and women share a common factor in their emotional make-up that makes dancing especially enjoyable," from "Sexual orientation in professional dance," Archives of Sexual Behaviour. 26.4 (August 1997). Such an interpretation is particularly ludicrous when considering the pre-rock and roll masculine dancing rituals in the jive, Charleston and jitterbug. Once more, the history of rock music is obscuring the history of dance both before the mid 1950s and after acid house. [9] Women, gay men and black communities through much of the twentieth century have used these popular spaces. For example, Lynne Segal, in Slow Motion. London: Virago, 1990, stated that "through dancing, athletic and erotic performance, but most powerfully through music, Black men could express something about the body and its physicality, about emotions and their cosmic reach, rarely found in white culture - least of all in white male culture,": 191 References Ansen, D., Giles, J., Kroll, J., Gates, D. and Schoemer, K. "What's a handsome lad to do?" Newsweek 133.19 (May 10, 1999): 85. "Ask Dr. Hip." U.S. News and World Report 129.16 (October 23, 2000): 72. Bailey, J. Michael., and Oberschneider, Michael. "Sexual orientation in professional dance." Archives of Sexual Behaviour. 26.4 (August 1997):expanded academic database [fulltext]. Boehm, E. "Pop will beat itself up." Variety 373.5 (December 14, 1998): 89. Bracewell, Michael. "Britpop's coming home, it's coming home." New Statesman.(February 21 1997): 36. Buchbinder, David. Performance Anxieties .Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1998. Faludi, Susan. Stiffed. London: Chatto and Windus, 1999. Frith, Simon. "Anglo-America and its discontents." Cultural Studies. 5 1991. Futterman, Steve. "The best and worst: honour roll." Entertainment Weekly, 574-575 (December 22-December 29 2000): 146. Gikandi, Simon. Maps of Englishness. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. Kadis, Alex. Take That: In private. London: Virgin Books, 1994. Kamp, D. "London Swings! Again!" Vanity Fair ( March 1997): 102. Kimmel, Michael. Manhood in America. New York: The Free Press, 1996. Mendell, Adrienne. How men think. New York: Fawcett, 1996. Moore, Susan. "Getting a bit of the other - the pimps of postmodernism." In Rowena Chapman and Jonathan Rutherford (ed.) Male Order .London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1988. 165-175. Orecklin, Michele. "People." Time. 155.10 (March 13, 2000): 101. Pollack, William. Real boys. Melbourne: Scribe Publications, 1999. Reynolds, Simon. members.aol.com/blissout/britpop.html. Accessed on April 15, 2001. Robinson, David. No less a man. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University, 1994. Segal, Lynne. Slow Motion. London: Virago, 1990. Smith, Paul. "Introduction" in P. Smith (ed.), Boys: Masculinity in contemporary culture. Colorado: Westview Press, 1996. Swart, S. "U.K. Showbiz" Variety.(December 11-17, 2000): 35. Sexton, Paul and Masson, Gordon. "Tips for Brits who want U.S. success" Billboard .(September 9 2000): 1. Wells, Steven. "Angst." NME.(November 21 1998): 62. "Will Geri's fling lose its fizz?" Marketing.(August 2000): 17. Woods, S. "Robbie Williams Sing when you're winning" The Village Voice. 45.52. (January 2, 2001): 98.

Abstract:

IntroductionIn the year 2000, a group of likeminded individuals got together and convened the first annual World Barista Championship in Monte Carlo. With twelve competitors from around the globe, each competitor was judged by seven judges: one head judge who oversaw the process, two technical judges who assessed technical skills, and four sensory judges who evaluated the taste and appearance of the espresso drinks. Competitors had fifteen minutes to serve four espresso coffees, four cappuccino coffees, and four “signature” drinks that they had devised using one shot of espresso and other ingredients of their choice, but no alcohol. The competitors were also assessed on their overall barista skills, their creativity, and their ability to perform under pressure and impress the judges with their knowledge of coffee. This competition has grown to the extent that eleven years later, in 2011, 54 countries held national barista championships with the winner from each country competing for the highly coveted position of World Barista Champion. That year, Alejandro Mendez from El Salvador became the first world champion from a coffee producing nation. Champion baristas are more likely to come from coffee consuming countries than they are from coffee producing countries as countries that produce coffee seldom have a culture of espresso coffee consumption. While Ireland is not a coffee-producing nation, the Irish are the highest per capita consumers of tea in the world (Mac Con Iomaire, “Ireland”). Despite this, in 2008, Stephen Morrissey from Ireland overcame 50 other national champions to become the 2008 World Barista Champion (see, http://vimeo.com/2254130). Another Irish national champion, Colin Harmon, came fourth in this competition in both 2009 and 2010. This paper discusses the history and development of coffee and coffee houses in Dublin from the 17th century, charting how coffee culture in Dublin appeared, evolved, and stagnated before re-emerging at the beginning of the 21st century, with a remarkable win in the World Barista Championships. The historical links between coffeehouses and media—ranging from print media to electronic and social media—are discussed. In this, the coffee house acts as an informal public gathering space, what urban sociologist Ray Oldenburg calls a “third place,” neither work nor home. These “third places” provide anchors for community life and facilitate and foster broader, more creative interaction (Oldenburg). This paper will also show how competition from other “third places” such as clubs, hotels, restaurants, and bars have affected the vibrancy of coffee houses. Early Coffee Houses The first coffee house was established in Constantinople in 1554 (Tannahill 252; Huetz de Lemps 387). The first English coffee houses opened in Oxford in 1650 and in London in 1652. Coffee houses multiplied thereafter but, in 1676, when some London coffee houses became hotbeds for political protest, the city prosecutor decided to close them. The ban was soon lifted and between 1680 and 1730 Londoners discovered the pleasure of drinking coffee (Huetz de Lemps 388), although these coffee houses sold a number of hot drinks including tea and chocolate as well as coffee.The first French coffee houses opened in Marseille in 1671 and in Paris the following year. Coffee houses proliferated during the 18th century: by 1720 there were 380 public cafés in Paris and by the end of the century there were 600 (Huetz de Lemps 387). Café Procope opened in Paris in 1674 and, in the 18th century, became a literary salon with regular patrons: Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot and Condorcet (Huetz de Lemps 387; Pitte 472). In England, coffee houses developed into exclusive clubs such as Crockford’s and the Reform, whilst elsewhere in Europe they evolved into what we identify as cafés, similar to the tea shops that would open in England in the late 19th century (Tannahill 252-53). Tea quickly displaced coffee in popularity in British coffee houses (Taylor 142). Pettigrew suggests two reasons why Great Britain became a tea-drinking nation while most of the rest of Europe took to coffee (48). The first was the power of the East India Company, chartered by Elizabeth I in 1600, which controlled the world’s biggest tea monopoly and promoted the beverage enthusiastically. The second was the difficulty England had in securing coffee from the Levant while at war with France at the end of the seventeenth century and again during the War of the Spanish Succession (1702-13). Tea also became the dominant beverage in Ireland and over a period of time became the staple beverage of the whole country. In 1835, Samuel Bewley and his son Charles dared to break the monopoly of The East India Company by importing over 2,000 chests of tea directly from Canton, China, to Ireland. His family would later become synonymous with the importation of coffee and with opening cafés in Ireland (see, Farmar for full history of the Bewley's and their activities). Ireland remains the highest per-capita consumer of tea in the world. Coffee houses have long been linked with social and political change (Kennedy, Politicks; Pincus). The notion that these new non-alcoholic drinks were responsible for the Enlightenment because people could now gather socially without getting drunk is rejected by Wheaton as frivolous, since there had always been alternatives to strong drink, and European civilisation had achieved much in the previous centuries (91). She comments additionally that cafés, as gathering places for dissenters, took over the role that taverns had long played. Pennell and Vickery support this argument adding that by offering a choice of drinks, and often sweets, at a fixed price and in a more civilized setting than most taverns provided, coffee houses and cafés were part of the rise of the modern restaurant. It is believed that, by 1700, the commercial provision of food and drink constituted the second largest occupational sector in London. Travellers’ accounts are full of descriptions of London taverns, pie shops, coffee, bun and chop houses, breakfast huts, and food hawkers (Pennell; Vickery). Dublin Coffee Houses and Later incarnations The earliest reference to coffee houses in Dublin is to the co*ck Coffee House in Cook Street during the reign of Charles II (1660-85). Public dining or drinking establishments listed in the 1738 Dublin Directory include taverns, eating houses, chop houses, coffee houses, and one chocolate house in Fownes Court run by Peter Bardin (Hardiman and Kennedy 157). During the second half of the 17th century, Dublin’s merchant classes transferred allegiance from taverns to the newly fashionable coffee houses as places to conduct business. By 1698, the fashion had spread to country towns with coffee houses found in Cork, Limerick, Kilkenny, Clonmel, Wexford, and Galway, and slightly later in Belfast and Waterford in the 18th century. Maxwell lists some of Dublin’s leading coffee houses and taverns, noting their clientele: There were Lucas’s Coffee House, on Cork Hill (the scene of many duels), frequented by fashionable young men; the Phoenix, in Werburgh Street, where political dinners were held; Dick’s Coffee House, in Skinner’s Row, much patronized by literary men, for it was over a bookseller’s; the Eagle, in Eustace Street, where meetings of the Volunteers were held; the Old Sot’s Hole, near Essex Bridge, famous for its beefsteaks and ale; the Eagle Tavern, on Cork Hill, which was demolished at the same time as Lucas’s to make room for the Royal Exchange; and many others. (76) Many of the early taverns were situated around the Winetavern Street, Cook Street, and Fishamble Street area. (see Fig. 1) Taverns, and later coffee houses, became meeting places for gentlemen and centres for debate and the exchange of ideas. In 1706, Francis Dickson published the Flying Post newspaper at the Four Courts coffee house in Winetavern Street. The Bear Tavern (1725) and the Black Lyon (1735), where a Masonic Lodge assembled every Wednesday, were also located on this street (Gilbert v.1 160). Dick’s Coffee house was established in the late 17th century by bookseller and newspaper proprietor Richard Pue, and remained open until 1780 when the building was demolished. In 1740, Dick’s customers were described thus: Ye citizens, gentlemen, lawyers and squires,who summer and winter surround our great fires,ye quidnuncs! who frequently come into Pue’s,To live upon politicks, coffee, and news. (Gilbert v.1 174) There has long been an association between coffeehouses and publishing books, pamphlets and particularly newspapers. Other Dublin publishers and newspapermen who owned coffee houses included Richard Norris and Thomas Bacon. Until the 1850s, newspapers were burdened with a number of taxes: on the newsprint, a stamp duty, and on each advertisem*nt. By 1865, these taxes had virtually disappeared, resulting in the appearance of 30 new newspapers in Ireland, 24 of them in Dublin. Most people read from copies which were available free of charge in taverns, clubs, and coffee houses (MacGiolla Phadraig). Coffee houses also kept copies of international newspapers. On 4 May 1706, Francis Dickson notes in the Dublin Intelligence that he held the Paris and London Gazettes, Leyden Gazette and Slip, the Paris and Hague Lettres à la Main, Daily Courant, Post-man, Flying Post, Post-script and Manuscripts in his coffeehouse in Winetavern Street (Kennedy, “Dublin”). Henry Berry’s analysis of shop signs in Dublin identifies 24 different coffee houses in Dublin, with the main clusters in Essex Street near the Custom’s House (Cocoa Tree, Bacon’s, Dempster’s, Dublin, Merchant’s, Norris’s, and Walsh’s) Cork Hill (Lucas’s, St Lawrence’s, and Solyman’s) Skinners’ Row (Bow’s’, Darby’s, and Dick’s) Christ Church Yard (Four Courts, and London) College Green (Jack’s, and Parliament) and Crampton Court (Exchange, and Little Dublin). (see Figure 1, below, for these clusters and the locations of other Dublin coffee houses.) The earliest to be referenced is the co*ck Coffee House in Cook Street during the reign of Charles II (1660-85), with Solyman’s (1691), Bow’s (1692), and Patt’s on High Street (1699), all mentioned in print before the 18th century. The name of one, the Cocoa Tree, suggests that chocolate was also served in this coffee house. More evidence of the variety of beverages sold in coffee houses comes from Gilbert who notes that in 1730, one Dublin poet wrote of George Carterwright’s wife at The Custom House Coffee House on Essex Street: Her coffee’s fresh and fresh her tea,Sweet her cream, ptizan, and whea,her drams, of ev’ry sort, we findboth good and pleasant, in their kind. (v. 2 161) Figure 1: Map of Dublin indicating Coffee House clusters 1 = Sackville St.; 2 = Winetavern St.; 3 = Essex St.; 4 = Cork Hill; 5 = Skinner's Row; 6 = College Green.; 7 = Christ Church Yard; 8 = Crampton Court.; 9 = Cook St.; 10 = High St.; 11 = Eustace St.; 12 = Werburgh St.; 13 = Fishamble St.; 14 = Westmorland St.; 15 = South Great George's St.; 16 = Grafton St.; 17 = Kildare St.; 18 = Dame St.; 19 = Anglesea Row; 20 = Foster Place; 21 = Poolbeg St.; 22 = Fleet St.; 23 = Burgh Quay.A = Cafe de Paris, Lincoln Place; B = Red Bank Restaurant, D'Olier St.; C = Morrison's Hotel, Nassau St.; D = Shelbourne Hotel, St. Stephen's Green; E = Jury's Hotel, Dame St. Some coffee houses transformed into the gentlemen’s clubs that appeared in London, Paris and Dublin in the 17th century. These clubs originally met in coffee houses, then taverns, until later proprietary clubs became fashionable. Dublin anticipated London in club fashions with members of the Kildare Street Club (1782) and the Sackville Street Club (1794) owning the premises of their clubhouse, thus dispensing with the proprietor. The first London club to be owned by the members seems to be Arthur’s, founded in 1811 (McDowell 4) and this practice became widespread throughout the 19th century in both London and Dublin. The origin of one of Dublin’s most famous clubs, Daly’s Club, was a chocolate house opened by Patrick Daly in c.1762–65 in premises at 2–3 Dame Street (Brooke). It prospered sufficiently to commission its own granite-faced building on College Green between Anglesea Street and Foster Place which opened in 1789 (Liddy 51). Daly’s Club, “where half the land of Ireland has changed hands”, was renowned for the gambling that took place there (Montgomery 39). Daly’s sumptuous palace catered very well (and discreetly) for honourable Members of Parliament and rich “bucks” alike (Craig 222). The changing political and social landscape following the Act of Union led to Daly’s slow demise and its eventual closure in 1823 (Liddy 51). Coincidentally, the first Starbucks in Ireland opened in 2005 in the same location. Once gentlemen’s clubs had designated buildings where members could eat, drink, socialise, and stay overnight, taverns and coffee houses faced competition from the best Dublin hotels which also had coffee rooms “in which gentlemen could read papers, write letters, take coffee and wine in the evening—an exiguous substitute for a club” (McDowell 17). There were at least 15 establishments in Dublin city claiming to be hotels by 1789 (Corr 1) and their numbers grew in the 19th century, an expansion which was particularly influenced by the growth of railways. By 1790, Dublin’s public houses (“pubs”) outnumbered its coffee houses with Dublin boasting 1,300 (Rooney 132). Names like the Goose and Gridiron, Harp and Crown, Horseshoe and Magpie, and Hen and Chickens—fashionable during the 17th and 18th centuries in Ireland—hung on decorative signs for those who could not read. Throughout the 20th century, the public house provided the dominant “third place” in Irish society, and the drink of choice for itd predominantly male customers was a frothy pint of Guinness. Newspapers were available in public houses and many newspapermen had their own favourite hostelries such as Mulligan’s of Poolbeg Street; The Pearl, and The Palace on Fleet Street; and The White Horse Inn on Burgh Quay. Any coffee served in these establishments prior to the arrival of the new coffee culture in the 21st century was, however, of the powdered instant variety. Hotels / Restaurants with Coffee Rooms From the mid-19th century, the public dining landscape of Dublin changed in line with London and other large cities in the United Kingdom. Restaurants did appear gradually in the United Kingdom and research suggests that one possible reason for this growth from the 1860s onwards was the Refreshment Houses and Wine Licences Act (1860). The object of this act was to “reunite the business of eating and drinking”, thereby encouraging public sobriety (Mac Con Iomaire, “Emergence” v.2 95). Advertisem*nts for Dublin restaurants appeared in The Irish Times from the 1860s. Thom’s Directory includes listings for Dining Rooms from the 1870s and Refreshment Rooms are listed from the 1880s. This pattern continued until 1909, when Thom’s Directory first includes a listing for “Restaurants and Tea Rooms”. Some of the establishments that advertised separate coffee rooms include Dublin’s first French restaurant, the Café de Paris, The Red Bank Restaurant, Morrison’s Hotel, Shelbourne Hotel, and Jury’s Hotel (see Fig. 1). The pattern of separate ladies’ coffee rooms emerged in Dublin and London during the latter half of the 19th century and mixed sex dining only became popular around the last decade of the 19th century, partly infuenced by Cesar Ritz and Auguste Escoffier (Mac Con Iomaire, “Public Dining”). Irish Cafés: From Bewley’s to Starbucks A number of cafés appeared at the beginning of the 20th century, most notably Robert Roberts and Bewley’s, both of which were owned by Quaker families. Ernest Bewley took over the running of the Bewley’s importation business in the 1890s and opened a number of Oriental Cafés; South Great Georges Street (1894), Westmoreland Street (1896), and what became the landmark Bewley’s Oriental Café in Grafton Street (1927). Drawing influence from the grand cafés of Paris and Vienna, oriental tearooms, and Egyptian architecture (inspired by the discovery in 1922 of Tutankhamen’s Tomb), the Grafton Street business brought a touch of the exotic into the newly formed Irish Free State. Bewley’s cafés became the haunt of many of Ireland’s leading literary figures, including Samuel Becket, Sean O’Casey, and James Joyce who mentioned the café in his book, Dubliners. A full history of Bewley’s is available (Farmar). It is important to note, however, that pots of tea were sold in equal measure to mugs of coffee in Bewley’s. The cafés changed over time from waitress- to self-service and a failure to adapt to changing fashions led to the business being sold, with only the flagship café in Grafton Street remaining open in a revised capacity. It was not until the beginning of the 21st century that a new wave of coffee house culture swept Ireland. This was based around speciality coffee beverages such as espressos, cappuccinos, lattés, macchiatos, and frappuccinnos. This new phenomenon coincided with the unprecedented growth in the Irish economy, during which Ireland became known as the “Celtic Tiger” (Murphy 3). One aspect of this period was a building boom and a subsequent growth in apartment living in the Dublin city centre. The American sitcom Friends and its fictional coffee house, “Central Perk,” may also have helped popularise the use of coffee houses as “third spaces” (Oldenberg) among young apartment dwellers in Dublin. This was also the era of the “dotcom boom” when many young entrepreneurs, software designers, webmasters, and stock market investors were using coffee houses as meeting places for business and also as ad hoc office spaces. This trend is very similar to the situation in the 17th and early 18th centuries where coffeehouses became known as sites for business dealings. Various theories explaining the growth of the new café culture have circulated, with reasons ranging from a growth in Eastern European migrants, anti-smoking legislation, returning sophisticated Irish emigrants, and increased affluence (Fenton). Dublin pubs, facing competition from the new coffee culture, began installing espresso coffee machines made by companies such as Gaggia to attract customers more interested in a good latté than a lager and it is within this context that Irish baristas gained such success in the World Barista competition. In 2001 the Georges Street branch of Bewley’s was taken over by a chain called Café, Bar, Deli specialising in serving good food at reasonable prices. Many ex-Bewley’s staff members subsequently opened their own businesses, roasting coffee and running cafés. Irish-owned coffee chains such as Java Republic, Insomnia, and O’Brien’s Sandwich Bars continued to thrive despite the competition from coffee chains Starbucks and Costa Café. Indeed, so successful was the handmade Irish sandwich and coffee business that, before the economic downturn affected its business, Irish franchise O’Brien’s operated in over 18 countries. The Café, Bar, Deli group had also begun to franchise its operations in 2008 when it too became a victim of the global economic downturn. With the growth of the Internet, many newspapers have experienced falling sales of their printed format and rising uptake of their electronic versions. Most Dublin coffee houses today provide wireless Internet connections so their customers can read not only the local newspapers online, but also others from all over the globe, similar to Francis Dickenson’s coffee house in Winetavern Street in the early 18th century. Dublin has become Europe’s Silicon Valley, housing the European headquarters for companies such as Google, Yahoo, Ebay, Paypal, and Facebook. There are currently plans to provide free wireless connectivity throughout Dublin’s city centre in order to promote e-commerce, however, some coffee houses shut off the wireless Internet in their establishments at certain times of the week in order to promote more social interaction to ensure that these “third places” remain “great good places” at the heart of the community (Oldenburg). Conclusion Ireland is not a country that is normally associated with a coffee culture but coffee houses have been part of the fabric of that country since they emerged in Dublin in the 17th century. These Dublin coffee houses prospered in the 18th century, and survived strong competition from clubs and hotels in the 19th century, and from restaurant and public houses into the 20th century. In 2008, when Stephen Morrissey won the coveted title of World Barista Champion, Ireland’s place as a coffee consuming country was re-established. The first decade of the 21st century witnessed a birth of a new espresso coffee culture, which shows no signs of weakening despite Ireland’s economic travails. References Berry, Henry F. “House and Shop Signs in Dublin in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries.” The Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland 40.2 (1910): 81–98. Brooke, Raymond Frederick. Daly’s Club and the Kildare Street Club, Dublin. Dublin, 1930. Corr, Frank. Hotels in Ireland. Dublin: Jemma Publications, 1987. Craig, Maurice. Dublin 1660-1860. Dublin: Allen Figgis, 1980. Farmar, Tony. The Legendary, Lofty, Clattering Café. Dublin: A&A Farmar, 1988. Fenton, Ben. “Cafe Culture taking over in Dublin.” The Telegraph 2 Oct. 2006. 29 Apr. 2012 ‹http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1530308/cafe-culture-taking-over-in-Dublin.html›. Gilbert, John T. A History of the City of Dublin (3 vols.). Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1978. Girouard, Mark. Victorian Pubs. New Haven, Conn.: Yale UP, 1984. Hardiman, Nodlaig P., and Máire Kennedy. A Directory of Dublin for the Year 1738 Compiled from the Most Authentic of Sources. Dublin: Dublin Corporation Public Libraries, 2000. Huetz de Lemps, Alain. “Colonial Beverages and Consumption of Sugar.” Food: A Culinary History from Antiquity to the Present. Eds. Jean-Louis Flandrin and Massimo Montanari. New York: Columbia UP, 1999. 383–93. Kennedy, Máire. “Dublin Coffee Houses.” Ask About Ireland, 2011. 4 Apr. 2012 ‹http://www.askaboutireland.ie/reading-room/history-heritage/pages-in-history/dublin-coffee-houses›. ----- “‘Politicks, Coffee and News’: The Dublin Book Trade in the Eighteenth Century.” Dublin Historical Record LVIII.1 (2005): 76–85. Liddy, Pat. Temple Bar—Dublin: An Illustrated History. Dublin: Temple Bar Properties, 1992. Mac Con Iomaire, Máirtín. “The Emergence, Development, and Influence of French Haute Cuisine on Public Dining in Dublin Restaurants 1900-2000: An Oral History.” Ph.D. thesis, Dublin Institute of Technology, Dublin, 2009. 4 Apr. 2012 ‹http://arrow.dit.ie/tourdoc/12›. ----- “Ireland.” Food Cultures of the World Encylopedia. Ed. Ken Albala. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2010. ----- “Public Dining in Dublin: The History and Evolution of Gastronomy and Commercial Dining 1700-1900.” International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management 24. Special Issue: The History of the Commercial Hospitality Industry from Classical Antiquity to the 19th Century (2012): forthcoming. MacGiolla Phadraig, Brian. “Dublin: One Hundred Years Ago.” Dublin Historical Record 23.2/3 (1969): 56–71. Maxwell, Constantia. Dublin under the Georges 1714–1830. Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1979. McDowell, R. B. Land & Learning: Two Irish Clubs. Dublin: The Lilliput P, 1993. Montgomery, K. L. “Old Dublin Clubs and Coffee-Houses.” New Ireland Review VI (1896): 39–44. Murphy, Antoine E. “The ‘Celtic Tiger’—An Analysis of Ireland’s Economic Growth Performance.” EUI Working Papers, 2000 29 Apr. 2012 ‹http://www.eui.eu/RSCAS/WP-Texts/00_16.pdf›. Oldenburg, Ray, ed. Celebrating the Third Place: Inspiring Stories About The “Great Good Places” At the Heart of Our Communities. New York: Marlowe & Company 2001. Pennell, Sarah. “‘Great Quantities of Gooseberry Pye and Baked Clod of Beef’: Victualling and Eating out in Early Modern London.” Londinopolis: Essays in the Cultural and Social History of Early Modern London. Eds. Paul Griffiths and Mark S. R. Jenner. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2000. 228–59. Pettigrew, Jane. A Social History of Tea. London: National Trust Enterprises, 2001. Pincus, Steve. “‘Coffee Politicians Does Create’: Coffeehouses and Restoration Political Culture.” The Journal of Modern History 67.4 (1995): 807–34. Pitte, Jean-Robert. “The Rise of the Restaurant.” Food: A Culinary History from Antiquity to the Present. Eds. Jean-Louis Flandrin and Massimo Montanari. New York: Columbia UP, 1999. 471–80. Rooney, Brendan, ed. A Time and a Place: Two Centuries of Irish Social Life. Dublin: National Gallery of Ireland, 2006. Tannahill, Reay. Food in History. St Albans, Herts.: Paladin, 1975. Taylor, Laurence. “Coffee: The Bottomless Cup.” The American Dimension: Cultural Myths and Social Realities. Eds. W. Arens and Susan P. Montague. Port Washington, N.Y.: Alfred Publishing, 1976. 14–48. Vickery, Amanda. Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England. New Haven: Yale UP, 2009. Wheaton, Barbara Ketcham. Savouring the Past: The French Kitchen and Table from 1300-1789. London: Chatto & Windus, Hogarth P, 1983. Williams, Anne. “Historical Attitudes to Women Eating in Restaurants.” Public Eating: Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 1991. Ed. Harlan Walker. Totnes: Prospect Books, 1992. 311–14. World Barista, Championship. “History–World Barista Championship”. 2012. 02 Apr. 2012 ‹http://worldbaristachampionship.com2012›.AcknowledgementA warm thank you to Dr. Kevin Griffin for producing the map of Dublin for this article.

Abstract:

IntroductionDespite claims that the importance of distance has been reduced due to technological and communications improvements (Cairncross; Friedman; O’Brien), the ‘power of place’ still resonates, often intensifying the role of geography (Christopherson et al.; Morgan; Pratt; Scott and Storper). Within the film industry, there has been a decentralisation of production from Hollywood, but there remains a spatial logic which has preferenced particular centres, such as Toronto, Vancouver, Sydney and Prague often led by a combination of incentives (Christopherson and Storper; Goldsmith and O’Regan; Goldsmith et al.; Miller et al.; Mould). The emergence of high end television, television programming for which the production budget is more than £1 million per television hour, has presented new opportunities for screen hubs sharing a very similar value chain to the film industry (OlsbergSPI with Nordicity).In recent years, interventions have proliferated with the aim of capitalising on the decentralisation of certain activities in order to attract international screen industries production and embed it within local hubs. Tools for building capacity and expertise have proliferated, including support for studio complex facilities, infrastructural investments, tax breaks and other economic incentives (Cucco; Goldsmith and O’Regan; Jensen; Goldsmith et al.; McDonald; Miller et al.; Mould). Yet experience tells us that these will not succeed everywhere. There is a need for a better understanding of both the capacity for places to build a distinctive and competitive advantage within a highly globalised landscape and the relative merits of alternative interventions designed to generate a sustainable production base.This article first sets out the rationale for the appetite identified in the screen industries for co-location, or clustering and concentration in a tightly drawn physical area, in global hubs of production. It goes on to explore the latest trends of decentralisation and examines the upturn in interventions aimed at attracting mobile screen industries capital and labour. Finally it introduces the Scottish screen industries and explores some of the ways in which Scotland has sought to position itself as a recipient of screen industries activity. The paper identifies some key gaps in infrastructure, most notably a studio, and calls for closer examination of the essential ingredients of, and possible interventions needed for, a vibrant and sustainable industry.A Compulsion for ProximityIt has been argued that particular spatial and place-based factors are central to the development and organisation of the screen industries. The film and television sector, the particular focus of this article, exhibit an extraordinarily high degree of spatial agglomeration, especially favouring centres with global status. It is worth noting that the computer games sector, not explored in this article, slightly diverges from this trend displaying more spatial patterns of decentralisation (Vallance), although key physical hubs of activity have been identified (Champion). Creative products often possess a cachet that is directly associated with their point of origin, for example fashion from Paris, films from Hollywood and country music from Nashville – although it can also be acknowledged that these are often strategic commercial constructions (Pecknold). The place of production represents a unique component of the final product as well as an authentication of substantive and symbolic quality (Scott, “Creative cities”). Place can act as part of a brand or image for creative industries, often reinforcing the advantage of being based in particular centres of production.Very localised historical, cultural, social and physical factors may also influence the success of creative production in particular places. Place-based factors relating to the built environment, including cheap space, public-sector support framework, connectivity, local identity, institutional environment and availability of amenities, are seen as possible influences in the locational choices of creative industry firms (see, for example, Drake; Helbrecht; Hutton; Leadbeater and Oakley; Markusen).Employment trends are notoriously difficult to measure in the screen industries (Christopherson, “Hollywood in decline?”), but the sector does contain large numbers of very small firms and freelancers. This allows them to be flexible but poses certain problems that can be somewhat offset by co-location. The findings of Antcliff et al.’s study of workers in the audiovisual industry in the UK suggested that individuals sought to reconstruct stable employment relations through their involvement in and use of networks. The trust and reciprocity engendered by stable networks, built up over time, were used to offset the risk associated with the erosion of stable employment. These findings are echoed by a study of TV content production in two media regions in Germany by Sydow and Staber who found that, although firms come together to work on particular projects, typically their business relations extend for a much longer period than this. Commonly, firms and individuals who have worked together previously will reassemble for further project work aided by their past experiences and expectations.Co-location allows the development of shared structures: language, technical attitudes, interpretative schemes and ‘communities of practice’ (Bathelt, et al.). Grabher describes this process as ‘hanging out’. Deep local pools of creative and skilled labour are advantageous both to firms and employees (Reimer et al.) by allowing flexibility, developing networks and offsetting risk (Banks et al.; Scott, “Global City Regions”). For example in Cook and Pandit’s study comparing the broadcasting industry in three city-regions, London was found to be hugely advantaged by its unrivalled talent pool, high financial rewards and prestigious projects. As Barnes and Hutton assert in relation to the wider creative industries, “if place matters, it matters most to them” (1251). This is certainly true for the screen industries and their spatial logic points towards a compulsion for proximity in large global hubs.Decentralisation and ‘Sticky’ PlacesDespite the attraction of global production hubs, there has been a decentralisation of screen industries from key centres, starting with the film industry and the vertical disintegration of Hollywood studios (Christopherson and Storper). There are instances of ‘runaway production’ from the 1920s onwards with around 40 per cent of all features being accounted for by offshore production in 1960 (Miller et al., 133). This trend has been increasing significantly in the last 20 years, leading to the genesis of new hubs of screen activity such as Toronto, Vancouver, Sydney and Prague (Christopherson, “Project work in context”; Goldsmith et al.; Mould; Miller et al.; Szczepanik). This development has been prompted by a multiplicity of reasons including favourable currency value differentials and economic incentives. Subsidies and tax breaks have been offered to secure international productions with most countries demanding that, in order to qualify for tax relief, productions have to spend a certain amount of their budget within the local economy, employ local crew and use domestic creative talent (Hill). Extensive infrastructure has been developed including studio complexes to attempt to lure productions with the advantage of a full service offering (Goldsmith and O’Regan).Internationally, Canada has been the greatest beneficiary of ‘runaway production’ with a state-led enactment of generous film incentives since the late 1990s (McDonald). Vancouver and Toronto are the busiest locations for North American Screen production after Los Angeles and New York, due to exchange rates and tax rebates on labour costs (Miller et al., 141). 80% of Vancouver’s production is attributable to runaway production (Jensen, 27) and the city is considered by some to have crossed a threshold as:It now possesses sufficient depth and breadth of talent to undertake the full array of pre-production, production and post-production services for the delivery of major motion pictures and TV programmes. (Barnes and Coe, 19)Similarly, Toronto is considered to have established a “comprehensive set of horizontal and vertical media capabilities” to ensure its status as a “full function media centre” (Davis, 98). These cities have successfully engaged in entrepreneurial activity to attract production (Christopherson, “Project Work in Context”) and in Vancouver the proactive role of provincial government and labour unions are, in part, credited with its success (Barnes and Coe). Studio-complex infrastructure has also been used to lure global productions, with Toronto, Melbourne and Sydney all being seen as key examples of where such developments have been used as a strategic priority to take local production capacity to the next level (Goldsmith and O’Regan).Studies which provide a historiography of the development of screen-industry hubs emphasise a complex interplay of social, cultural and physical conditions. In the complex and global flows of the screen industries, ‘sticky’ hubs have emerged with the ability to attract and retain capital and skilled labour. Despite being principally organised to attract international production, most studio complexes, especially those outside of global centres need to have a strong relationship to local or national film and television production to ensure the sustainability and depth of the labour pool (Goldsmith and O’Regan, 2003). Many have a broadcaster on site as well as a range of companies with a media orientation and training facilities (Goldsmith and O’Regan, 2003; Picard, 2008). The emergence of film studio complexes in the Australian Gold Coast and Vancouver was accompanied by an increasing role for television production and this multi-purpose nature was important for the continuity of production.Fostering a strong community of below the line workers, such as set designers, locations managers, make-up artists and props manufacturers, can also be a clear advantage in attracting international productions. For example at Cinecitta in Italy, the expertise of set designers and experienced crews in the Barrandov Studios of Prague are regarded as major selling points of the studio complexes there (Goldsmith and O’Regan; Miller et al.; Szczepanik). Natural and built environments are also considered very important for film and television firms and it is a useful advantage for capturing international production when cities can double for other locations as in the cases of Toronto, Vancouver, Prague for example (Evans; Goldsmith and O’Regan; Szczepanik). Toronto, for instance, has doubled for New York in over 100 films and with regard to television Due South’s (1994-1998) use of Toronto as Chicago was estimated to have saved 40 per cent in costs (Miller et al., 141).The Scottish Screen Industries Within mobile flows of capital and labour, Scotland has sought to position itself as a recipient of screen industries activity through multiple interventions, including investment in institutional frameworks, direct and indirect economic subsidies and the development of physical infrastructure. Traditionally creative industry activity in the UK has been concentrated in London and the South East which together account for 43% of the creative economy workforce (Bakhshi et al.). In order, in part to redress this imbalance and more generally to encourage the attraction and retention of international production a range of policies have been introduced focused on the screen industries. A revised Film Tax Relief was introduced in 2007 to encourage inward investment and prevent offshoring of indigenous production, and this has since been extended to high-end television, animation and children’s programming. Broadcasting has also experienced a push for decentralisation led by public funding with a responsibility to be regionally representative. The BBC (“BBC Annual Report and Accounts 2014/15”) is currently exceeding its target of 50% network spend outside London by 2016, with 17% spent in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Channel 4 has similarly committed to commission at least 9% of its original spend from the nations by 2020. Studios have been also developed across the UK including at Roath Lock (Cardiff), Titanic Studios (Belfast), MedicaCity (Salford) and The Sharp Project (Manchester).The creative industries have been identified as one of seven growth sectors for Scotland by the government (Scottish Government). In 2010, the film and video sector employed 3,500 people and contributed £120 million GVA and £120 million adjusted GVA to the economy and the radio and TV sector employed 3,500 people and contributed £50 million GVA and £400 million adjusted GVA (The Scottish Parliament). Beyond the direct economic benefits of sectors, the on-screen representation of Scotland has been claimed to boost visitor numbers to the country (EKOS) and high profile international film productions have been attracted including Skyfall (2012) and WWZ (2013).Scotland has historically attracted international film and TV productions due to its natural locations (VisitScotland) and on average, between 2009-2014, six big budget films a year used Scottish locations both urban and rural (BOP Consulting, 2014). In all, a total of £20 million was generated by film-making in Glasgow during 2011 (Balkind) with WWZ (2013) and Cloud Atlas (2013), representing Philadelphia and San Francisco respectively, as well as doubling for Edinburgh for the recent acclaimed Scottish films Filth (2013) and Sunshine on Leith (2013). Sanson (80) asserts that the use of the city as a site for international productions not only brings in direct revenue from production money but also promotes the city as a “fashionable place to live, work and visit. Creativity makes the city both profitable and ‘cool’”.Nonetheless, issues persist and it has been suggested that Scotland lacks a stable and sustainable film industry, with low indigenous production levels and variable success from year to year in attracting inward investment (BOP Consulting). With regard to crew, problems with an insufficient production base have been identified as an issue in maintaining a pipeline of skills (BOP Consulting). Developing ‘talent’ is a central aspect of the Scottish Government’s Strategy for the Creative Industries, yet there remains the core challenge of retaining skills and encouraging new talent into the industry (BOP Consulting).With regard to film, a lack of substantial funding incentives and the absence of a studio have been identified as a key concern for the sector. For example, within the film industry the majority of inward investment filming in Scotland is location work as it lacks the studio facilities that would enable it to sustain a big-budget production in its entirety (BOP Consulting). The absence of such infrastructure has been seen as contributing to a drain of Scottish talent from these industries to other areas and countries where there is a more vibrant sector (BOP Consulting). The loss of Scottish talent to Northern Ireland was attributed to the longevity of the work being provided by Games of Thrones (2011-) now having completed its six series at the Titanic Studios in Belfast (EKOS) although this may have been stemmed somewhat recently with the attraction of US high-end TV series Outlander (2014-) which has been based at Wardpark in Cumbernauld since 2013.Television, both high-end production and local broadcasting, appears crucial to the sustainability of screen production in Scotland. Outlander has been estimated to contribute to Scotland’s production spend figures reaching a historic high of £45.8 million in 2014 (Creative Scotland ”Creative Scotland Screen Strategy Update”). The arrival of the program has almost doubled production spend in Scotland, offering the chance for increased stability for screen industries workers. Qualifying for UK High-End Television Tax Relief, Outlander has engaged a crew of approximately 300 across props, filming and set build, and cast over 2,000 supporting artist roles from within Scotland and the UK.Long running drama, in particular, offers key opportunities for both those cutting their teeth in the screen industries and also by providing more consistent and longer-term employment to existing workers. BBC television soap River City (2002-) has been identified as a key example of such an opportunity and the programme has been credited with providing a springboard for developing the skills of local actors, writers and production crew (Hibberd). This kind of pipeline of production is critical given the work patterns of the sector. According to Creative Skillset, of the 4,000 people in Scotland are employed in the film and television industries, 40% of television workers are freelance and 90% of film production work in freelance (EKOS).In an attempt to address skills gaps, the Outlander Trainee Placement Scheme has been devised in collaboration with Creative Scotland and Creative Skillset. During filming of Season One, thirty-eight trainees were supported across a range of production and craft roles, followed by a further twenty-five in Season Two. Encouragingly Outlander, and the books it is based on, is set in Scotland so the authenticity of place has played a strong component in the decision to locate production there. Producer David Brown began his career on Bill Forsyth films Gregory’s Girl (1981), Local Hero (1983) and Comfort and Joy (1984) and has a strong existing relationship to Scotland. He has been very vocal in his support for the trainee program, contending that “training is the future of our industry and we at Outlander see the growth of talent and opportunities as part of our mission here in Scotland” (“Outlander fast tracks next generation of skilled screen talent”).ConclusionsThis article has aimed to explore the relationship between place and the screen industries and, taking Scotland as its focus, has outlined a need to more closely examine the ways in which the sector can be supported. Despite the possible gains in terms of building a sustainable industry, the state-led funding of the global screen industries is contested. The use of tax breaks and incentives has been problematised and critiques range from use of public funding to attract footloose media industries to the increasingly zero sum game of competition between competing places (Morawetz; McDonald). In relation to broadcasting, there have been critiques of a ‘lift and shift’ approach to policy in the UK, with TV production companies moving to the nations and regions temporarily to meet the quota and leaving once a production has finished (House of Commons). Further to this, issues have been raised regarding how far such interventions can seed and develop a rich production ecology that offers opportunities for indigenous talent (Christopherson and Rightor).Nonetheless recent success for the screen industries in Scotland can, at least in part, be attributed to interventions including increased decentralisation of broadcasting and the high-end television tax incentives. This article has identified gaps in infrastructure which continue to stymie growth and have led to production drain to other centres. 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Abstract:

IntroductionCoffee, as a stimulant, and the spaces in which it is has been consumed, have long played a vital role in fostering communication, creativity, and sociality. This article explores the interrelationship of café space, communication, creativity, and materialism. In developing these themes, this article is structured in two parts. The first looks back to the coffee houses of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to give a historical context to the contemporary role of the café as a key site of creativity through its facilitation of social interaction, communication and information exchange. The second explores the continuation of the link between cafés, communication and creativity, through an instance from the mid-twentieth century where this process becomes individualised and is tied more intrinsically to the material surroundings of the café itself. From this, we argue that in order to understand the connection between café space and creativity, it is valuable to consider the rich polymorphic material and aesthetic composition of cafés. The Social Life of Coffee: London’s Coffee Houses While the social consumption of coffee has a long history, here we restrict our focus to a discussion of the London coffee houses of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It was during the seventeenth century that the vogue of these coffee houses reached its zenith when they operated as a vibrant site of mercantile activity, as well as cultural and political exchange (Cowan; Lillywhite; Ellis). Many of these coffee houses were situated close to the places where politicians, merchants, and other significant people congregated and did business, near government buildings such as Parliament, as well as courts, ports and other travel route hubs (Lillywhite 17). A great deal of information was shared within these spaces and, as a result, the coffee house became a key venue for communication, especially the reading and distribution of print and scribal publications (Cowan 85). At this time, “no coffee house worth its name” would be without a ready selection of newspapers for its patrons (Cowan 173). By working to twenty-four hour diurnal cycles and heightening the sense of repetition and regularity, coffee houses also played a crucial role in routinising news as a form of daily consumption alongside other forms of habitual consumption (including that of coffee drinking). In Cowan’s words, “restoration coffee houses soon became known as places ‘dasht with diurnals and books of news’” (172). Among these was the short-lived but nonetheless infamous social gossip publication, The Tatler (1709-10), which was strongly associated with the London coffee houses and, despite its short publication life, offers great insight into the social life and scandals of the time. The coffee house became, in short, “the primary social space in which ‘news’ was both produced and consumed” (Cowan 172). The proprietors of coffee houses were quick to exploit this situation by dealing in “news mongering” and developing their own news publications to supplement their incomes (172). They sometimes printed news, commentary and gossip that other publishers were not willing to print. However, as their reputation as news providers grew, so did the pressure on coffee houses to meet the high cost of continually acquiring or producing journals (Cowan 173; Ellis 185-206). In addition to the provision of news, coffee houses were vital sites for other forms of communication. For example, coffee houses were key venues where “one might deposit and receive one’s mail” (Cowan 175), and the Penny Post used coffeehouses as vital pick-up and delivery centres (Lillywhite 17). As Cowan explains, “Many correspondents [including Jonathan Swift] used a coffeehouse as a convenient place to write their letters as well as to send them” (176). This service was apparently provided gratis for regular patrons, but coffee house owners were less happy to provide this for their more infrequent customers (Cowan 176). London’s coffee houses functioned, in short, as notable sites of sociality that bundled together drinking coffee with news provision and postal and other services to attract customers (Cowan; Ellis). Key to the success of the London coffee house of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was the figure of the virtuoso habitué (Cowan 105)—an urbane individual of the middle or upper classes who was skilled in social intercourse, skills that were honed through participation in the highly ritualised and refined forms of interpersonal communication, such as visiting the stately homes of that time. In contrast to such private visits, the coffee house provided a less formalised and more spontaneous space of sociality, but where established social skills were distinctly advantageous. A striking example of the figure of the virtuoso habitué is the philosopher, architect and scientist Robert Hooke (1635-1703). Hooke, by all accounts, used the opportunities provided by his regular visits to coffee houses “to draw on the knowledge of a wide variety of individuals, from servants and skilled laborers to aristocrats, as well as to share and display novel scientific instruments” (Cowan 105) in order to explore and develop his virtuoso interests. The coffee house also served Hooke as a place to debate philosophy with cliques of “like-minded virtuosi” and thus formed the “premier locale” through which he could “fulfil his own view of himself as a virtuoso, as a man of business, [and] as a man at the centre of intellectual life in the city” (Cowan 105-06). For Hooke, the coffee house was a space for serious work, and he was known to complain when “little philosophical work” was accomplished (105-06). Sociality operates in this example as a form of creative performance, demonstrating individual skill, and is tied to other forms of creative output. Patronage of a coffee house involved hearing and passing on gossip as news, but also entailed skill in philosophical debate and other intellectual pursuits. It should also be noted that the complex role of the coffee house as a locus of communication, sociality, and creativity was repeated elsewhere. During the 1600s in Egypt (and elsewhere in the Middle East), for example, coffee houses served as sites of intensive literary activity as well as the locations for discussions of art, sciences and literature, not to mention also of gambling and drug use (Hattox 101). While the popularity of coffee houses had declined in London by the 1800s, café culture was flowering elsewhere in mainland Europe. In the late 1870s in Paris, Edgar Degas and Edward Manet documented the rich café life of the city in their drawings and paintings (Ellis 216). Meanwhile, in Vienna, “the kaffeehaus offered another evocative model of urban and artistic modernity” (Ellis 217; see also Bollerey 44-81). Serving wine and dinners as well as coffee and pastries, the kaffeehaus was, like cafés elsewhere in Europe, a mecca for writers, artists and intellectuals. The Café Royal in London survived into the twentieth century, mainly through the patronage of European expatriates and local intellectuals such as Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, T. S. Elliot, and Henri Bergson (Ellis 220). This pattern of patronage within specific and more isolated cafés was repeated in famous gatherings of literary identities elsewhere in Europe throughout the twentieth century. From this historical perspective, a picture emerges of how the social functions of the coffee house and its successors, the espresso bar and modern café, have shifted over the course of their histories (Bollerey 44-81). In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the coffee house was an important location for vibrant social interaction and the consumption and distribution of various forms of communication such as gossip, news, and letters. However, in the years of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the café was more commonly a site for more restricted social interaction between discrete groups. Studies of cafés and creativity during this era focus on cafés as “factories of literature, inciters to art, and breeding places for new ideas” (Fitch, The Grand 18). Central in these accounts are bohemian artists, their associated social circles, and their preferred cafés de bohème (for detailed discussion, see Wilson; Fitch, Paris Café; Brooker; Grafe and Bollerey 4-41). As much of this literature on café culture details, by the early twentieth century, cafés emerge as places that enable individuals to carve out a space for sociality and creativity which was not possible elsewhere in the modern metropolis. Writing on the modern metropolis, Simmel suggests that the concentration of people and things in cities “stimulate[s] the nervous system of the individual” to such an extent that it prompts a kind of self-preservation that he terms a “blasé attitude” (415). This is a form of “reserve”, he writes, which “grants to the individual a [certain] kind and an amount of personal freedom” that was hitherto unknown (416). Cafés arguably form a key site in feeding this dynamic insofar as they facilitate self-protectionism—Fitch’s “pool of privacy” (The Grand 22)—and, at the same time, produce a sense of individual freedom in Simmel’s sense of the term. That is to say, from the early-to-mid twentieth century, cafés have become complex settings in terms of the relationships they enable or constrain between living in public, privacy, intimacy, and cultural practice. (See Haine for a detailed discussion of how this plays out in relation to working class engagement with Paris cafés, and Wilson as well as White on other cultural contexts, such as Japan.) Threaded throughout this history is a clear celebration of the individual artist as a kind of virtuoso habitué of the contemporary café. Café Jama Michalika The following historical moment, drawn from a powerful point in the mid-twentieth century, illustrates this last stage in the evolution of the relationship between café space, communication, and creativity. This particular historical moment concerns the renowned Polish composer and conductor Krzysztof Penderecki, who is most well-known for his avant-garde piece Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima (1960), his Polymorphia (1961), and St Luke Passion (1963-66), all of which entailed new compositional and notation techniques. Poland, along with other European countries devastated by the Second World War, underwent significant rebuilding after the war, also investing heavily in the arts, musical education, new concert halls, and conservatoria (Monastra). In the immediate post-war period, Poland and Polish culture was under the strong ideological influence exerted by the Soviet Union. However, as Thomas notes, within a year of Stalin’s death in 1953, “there were flickering signs of moderation in Polish culture” (83). With respect to musical creativity, a key turning point was the Warsaw Autumn Music Festival of 1956. “The driving force” behind the first festival (which was to become an annual event), was Polish “composers’ overwhelming sense of cultural isolation and their wish to break the provincial nature of Polish music” at that time (Thomas 85). Penderecki was one of a younger generation of composers who participated in, and benefited from, these early festivals, making his first appearance in 1959 with his composition Strophes, and successive appearances with Dimensions of Time and Silence in 1960, and Threnody in 1961 (Thomas 90). Penderecki married in the 1950s and had a child in 1955. This, in combination with the fact that his wife was a pianist and needed to practice daily, restricted Penderecki’s ability to work in their small Krakow apartment. Nor could he find space at the music school which was free from the intrusion of the sound of other instruments. Instead, he frequented the café Jama Michalika off the central square of Krakow, where he worked most days between nine in the morning and noon, when he would leave as a pianist began to play. Penderecki states that because of the small space of the café table, he had to “invent [a] special kind of notation which allowed me to write the piece which was for 52 instruments, like Threnody, on one small piece of paper” (Krzysztof Penderecki, 2000). In this, Penderecki created a completely new set of notation symbols, which assisted him in graphically representing tone clustering (Robinson 6) while, in his score for Polymorphia, he implemented “novel graphic notation, comparable with medical temperature charts, or oscillograms” (Schwinger 29) to represent in the most compact way possible the dense layering of sounds and vocal elements that is developed in this particular piece. This historical account is valuable because it contributes to discussions on individual creativity that both depends on, and occurs within, the material space of the café. This relationship is explored in Walter Benjamin’s essay “Polyclinic”, where he develops an extended analogy between the writer and the café and the surgeon and his instruments. As Cohen summarises, “Benjamin constructs the field of writerly operation both in medical terms and as a space dear to Parisian intellectuals, as an operating table that is also the marble-topped table of a café” (179). At this time, the space of the café itself thus becomes a vital site for individual cultural production, putting the artist in touch with the social life of the city, as many accounts of writers and artists in the cafés of Paris, Prague, Vienna, and elsewhere in Europe attest. “The attraction of the café for the writer”, Fitch argues, “is that seeming tension between the intimate circle of privacy in a comfortable room, on the one hand, and the flow of (perhaps usable) information all around on the other” (The Grand 11). Penderecki talks about searching for a sound while composing in café Jama Michalika and, hearing the noise of a passing tram, subsequently incorporated it into his famous composition, Threnody (Krzysztof Penderecki, 2000). There is an indirect connection here with the attractions of the seventeenth century coffee houses in London, where news writers drew much of their gossip and news from the talk within the coffee houses. However, the shift is to a more isolated, individualistic habitué. Nonetheless, the aesthetic composition of the café space remains essential to the creative productivity described by Penderecki. A concept that can be used to describe this method of composition is contained within one of Penderecki’s best-known pieces, Polymorphia (1961). The term “polymorphia” refers not to the form of the music itself (which is actually quite conventionally structured) but rather to the multiple blending of sounds. Schwinger defines polymorphia as “many formedness […] which applies not […] to the form of the piece, but to the broadly deployed scale of sound, [the] exchange and simultaneous penetration of sound and noise, the contrast and interflow of soft and hard sounds” (131). This description also reflects the rich material context of the café space as Penderecki describes its role in shaping (both enabling and constraining) his creative output. Creativity, Technology, Materialism The materiality of the café—including the table itself for Penderecki—is crucial in understanding the relationship between the forms of creative output and the material conditions of the spaces that enable them. In Penderecki’s case, to understand the origins of the score and even his innovative forms of musical notation as artefacts of communication, we need to understand the material conditions under which they were created. As a fixture of twentieth and twenty-first century urban environments, the café mediates the private within the public in a way that offers the contemporary virtuoso habitué a rich, polymorphic sensory experience. In a discussion of the indivisibility of sensation and its resistance to language, writer Anna Gibbs describes these rich experiential qualities: sitting by the window in a café watching the busy streetscape with the warmth of the morning sun on my back, I smell the delicious aroma of coffee and simultaneously feel its warmth in my mouth, taste it, and can tell the choice of bean as I listen idly to the chatter in the café around me and all these things blend into my experience of “being in the café” (201). Gibbs’s point is that the world of the café is highly synaesthetic and infused with sensual interconnections. The din of the café with its white noise of conversation and overlaying sounds of often carefully chosen music illustrates the extension of taste beyond the flavour of the coffee on the palate. In this way, the café space provides the infrastructure for a type of creative output that, in Gibbs’s case, facilitates her explanation of expression and affect. The individualised virtuoso habitué, as characterised by Penderecki’s work within café Jama Michalika, simply describes one (celebrated) form of the material conditions of communication and creativity. An essential factor in creative cultural output is contained in the ways in which material conditions such as these come to be organised. As Elizabeth Grosz expresses it: Art is the regulation and organisation of its materials—paint, canvas, concrete, steel, marble, words, sounds, bodily movements, indeed any materials—according to self-imposed constraints, the creation of forms through which these materials come to generate and intensify sensation and thus directly impact living bodies, organs, nervous systems (4). Materialist and medium-oriented theories of media and communication have emphasised the impact of physical constraints and enablers on the forms produced. McLuhan, for example, famously argued that the typewriter brought writing, speech, and publication into closer association, one effect of which was the tighter regulation of spelling and grammar, a pressure toward precision and uniformity that saw a jump in the sales of dictionaries (279). In the poetry of E. E. Cummings, McLuhan sees the typewriter as enabling a patterned layout of text that functions as “a musical score for choral speech” (278). In the same way, the café in Penderecki’s recollections both constrains his ability to compose freely (a creative activity that normally requires ample flat surface), but also facilitates the invention of a new language for composition, one able to accommodate the small space of the café table. Recent studies that have sought to materialise language and communication point to its physicality and the embodied forms through which communication occurs. As Packer and Crofts Wiley explain, “infrastructure, space, technology, and the body become the focus, a move that situates communication and culture within a physical, corporeal landscape” (3). The confined and often crowded space of the café and its individual tables shape the form of productive output in Penderecki’s case. Targeting these material constraints and enablers in her discussion of art, creativity and territoriality, Grosz describes the “architectural force of framing” as liberating “the qualities of objects or events that come to constitute the substance, the matter, of the art-work” (11). More broadly, the design features of the café, the form and layout of the tables and the space made available for individual habitation, the din of the social encounters, and even the stimulating influences on the body of the coffee served there, can be seen to act as enablers of communication and creativity. Conclusion The historical examples examined above indicate a material link between cafés and communication. They also suggest a relationship between materialism and creativity, as well as the roots of the romantic association—or mythos—of cafés as a key source of cultural life as they offer a “shared place of composition” and an “environment for creative work” (Fitch, The Grand 11). We have detailed one example pertaining to European coffee consumption, cafés and creativity. While we believe Penderecki’s case is valuable in terms of what it can tell us about forms of communication and creativity, clearly other cultural and historical contexts may reveal additional insights—as may be found in the cases of Middle Eastern cafés (Hattox) or the North American diner (Hurley), and in contemporary developments such as the café as a source of free WiFi and the commodification associated with global coffee chains. Penderecki’s example, we suggest, also sheds light on a longer history of creativity and cultural production that intersects with contemporary work practices in city spaces as well as conceptualisations of the individual’s place within complex urban spaces. References Benjamin, Walter. “Polyclinic” in “One-Way Street.” One-Way Street and Other Writings. Trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter. London: Verso, 1998: 88-9. Bollerey, Franziska. “Setting the Stage for Modernity: The Cosmos of the Coffee House.” Cafés and Bars: The Architecture of Public Display. Eds. Christoph Grafe and Franziska Bollerey. New York: Routledge, 2007. 44-81. Brooker, Peter. Bohemia in London: The Social Scene of Early Modernism. Houndmills, Hamps.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Cohen, Margaret. Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution. Berkeley: U of California P, 1995. Cowan, Brian. The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the British Coffeehouse. New Haven: Yale UP, 2005. Ellis, Markman. The Coffee House: A Cultural History. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2004. Fitch, Noël Riley. Paris Café: The Sélect Crowd. Brooklyn: Soft Skull Press, 2007. -----. The Grand Literary Cafés of Europe. London: New Holland Publishers (UK), 2006. Gibbs, Anna. “After Affect: Sympathy, Synchrony, and Mimetic Communication.” The Affect Theory Reader. Eds. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Siegworth. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. 186-205. Grafe, Christoph, and Franziska Bollerey. “Introduction: Cafés and Bars—Places for Sociability.” Cafés and Bars: The Architecture of Public Display. Eds. Christoph Grafe and Franziska Bollerey. New York: Routledge, 2007. 4-41. Grosz, Elizabeth. Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth. New York: Columbia UP, 2008. Haine, W. Scott. The World of the Paris Café. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996. Hattox, Ralph S. Coffee and Coffeehouses: The Origins of a Social Beverage in the Medieval Near East. Seattle: U of Washington P, 1985. Hurley, Andrew. Diners, Bowling Alleys and Trailer Parks: Chasing the American Dream in the Postwar Consumer Culture. New York: Basic Books, 2001. Krzysztof Penderecki. Dir. Andreas Missler-Morell. Spektrum TV production and Telewizja Polska S.A. Oddzial W Krakowie for RM Associates and ZDF in cooperation with ARTE, 2000. Lillywhite, Bryant. London Coffee Houses: A Reference Book of Coffee Houses of the Seventeenth, Eighteenth, and Nineteenth Centuries. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1963. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. London: Abacus, 1974. Monastra, Peggy. “Krzysztof Penderecki’s Polymorphia and Fluorescence.” Moldenhauer Archives, [US] Library of Congress. 12 Jan. 2012 ‹http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/moldenhauer/2428143.pdf› Packer, Jeremy, and Stephen B. Crofts Wiley. “Introduction: The Materiality of Communication.” Communication Matters: Materialist Approaches to Media, Mobility and Networks. New York, Routledge, 2012. 3-16. Robinson, R. Krzysztof Penderecki: A Guide to His Works. Princeton, NJ: Prestige Publications, 1983. Schwinger, Wolfram. Krzysztof Penderecki: His Life and Work. Encounters, Biography and Musical Commentary. London: Schott, 1979. Simmel, Georg. The Sociology of Georg Simmel. Ed. and trans. Kurt H. Wolff. Glencoe, IL: The Free P, 1960. Thomas, Adrian. Polish Music since Szymanowski. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005. White, Merry I. Coffee Life in Japan. Berkeley: U of California P, 2012. Wilson, Elizabeth. “The Bohemianization of Mass Culture.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 2.1 (1999): 11-32.

Abstract:

This paper argues that artist Dope Saint Jude is transforming South African hip-hop by queering a genre that has predominantly been male and heteronormative. Specifically, I analyse the opening skit of her music video “Keep in Touch” in order to unpack the ways which she revives Gayle, a gay language that adopted double-coded forms of speech during the apartheid era—a context in which hom*osexuals were criminalised. The use of Gayle and spaces close to the city centre of Cape Town (such as Salt River and Woodstock) speaks to the city as it was before it was transformed by the decline of industries due to the country’s adoption of neoliberal economics and, more recently, by the gentrification of these spaces. Dope Saint Jude therefore reclaims these city spaces through her use of gay modes of speech that have a long history in Cape Town and by positioning her work as hip-hop, which has been popular in the city for well over two decades. Her inclusion of transgender MC and DJ Angel Ho pushes the boundaries of hegemonic and binary conceptions of gender identity even further. In essence, Dope Saint Jude is transforming local hip-hop in a context that is shaped significantly by US cultural imperialism. The artist is also transforming our perspective of spaces that have been altered by neoliberal economics.Setting the SceneDope Saint Jude (DSJ) is a queer MC from Elsies River, a working class township located on Cape Town's Cape Flats in South Africa. Elsies River was defined as a “coloured” neighbourhood under the apartheid state's Group Areas Act, which segregated South Africans racially. With the aid of the Population Registration Act, citizens were classified, not merely along the lines of white, Asian, or black—black subjects were also divided into further categories. The apartheid state also distinguished between black and “coloured” subjects. Michael MacDonald contends that segregation “ordained blacks to be inferior to whites; apartheid cast them to be indelibly different” (11). Apartheid declared “African claims in South Africa to be inferior to white claims” and effectively claimed that black subjects “belonged elsewhere, in societies of their own, because their race was different” (ibid). The term “coloured” defined people as “mixed race” to separate communities that might otherwise have identified as black in the broad and inclusive sense (Erasmus 16). Racial categorisation was used to create a racial hierarchy with white subjects at the top of that hierarchy and those classified as black receiving the least resources and benefits. This frustrated attempts to establish broad alliances of black struggles against apartheid. It is in this sense that race is socially and politically constructed and continues to have currency, despite the fact that biologically essentialist understandings of race have been discredited (Yudell 13–14). Thanks to apartheid town planning and resource allocation, many townships on the Cape Flats were poverty-stricken and plagued by gang violence (Salo 363). This continues to be the case because post-apartheid South Africa's embrace of neoliberal economics failed to address racialised class inequalities significantly (Haupt, Static 6–8). This is the '90s context in which socially conscious hip-hop crews, such as Prophets of da City or Black Noise, came together. They drew inspiration from Black Consciousness philosophy via their exposure to US hip-hop crews such as Public Enemy in order to challenge apartheid policies, including their racial interpellation as “coloured” as distinct from the more inclusive category, black (Haupt, “Black Thing” 178). Prophets of da City—whose co-founding member, Shaheen Ariefdien, also lived in Elsies River—was the first South African hip-hop outfit to record an album. Whilst much of their work was performed in English, they quickly transformed the genre by rapping in non-standard varieties of Afrikaans and by including MCs who rap in African languages (ibid). They therefore succeeded in addressing key issues related to race, language, and class disparities in relation to South Africa's transition to democracy (Haupt, “Black Thing”; Haupt, Stealing Empire). However, as is the case with mainstream US hip-hop, specifically gangsta rap (Clay 149), South African hip-hop has been largely dominated by heterosexual men. This includes the more commercial hip-hop scene, which is largely perceived to be located in Johannesburg, where male MCs like AKA and Cassper Nyovest became celebrities. However, certain female MCs have claimed the genre, notably EJ von Lyrik and Burni Aman who are formerly of Godessa, the first female hip-hop crew to record and perform locally and internationally (Haupt, Stealing Empire 166; Haupt, “Can a Woman in Hip-Hop”). DSJ therefore presents the exception to a largely heteronormative and male-dominated South African music industry and hip-hop scene as she transforms it with her queer politics. While queer hip-hop is not new in the US (Pabón and Smalls), this is new territory for South Africa. Writing about the US MC Jean Grae in the context of a “male-dominated music industry and genre,” Shanté Paradigm Smalls contends,Heteronormativity blocks the materiality of the experiences of Black people. Yet, many Black people strive for a heteronormative effect if not “reality”. In hip hop, there is a particular emphasis on maintaining the rigidity of categories, even if those categories fail [sic]. (87) DSJ challenges these rigid categories. Keep in TouchDSJ's most visible entry onto the media landscape to date has been her appearance in an H&M recycling campaign with British Sri Lankan artist MIA (H&M), some fashion shoots, her new EP—Reimagine (Dope Saint Jude)—and recent Finnish, US and French tours as well as her YouTube channel, which features her music videos. As the characters’ theatrical costumes suggest, “Keep in Touch” is possibly the most camp and playful music video she has produced. It commences somewhat comically with Dope Saint Jude walking down Salt River main road to a public telephone, where she and a young woman in pig tails exchange dirty looks. Salt River is located at the foot of Devil's Peak not far from Cape Town's CBD. Many factories were located there, but the area is also surrounded by low-income housing, which was designated a “coloured” area under apartheid. After apartheid, neighbourhoods such as Salt River, Woodstock, and the Bo-Kaap became increasingly gentrified and, instead of becoming more inclusive, many parts of Cape Town continued to be influenced by policies that enable racialised inequalities. Dope Saint Jude calls Angel Ho: DSJ: Awêh, Angie! Yoh, you must check this kak sturvy girl here by the pay phone. [Turns to the girl, who walks away as she bursts a chewing gum bubble.] Ja, you better keep in touch. Anyway, listen here, what are you wys?Angel Ho: Ah, just at the salon getting my hair did. What's good? DSJ: Wanna catch on kak today?Angel Ho: Yes, honey. But, first, let me Gayle you this. By the jol by the art gallery, this Wendy, nuh. This Wendy tapped me on the shoulder and wys me, “This is a place of decorum.”DSJ: What did she wys?Angel Ho: De-corum. She basically told me this is not your house. DSJ: I know you told that girl to keep in touch!Angel Ho: Yes, Mama! I'm Paula, I told that bitch, “Keep in touch!” [Points index finger in the air.](Saint Jude, Dope, “Keep in Touch”)Angel Ho's name is a play on the male name Angelo and refers to the trope of the ho (whor*) in gangsta rap lyrics and in music videos that present objectified women as secondary to male, heterosexual narratives (Sharpley-Whiting 23; Collins 27). The queering of Angelo, along with Angel Ho’s non-binary styling in terms of hair, make-up, and attire, appropriates a heterosexist, sexualised stereotype of women in order to create room for a gender identity that operates beyond heteronormative male-female binaries. Angel Ho’s location in a hair salon also speaks to stereotypical associations of salons with women and gay subjects. In a discussion of gender stereotypes about hair salons, Kristen Barber argues that beauty work has traditionally been “associated with women and with gay men” and that “the body beautiful has been tightly linked to the concept of femininity” (455–56). During the telephonic exchange, Angel Ho and Dope Saint Jude code-switch between standard and non-standard varieties of English and Afrikaans, as the opening appellation, “Awêh,” suggests. In this context, the term is a friendly greeting, which intimates solidarity. “Sturvy” means pretentious, whilst “kak” means sh*t, but here it is used to qualify “sturvy” and means that the girl at the pay phone is very pretentious or “full of airs.” To be “wys” means to be wise, but it can also mean that you are showing someone something or educating them. The meanings of these terms shift, depending on the context. The language practices in this skit are in line with the work of earlier hip-hop crews, such as Prophets of da City and Brasse vannie Kaap, to validate black, multilingual forms of speech and expression that challenge the linguistic imperialism of standard English and Afrikaans in South Africa, which has eleven official languages (Haupt, “Black Thing”; Haupt, Stealing Empire; Williams). Henry Louis Gates’s research on African American speech varieties and literary practices emerging from the repressive context of slavery is essential to understanding hip-hop’s language politics. Hip-hop artists' multilingual wordplay creates parallel discursive universes that operate both on the syntagmatic axis of meaning-making and the paradigmatic axis (Gates 49; Haupt, “Stealing Empire” 76–77). Historically, these discursive universes were those of the slave masters and the slaves, respectively. While white hegemonic meanings are produced on the syntagmatic axis (which is ordered and linear), black modes of speech as seen in hip-hop word play operate on the paradigmatic axis, which is connotative and non-linear (ibid). Distinguishing between Signifyin(g) / Signification (upper case, meaning black expression) and signification (lower case, meaning white dominant expression), he argues that “the signifier ‘Signification’ has remained identical in spelling to its white counterpart to demonstrate [. . .] that a simultaneous, but negated, parallel discursive (ontological, political) universe exists within the larger white discursive universe” (Gates 49). The meanings of terms and expressions can change, depending on the context and manner in which they are used. It is therefore the shared experiences of speech communities (such as slavery or racist/sexist oppression) that determine the negotiated meanings of certain forms of expression. Gayle as a Parallel Discursive UniverseDSJ and Angel Ho's performance of Gayle takes these linguistic practices further. Viewers are offered points of entry into Gayle via the music video’s subtitles. We learn that Wendy is code for a white person and that to keep in touch means exactly the opposite. Saint Jude explains that Gayle is a very fun queer language that was used to kind of mask what people were saying [. . .] It hides meanings and it makes use of women's names [. . . .] But the thing about Gayle is it's constantly changing [. . .] So everywhere you go, you kind of have to pick it up according to the context that you're in. (Ovens, Saint Jude and Haupt)According to Kathryn Luyt, “Gayle originated as Moffietaal [gay language] in the coloured gay drag culture of the Western Cape as a form of slang amongst Afrikaans-speakers which over time, grew into a stylect used by gay English and Afrikaans-speakers across South Africa” (Luyt 8; Cage 4). Given that the apartheid state criminalised hom*osexuals, Gayle was coded to evade detection and to seek out other members of this speech community (Luyt 8). Luyt qualifies the term “language” by arguing, “The term ‘language’ here, is used not as a constructed language with its own grammar, syntax, morphology and phonology, but in the same way as linguists would discuss women’s language, as a way of speaking, a kind of sociolect” (Luyt 8; Cage 1). However, the double-coded nature of Gayle allows one to think of it as creating a parallel discursive universe as Gates describes it (49). Whereas African American and Cape Flats discursive practices function parallel to white, hegemonic discourses, gay modes of speech run parallel to heteronormative communication. Exclusion and MicroaggressionsThe skit brings both discursive practices into play by creating room for one to consider that DSJ queers a male-dominated genre that is shaped by US cultural imperialism (Haupt, Stealing Empire 166) as a way of speaking back to intersectional forms of marginalisation (Crenshaw 1244), which are created by “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy” (hooks 116). This is significant in South Africa where “curative rape” of lesbians and other forms of hom*ophobic violence are prominent (cf. Gqola; Hames; Msibi). Angel Ho's anecdote conveys a sense of the extent to which black individuals are subject to scrutiny. Ho's interpretation of the claim that the gallery “is a place of decorum” is correct: it is not Ho's house. Black queer subjects are not meant to feel at home or feel a sense of ownership. This functions as a racial microaggression: “subtle insults (verbal, nonverbal, and/or visual) directed toward people of color, often automatically or unconsciously” (Solorzano, Ceja, and Yosso 60). This speaks to DSJ's use of Salt River, Woodstock, and Bo-Kaap for the music video, which features black queer bodies in performance—all of these spaces are being gentrified, effectively pushing working class people of colour out of the city (cf. Didier, Morange, and Peyroux; Lemanski). Gustav Visser explains that gentrification has come to mean a unit-by-unit acquisition of housing which replaces low-income residents with high-income residents, and which occurs independent of the structural condition, architecture, tenure or original cost level of the housing (although it is usually renovated for or by the new occupiers). (81–82) In South Africa this inequity plays out along racial lines because its neoliberal economic policies created a small black elite without improving the lives of the black working class. Instead, the “new African bourgeoisie, because it shares racial identities with the bulk of the poor and class interests with white economic elites, is in position to mediate the reinforcing cleavages between rich whites and poor blacks without having to make more radical changes” (MacDonald 158). In a news article about a working class Salt River family of colour’s battle against an eviction, Christine Hogg explains, “Gentrification often means the poor are displaced as the rich move in or buildings are upgraded by new businesses. In Woodstock and Salt River both are happening at a pace.” Angel Ho’s anecdote, as told from a Woodstock hair salon, conveys a sense of what Woodstock’s transformation from a coloured, working class Group Area to an upmarket, trendy, and arty space would mean for people of colour, including black, queer subjects. One could argue that this reading of the video is undermined by DSJ’s work with global brand H&M. Was she was snared by neoliberal economics? Perhaps, but one response is that the seeds of any subculture’s commercial co-option lie in the fact it speaks through commodities (for example clothing, make-up, CDs, vinyl, or iTunes / mp3 downloads (Hebdige 95; Haupt, Stealing Empire 144–45). Subcultures have a window period in which to challenge hegemonic ideologies before they are delegitimated or commercially co-opted. Hardt and Negri contend that the means that extend the reach of corporate globalisation could be used to challenge it from within it (44–46; Haupt, Stealing Empire 26). DSJ utilises her H&M work, social media, the hip-hop genre, and international networks to exploit that window period to help mainstream black queer identity politics.ConclusionDSJ speaks back to processes of exclusion from the city, which was transformed by apartheid and, more recently, gentrification, by claiming it as a creative and playful space for queer subjects of colour. She uses Gayle to lay claim to the city as it has a long history in Cape Town. In fact, she says that she is not reviving Gayle, but is simply “putting it on a bigger platform” (Ovens, Saint Jude, and Haupt). The use of subtitles in the video suggests that she wants to mainstream queer identity politics. Saint Jude also transforms hip-hop heteronormativity by queering the genre and by locating her work within the history of Cape hip-hop’s multilingual wordplay. ReferencesBarber, Kristin. “The Well-Coiffed Man: Class, Race, and Heterosexual Masculinity in the Hair Salon.” Gender and Society 22.4 (2008): 455–76.Cage, Ken. “An Investigation into the Form and Function of Language Used by Gay Men in South Africa.” Rand Afrikaans University: MA thesis, 1999.Clay, Andreana. “‘I Used to Be Scared of the Dick’: Queer Women of Color and Hip-Hop Masculinity.” Home Girls Make Some Noise: Hip Hop Feminism Anthology. Ed. Gwendolyn D. Pough, Elain Richardson, Aisha Durham, and Rachel Raimist. California: Sojourns, 2007.Collins, Patricia Hill. Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism. New York: Routledge, 2005. Crenshaw, Kimberle. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color”. Stanford Law Review 43.6 (1991): 1241–299.Didier, Sophie, Marianne Morange, and Elisabeth Peyroux. “The Adaptative Nature of Neoliberalism at the Local Scale: Fifteen Years of City Improvement Districts in Cape Town and Johannesburg.” Antipode 45.1 (2012): 121–39.Erasmus, Zimitri. “Introduction.” Coloured by History, Shaped by Place. Ed. Zimitri Erasmus. Cape Town: Kwela Books & SA History Online, 2001. Gates, Henry Louis. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1988.Gqola, Pumla Dineo. Rape: A South African Nightmare. Johannesburg: Jacana, 2015.Hames, Mary. “Violence against Black Lesbians: Minding Our Language.” Agenda 25.4 (2011): 87–91.Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire. London: Harvard UP, 2000.Haupt, Adam. “Can a Woman in Hip Hop Speak on Her Own Terms?” Africa Is a Country. 23 Mar. 2015. <http://africasacountry.com/2015/03/the-double-consciousness-of-burni-aman-can-a-woman-in-hip-hop-speak-on-her-own-terms/>.Haupt, Adam. Static: Race & Representation in Post-Apartheid Music, Media & Film. Cape Town: HSRC Press, 2012. Haupt, Adam. Stealing Empire: P2P, Intellectual Property and Hip-Hop Subversion. Cape Town: HSRC Press, 2008. Haupt, Adam. “Black Thing: Hip-Hop Nationalism, ‘Race’ and Gender in Prophets of da City and Brasse vannie Kaap.” Coloured by History, Shaped by Place. Ed. Zimitri Erasmus. Cape Town: Kwela Books & SA History Online, 2001. Hebdige, Dick. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Routledge, 1979.Hogg, Christine. “In Salt River Gentrification Often Means Eviction: Family Set to Lose Their Home of 11 Years.” Ground Up. 15 June 2016. <http://www.groundup.org.za/article/salt-river-gentrification-often-means-eviction/>.hooks, bell. Outlaw: Culture: Resisting Representations. New York: Routledge, 1994.Lemanski, Charlotte. “Hybrid Gentrification in South Africa: Theorising across Southern and Northern Cities.” Urban Studies 51.14 (2014): 2943–60.Luyt, Kathryn. “Gay Language in Cape Town: A Study of Gayle – Attitudes, History and Usage.” University of Cape Town: MA thesis, 2014.MacDonald, Michael. Why Race Matters in South Africa. University of Kwazulu-Natal Press: Scottsville, 2006.Msibi, Thabo. “Not Crossing the Line: Masculinities and hom*ophobic Violence in South Africa”. Agenda. 23.80 (2009): 50–54.Pabón, Jessica N., and Shanté Paradigm Smalls. “Critical Intimacies: Hip Hop as Queer Feminist Pedagogy.” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory (2014): 1–7.Salo, Elaine. “Negotiating Gender and Personhood in the New South Africa: Adolescent Women and Gangsters in Manenberg Township on the Cape Flats.” Journal of European Cultural Studies 6.3 (2003): 345–65.Solórzano, Daniel, Miguel Ceja, and Tara Yosso. “Critical Race Theory, Racial Microaggressions, and Campus Racial Climate: The Experiences of African American College Students.” Journal of Negro Education 69.1/2 (2000): 60–73.Sharpley-Whiting, T. Denean. Pimps Up, Ho’s Down: Hip Hop’s Hold on Young Black Women. New York: New York UP, 2007.Smalls, Shanté Paradigm. “‘The Rain Comes Down’: Jean Grae and Hip Hop Heteronormativity.” American Behavioral Scientist 55.1 (2011): 86–95.Visser, Gustav. “Gentrification: Prospects for Urban South African Society?” Acta Academica Supplementum 1 (2003): 79–104.Williams, Quentin E. “Youth Multilingualism in South Africa’s Hip-Hop Culture: a Metapragmatic Analysis.” Sociolinguistic Studies 10.1 (2016): 109–33.Yudell, Michael. “A Short History of the Race Concept.” Race and the Genetic Revolution: Science, Myth, and Culture. Ed. Sheldon Krimsky and Kathleen Sloan. New York: Columbia UP, 2011.InterviewsOvens, Neil, Dope Saint Jude, and Adam Haupt. One FM Radio interview. Cape Town. 21 Apr. 2016.VideosSaint Jude, Dope. “Keep in Touch.” YouTube. 23 Feb. 2015. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2ux9R839lE>. H&M. “H&M World Recycle Week Featuring M.I.A.” YouTube. 11 Apr. 2016. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7MskKkn2Jg>. MusicSaint Jude, Dope. Reimagine. 15 June 2016. <https://dopesaintjude.bandcamp.com/album/reimagine>.

Abstract:

To sin by silence, when we should protest,Makes cowards out of men.— Ella Wheeler WilcoxProtest is culturally entwined in historical and juro-political realities and is a fundamental element of the exercise of individual and collective rights. As our title notes, while there are currently many ‘protests in progress’ around the world, there is also a great deal of ‘progress in protest’ in terms of what protests look like, their scale and number, how they are formed and conducted, their goals, how they can be studied, as well as the varying responses formed in relation to protest. The etymology of protest associates two important dynamics pertaining to the topic. Firstly, a protest is something that is put forward, forth, or toward the front (from the Latin pro); essentially, it is in one manner or another, made publically. Secondly, it suggests that a person or persons have beared witness (testis) and instead of remaining silent, have made a declaration or assertion (testari). In other words, someone has made public their disapproval or objection. The nine articles that comprise this issue of M/C Journal on ‘protest’ reminds us of these salient elements of protest. Each, in their own way, highlight the importance of not remaining silent when faced with an injustice or in order to promote social change. As Bill McKibben (7) outlines in his foreword to an excellent collection of protest documents, ‘voices of protest ... are often precisely what propels human civilisation forward and allows it to become unstuck’. However, not all forms of contemporary protest shares ideological or progressive aims. Here, we might consider the emergence of contentious formations such as the alt-right and antifa, what is considered ‘fake’ or ‘real’, and ongoing conflicts between notions of individual and collective rights and state sovereignty.This modest but insightful collection demonstrates the broad scope of this field of inquiry. This issue explores the intersections among social justice, identity and communications technology, as well as the convergences and divergences in the form, function and substance of protest. Through an analysis of protest’s relationship to media, the author’s highlight the possibilities of protest to effect social change. The issue begins with Lakota screenwriter and activist Floris White Bull’s (Floris Ptesáŋ Huŋká) discussion of the documentary AWAKE, a Dream from Standing Rock (2017) and the #NODAPL protest. The film, split into three parts, takes a poignant and quite personal look at the native-led peaceful resistance at the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in North Dakota in 2016. This protest involved tens of thousands of activists from all over the world who opposed the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) which was to transport fracked oil directly underneath the Missouri River and through sovereign Lakota land (see Image 1). However, the events at Standing Rock were not a single-issue protest and brought activists together over a range of interrelated issues including environmental protection, human rights, water security, community health and Native American sovereignty. The Water Protectors were also forced to contest racist and disparaging media representations. As such, Standing Rock remains a site of cultural exchange and learning. These protests are not historical, but instead, are an ongoing struggle. The film AWAKE is important as testimony to the injustices at Standing Rock. A short description of the film is first provided in order to provide some additional context to perspectives addressed in the film. From there, White Bull has been invited to respond to questions posed by the editors regarding the Standing Rock Protests and documentary films such as AWAKE. As an Indigenous person fighting for justice, White Bull reminds readers that ‘[t]he path forward is the same as it has always been – holding on to our goals, values and dignity with resilience’.Image 1: Dakota Access Pipeline Protesters, 2016. Photo credit: Indigenous Environmental Network.Cat Pausé and Sandra Grey use an example of fat shaming to investigate how media impacts body politics and determines who is enfranchised to voice public dissent. Media becomes a mechanism for policing and governing bodily norms and gendered identities. As well as outlining a brief history of feminist body activism, the authors draw on personal experience and interview material with activists to reflect on fat embodiment and politics. Also informed by intersectional approaches, their work alerts us to the diverse vectors by which injustice and oppression fall on some bodies differently as well as the diverse bodies assembled in any crowd.Greg Watson suggests that “[c]ontemporary societies are increasingly becoming sites in which it is more difficult for people to respectfully negotiate disagreements about human diversity”. Drawing on his experiences organising Human Libraries throughout Australia, Watson argues these spaces create opportunities for engaging with difference. In this sense Human Libraries can be considered sites which protest the micropublics’ “codes of civility” which produce everyday marginalisations of difference.Micropolitics and creative forms of protest are also central to Ella Cutler, Jacqueline Gothe, and Alexandra Crosby’s article. The author’s consider three design projects which seek to facilitate ethical communication with diverse communities. Drawing on Guy Julier’s tactics for activist design, each project demonstrates the value of slowing down in order to pay attention to experience. In this way, research through design offers a reflexive means for engaging social change.Research practices are also central to making visible community resistance. Anthony McCosker and Timothy Graham consider the role of social networking in urban protests through the campaign to save the iconic Melbourne music venue The Palace (see Image 2). Their article considers the value of social media data and analytics in relation to the court proceedings and trial processes. Given the centrality of social media to activist campaigns their reflections provide a timely evaluation of how data publics are constituted and their ongoing legacy.Image 2: Melbourne’s Palace Theatre before demolition. Photo Credit: Melbourne Heritage Action.For Marcelina Piotrowski pleasure is central to understanding data production and protest. She draws on a Deleuze and Guattarian framework in order to consider protests against oil pipelines in British Columbia. Importantly, through this theoretical framework of ‘data desires’, pleasure is not something owned by the individual subject but rather holds the potential to construct generative social collectivities. This is traced through three different practices: deliberation in online forums; citizen science and social media campaigns. This has important implications for understanding environmental issues and our own enfolding within them. Nadine Kozak takes a look at how Online Service Providers (OSPs) have historically used internet ‘blackouts’ in order to protest United States government regulations. Kozak points to protests against the Communications Decency Act (1996) which sought to regulate online p*rnographic material and the Stop Online Piracy Act (2011) which proposed increased federal government power to take action against online copyright infringement. Recently, the United States Congress recently passed the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA) and the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA), which hold OSPs liable for third-party content including advertising for prostitution. However, despite condemnation from the Department of Justice and trafficking victims, OSPs did not utilise blackouts as a means to protest these new measures. Kozak concludes that the decision to whether or not to utilise blackout protests is dependent on the interests of technology companies and large OSPs. It is evident that most especially since Donald Trump popularised the term, ‘fake news’ has taken a centre stage in discussions concerning media. In fact, the lines between what is fake and what is official have become blurred. Most recently, QAnon proponents have been attending Trump rallies and speeches giving further visibility to various conspiracy narratives stemming from online message boards (see Image 3). Marc Tuters, Emilija Jokubauskaitė, and Daniel Bach establishe a clear timeline of events in order to trace the origins of ‘#Pizzagate’; a 2016 conspiracy theory that falsely claimed that several U.S. restaurants and high-ranking officials of the Democratic Party were connected with human trafficking and an alleged child-sex ring. The authors investigate the affordances of 4chan to unpack how the site’s anonymity, rapid temporality and user collectivisation were instrumental in creating ‘bullsh*t’; a usage which the authors suggest is a “technical term for persuasive speech unconcerned with veracity”. This provides an understanding of how alt-right communities are assembled and motivated in a post-truth society. Image 3: QAnon proponents at Trump rally in Tampa, 31 July 2018. Photo credit: Kirby Wilson, Tampa Bay Times.Finally, Colin Salter analyses protests for animal rights as a lens to critique notions of national identity and belonging. Protests on whaling in the Southern Ocean (see Image 4) and live export trade from Australia continue to be highly contested political issues. Salter reflects on the ABC’s 2011 exposé into Australian live animal exports to Indonesia and the 2014 hearings at the International Court of Justice into Japanese whaling. Salter then traces the common elements between animal rights campaigns in order to demonstrate the manner in which the physical bodies of animals, their treatment, and the debate surrounding that treatment become sites for mapping cultural identity, nationhood, and sovereignty. Here, Salter suggests that such inquiry is useful for promoting broader consideration of efficacious approaches to animal advocacy and social change.Image 4: The ship Bob Barker, rammed by the Japanese whaling vessel Nishin Maru. Photo credit: Sea Shepherd Facebook Page. As indicated in the opening paragraphs, it is crucial for people committed to social justice to publically raise their voices in protest. As such, we would like to thank each of the authors for their important contributions to this issue on ‘protest’. In its own way, each contribution serves doubly as a form of protest and a means to understand the topic more clearly. There is solidarity evidenced in this issue. Taken as a whole, these articles attest to the importance of understanding protest and social change.ReferencesMcKibben, B. "Foreword." Voices of Protest: Documents of Courage and Dissent. Eds. Frank Lowenstein, Sheryl Lechner, and Erik Bruun. New York: Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers, 2007. 7-8.Wilcox, E.W. "Protest." Poems of Problems. Chicago: W.B. Conkey Company, 1914.

Abstract:

There is, in our sense of place, little cognisance of what lies underground. Yet our sense of place, instinctive, unconscious, primeval, has its own underground: the secret spaces which mirror our insides; the world beneath the skin. Our roots lie beneath the ground, with the minerals and the dead. (Hughes 83) The-Home-and-Away-Game Imagine the earth-grounded, “diagrammatological” trajectory of a footballer who as one member of a team is psyching himself up before the start of a game. The siren blasts its trumpet call. The footballer bursts out of the pavilion (where this psyching up has taken place) to engage in the opening bounce or kick of the game. And then: running, leaping, limping after injury, marking, sliding, kicking, and possibly even passing out from concussion. Finally, the elation accompanying the final siren, after which hugs, handshakes and raised fists conclude the actual match on the football oval. This exit from the pavilion, the course the player takes during the game itself, and return to the pavilion, forms a combination of stasis and movement, and a return to exhausted stasis again, that every player engages with regardless of the game code. Examined from a “diagrammatological” perspective, a perspective Rowan Wilken (following in the path of Gilles Deleuze and W. J. T. Mitchell) understands as “a generative process: a ‘metaphor’ or way of thinking — diagrammatic, diagrammatological thinking — which in turn, is linked to poetic thinking” (48), this footballer’s scenario arises out of an aerial perspective that depicts the actual spatial trajectory the player takes during the course of a game. It is a diagram that is digitally encoded via a sensor on the footballer’s body, and being an electronically encoded diagram it can also make available multiple sets of data such as speed, heartbeat, blood pressure, maybe even brain-wave patterns. From this limited point of view there is only one footballer’s playing trajectory to consider; various groupings within the team, the whole team itself, and the diagrammatological depiction of its games with various other teams might also be possible. This singular imagining though is itself an actuality: as a diagram it is encoded as a graphic image by a satellite hovering around the earth with a Global Positioning System (GPS) reading the sensor attached to the footballer which then digitally encodes this diagrammatological trajectory for appraisal later by the player, coach, team and management. In one respect, this practice is another example of a willing self-surveillance critical to explaining the reflexive subject and its attribute of continuous self-improvement. According to Docker, Official Magazine of the Fremantle Football Club, this is a technique the club uses as a part of game/play assessment, a system that can provide a “running map” for each player equipped with such a tracking device during a game. As the Fremantle Club’s Strength and Conditioning Coach Ben Tarbox says of this tactic, “We’re getting a physiological profile that has started to build a really good picture of how individual players react during a game” (21). With a little extra effort (and some sizeable computer processing grunt) this two dimensional linear graphic diagram of a footballer working the football ground could also form the raw material for a three-dimensional animation, maybe a virtual reality game, even a hologram. It could also be used to sideline a non-performing player. Now try another related but different imagining: what if this diagrammatological trajectory could be enlarged a little to include the possibility that this same player’s movements could be mapped out by the idea of home-and-away games; say over the course of a season, maybe even a whole career, for instance? No doubt, a wide range of differing diagrammatological perspectives might suggest themselves. My own particular refinement of this movement/stasis on the footballer’s part suggests my own distinctive comings and goings to and from my own specific piece of home country. And in this incessantly domestic/real world reciprocity, in this diurnally repetitive leaving and coming back to home country, might it be plausible to think of “Home as Capital of the Region”? If, as Walter Benjamin suggests in the prelude to his monumental Arcades Project, “Paris — the Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” could it be that both in and through my comings and goings to and from this selfsame home country, my own burgeoning sense of regionality is constituted in every minute-by-minutiae of lived experience? Could it be that this feeling about home is manifested in my every day-to-night manoeuvre of home-and-away-and-away-and-home-making, of every singular instance of exit, play/engage, and the return home? “Home, Capital of the Region” then examines the idea that my home is that part of the country which is the still-point of eternal return, the bedrock to which I retreat after the daily grind, and the point from which I start out and do it all again the next day. It employs, firstly, this ‘diagrammatological’ perspective to illustrate the point that this stasis/movement across country can make an electronic record of my own psychic self-surveillance and actualisation in-situ. And secondly, the architectural plan of the domestic home (examined through the perspective of critical regionalism) is used as a conduit to illustrate how I am physically embedded in country. Lastly, intermingling these digressive threads is chora, Plato’s notion of embodied place and itself an ancient regional rendering of this eternal return to the beginning, the place where the essential diversity of country decisively enters the soul. Chora: Core of Regionality Kevin Lynch writes that, “Our senses are local, while our experience is regional” (10), a combination that suggests this regional emphasis on home-and-away-making might be a useful frame of reference (simultaneously spatiotemporal, both a visceral and encoded communication) for me to include as a crucial vector in my own life-long learning package. Regionality (as, variously, a sub-generic categorisation and an extension/concentration of nationality, as well as a recently re-emerged friend/antagonist to a global understanding) infuses my world of home with a grounded footing in country, one that is a site of an Eternal Return to the Beginning in the micro-world of the everyday. This is a point John Sallis discusses at length in his analysis of Plato’s Timaeus and its founding notion of regionality: chora. More extended absences away from home-base are of course possible but one’s return to home on most days and for most nights is a given of post/modern, maybe even of ancient everyday experience. Even for the continually shifting nomad, nightfall in some part of the country brings the rest and recreation necessary for the next day’s wanderings. This fundamental question of an Eternal Return to the Beginning arises as a crucial element of the method in Plato’s Timaeus, a seemingly “unstructured” mythic/scientific dialogue about the origins and structure of both the psychically and the physically implaced world. In the Timaeus, “incoherence is especially obvious in the way the natural sequence in which a narrative would usually unfold is interrupted by regressions, corrections, repetitions, and abrupt new beginnings” (Gadamer 160). Right in the middle of the Timaeus, in between its sections on the “Work of Reason” and the “Work of Necessity”, sits chora, both an actual spatial and bodily site where my being intersects with my becoming, and where my lived life criss-crosses the various arts necessary to articulating a recorded version of that life. Every home is a grounded chora-logical timespace harness guiding its occupant’s thoughts, feelings and actions. My own regionally implaced chora (an example of which is the diagrammatological trajectory already outlined above as my various everyday comings and goings, of me acting in and projecting myself into context) could in part be understood as a graphical realisation of the extent of my movements and stationary rests in my own particular timespace trajectory. The shorthand for this process is ‘embedded’. Gregory Ulmer writes of chora that, “While chorography as a term is close to choreography, it duplicates a term that already exists in the discipline of geography, thus establishing a valuable resonance for a rhetoric of invention concerned with the history of ‘place’ in relation to memory” (Heuretics 39, original italics). Chorography is the geographic discipline for the systematic study and analysis of regions. Chora, home, country and regionality thus form an important multi-dimensional zone of interplay in memorialising the game of everyday life. In light of these observations I might even go so far as to suggest that this diagrammatological trajectory (being both digital and GPS originated) is part of the increasingly electrate condition that guides the production of knowledge in any global/regional context. This last point is a contextual connection usefully examined in Alan J. Scott’s Regions and the World Economy: The Coming Shape of Global Production, Competition, and Political Order and Michael Storper’s The Regional World: Territorial Development in a Global Economy. Their analyses explicitly suggest that the symbiosis between globalisation and regionalisation has been gathering pace since at least the end of World War Two and the Bretton Woods agreement. Our emerging understanding of electracy also happens to be Gregory Ulmer’s part-remedy for shifting the ground under the intense debates surrounding il/literacy in the current era (see, in particular, Internet Invention). And, for Tony Bennett, Michael Emmison and John Frow’s analysis of “Australian Everyday Cultures” (“Media Culture and the Home” 57–86), it is within the home that our un.conscious understanding of electronic media is at its most intense, a pattern that emerges in the longer term through receiving telegrams, compiling photo albums, listening to the radio, home- and video-movies, watching the evening news on television, and logging onto the computer in the home-office, media-room or home-studio. These various generalisations (along with this diagrammatological view of my comings and goings to and from the built space of home), all point indiscriminately to a productive confusion surrounding the sedentary and nomadic opposition/conjunction. If natural spaces are constituted in nouns like oceans, forests, plains, grasslands, steppes, deserts, rivers, tidal interstices, farmland etc. (and each categorisation here relies on the others for its existence and demarcation) then built space is often seen as constituting its human sedentary equivalent. For Deleuze and Guatteri (in A Thousand Plateaus, “1227: Treatise on Nomadology — The War Machine”) these natural spaces help instigate a nomadic movement across localities and regions. From a nomadology perspective, these smooth spaces unsettle a scientific, numerical calculation, sometimes even aesthetic demarcation and order. If they are marked at all, it is by heterogenous and differential forces, energised through constantly oscillating intensities. A Thousand Plateaus is careful though not to elevate these smooth nomadic spaces over the more sedentary spaces of culture and power (372–373). Nonetheless, as Edward S. Casey warns, “In their insistence on becoming and movement, however, the authors of A Thousand Plateaus overlook the placial potential of settled dwelling — of […] ‘built places’” (309, original italics). Sedentary, settled dwelling centred on home country may have a crust of easy legibility and order about it but it also formats a locally/regionally specific nomadic quality, a point underscored above in the diagrammatological perspective. The sedentary tendency also emerges once again in relation to home in the architectural drafting of the domestic domicile. The Real Estate Revolution When Captain Cook planted the British flag in the sand at Botany Bay in 1770 and declared the country it spiked as Crown Land and henceforth will come under the ownership of an English sovereign, it was also the moment when white Australia’s current fascination with real estate was conceived. In the wake of this spiking came the intense anxiety over Native Title that surfaced in late twentieth century Australia when claims of Indigenous land grabs would repossess suburban homes. While easily dismissed as hyperbole, a rhetorical gesture intended to arouse this very anxiety, its emergence is nonetheless an indication of the potential for political and psychic unsettling at the heart of the ownership and control of built place, or ‘settled dwelling’ in the Australian context. And here it would be wise to include not just the gridded, architectural quality of home-building and home-making, but also the home as the site of the family romance, another source of unsettling as much as a peaceful calming. Spreading out from the boundaries of the home are the built spaces of fences, bridges, roads, railways, airport terminals (along with their interconnecting pathways), which of course brings us back to the communications infrastructure which have so often followed alongside the development of transport infrastructure. These and other elements represent this conglomerate of built space, possibly the most significant transformation of natural space that humanity has brought about. For the purposes of this meditation though it is the more personal aspect of built space — my home and regional embeddedness, along with their connections into the global electrosphere — that constitutes the primary concern here. For a sedentary, striated space to settle into an unchallenged existence though requires a repression of the highest order, primarily because of the home’s proximity to everyday life, of the latter’s now fading ability to sometimes leave its presuppositions well enough alone. In settled, regionally experienced space, repressions are more difficult to abstract away, they are lived with on a daily basis, which also helps to explain the extra intensity brought to their sometimes-unsettling quality. Inversely, and encased in this globalised electro-spherical ambience, home cannot merely be a place where one dwells within avoiding those presuppositions, I take them with me when I travel and they come back with me from afar. This is a point obliquely reflected in Pico Iyer’s comment that “Australians have so flexible a sense of home, perhaps, that they can make themselves at home anywhere” (185). While our sense of home may well be, according to J. Douglas Porteous, “the territorial core” of our being, when other arrangements of space and knowledge shift it must inevitably do so as well. In these shifts of spatial affiliation (aided and abetted by regionalisation, globalisation and electronic knowledge), the built place of home can no longer be considered exclusively under the illusion of an autonomous sanctuary wholly guaranteed by capitalist property relations, one of the key factors in its attraction. These shifts in the cultural, economic and psychic relation of home to country are important to a sense of local and regional implacement. The “feeling” of autonomy and security involved in home occupation and/or ownership designates a component of this implacement, a point leading to Eric Leed’s comment that, “By the sixteenth century, literacy had become one of the definitive signs — along with the possession of property and a permanent residence — of an independent social status” (53). Globalising and regionalising forces make this feeling of autonomy and security dynamic, shifting the ground of home, work-place practices and citizenship allegiances in the process. Gathering these wide-ranging forces impacting on psychic and built space together is the emergence of critical regionalism as a branch of architectonics, considered here as a theory of domestic architecture. Critical Regionality Critical regionalism emerged out of the collective thinking of Liane Lefaivre and Alexander Tzonis (Tropical Architecture; Critical Regionalism), and as these authors themselves acknowledge, was itself deeply influenced by the work of Lewis Mumford during the first part of the twentieth century when he was arguing against the authority of the international style in architecture, a style epitomised by the Bauhaus movement. It is Kenneth Frampton’s essay, “Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance” that deliberately takes this question of critical regionalism and makes it a part of a domestic architectonic project. In many ways the ideas critical regionalism espouses can themselves be a microcosm of this concomitantly emerging global/regional polis. With public examples of built-form the power of the centre is on display by virtue of a building’s enormous size and frequently high-cultural aesthetic power. This is a fact restated again and again from the ancient world’s agora to Australia’s own political bunker — its Houses of Parliament in Canberra. While Frampton discusses a range of aspects dealing with the universal/implaced axis across his discussion, it is points five and six that deserve attention from a domestically implaced perspective. Under the sub-heading, “Culture Versus Nature: Topography, Context, Climate, Light and Tectonic Form” is where he writes that, Here again, one touches in concrete terms this fundamental opposition between universal civilization and autochthonous culture. The bulldozing of an irregular topography into a flat site is clearly a technocratic gesture which aspires to a condition of absolute placelessness, whereas the terracing of the same site to receive the stepped form of a building is an engagement in the act of “cultivating” the site. (26, original italics) The “totally flat datum” that the universalising tendency sometimes presupposes is, within the critical regionalist perspective, an erroneous assumption. The “cultivation” of a site for the design of a building illustrates the point that built space emerges out of an interaction between parallel phenomena as they contrast and/or converge in a particular set of timespace co-ordinates. These are phenomena that could include (but are not limited to) geomorphic data like soil and rock formations, seismic activity, inclination and declension; climatic considerations in the form of wind patterns, temperature variations, rainfall patterns, available light and dark, humidity and the like; the building context in relation to the cardinal points of north, south, east, and west, along with their intermediary positions. There are also architectural considerations in the form of available building materials and personnel to consider. The social, psychological and cultural requirements of the building’s prospective in-dwellers are intermingled with all these phenomena. This is not so much a question of where to place the air conditioning system but the actuality of the way the building itself is placed on its site, or indeed if that site should be built on at all. A critical regionalist building practice, then, is autochthonous to the degree that a full consideration of this wide range of in-situ interactions is taken into consideration in the development of its design plan. And given this autochthonous quality of the critical regionalist project, it also suggests that the architectural design plan itself (especially when it utilised in conjunction with CAD and virtual reality simulations), might be the better model for designing electrate-centred projects rather than writing or even the script. The proliferation of ‘McMansions’ across many Australian suburbs during the 1990s (generally, oversized domestic buildings designed in the abstract with little or no thought to the above mentioned elements, on bulldozed sites, with powerful air-conditioning systems, and no verandas or roof eves to speak of) demonstrates the continuing influence of a universal, centralising dogma in the realm of built place. As summer temperatures start to climb into the 40°C range all these air-conditioners start to hum in unison, which in turn raises the susceptibility of the supporting infrastructure to collapse under the weight of an overbearing electrical load. The McMansion is a clear example of a built form that is envisioned more so in a drafting room, a space where the architect is remote-sensing the locational specificities. In this envisioning (driven more by a direct line-of-sight idiom dominant in “flat datum” and economic considerations rather than architectural or experiential ones), the tactile is subordinated, which is the subject of Frampton’s sixth point: It is symptomatic of the priority given to sight that we find it necessary to remind ourselves that the tactile is an important dimension in the perception of built form. One has in mind a whole range of complementary sensory perceptions which are registered by the labile body: the intensity of light, darkness, heat and cold; the feeling of humidity; the aroma of material; the almost palpable presence of masonry as the body senses it own confinement; the momentum of an induced gait and the relative inertia of the body as it traverses the floor; the echoing resonance of our own footfall. (28) The point here is clear: in its wider recognition of, and the foregrounding of my body’s full range of sensate capacities in relation to both natural and built space, the critical regionalist approach to built form spreads its meaning-making capacities across a broader range of knowledge modalities. This tactility is further elaborated in more thoroughly personal ways by Margaret Morse in her illuminating essay, “Home: Smell, Taste, Posture, Gleam”. Paradoxically, this synaesthetic, syncretic approach to bodily meaning-making in a built place, regional milieu intensely concentrates the site-centred locus of everyday life, while simultaneously, the electronic knowledge that increasingly underpins it expands both my body’s and its region’s knowledge-making possibilities into a global gestalt, sometimes even a cosmological one. It is a paradoxical transformation that makes us look anew at social, cultural and political givens, even objective and empirical understandings, especially as they are articulated through national frames of reference. Domestic built space then is a kind of micro-version of the multi-function polis where work, pleasure, family, rest, public display and privacy intermingle. So in both this reduction and expansion in the constitution of domestic home life, one that increasingly represents the location of the production of knowledge, built place represents a concentration of energy that forces us to re-imagine border-making, order, and the dynamic interplay of nomadic movement and sedentary return, a point that echoes Nicolas Rothwell’s comment that “every exile has in it a homecoming” (80). Albeit, this is a knowledge-making milieu with an expanded range of modalities incorporated and expressed through a wide range of bodily intensities not simply cognitive ones. Much of the ambiguous discontent manifested in McMansion style domiciles across many Western countries might be traced to the fact that their occupants have had little or no say in the way those domiciles have been designed and/or constructed. In Heidegger’s terms, they have not thought deeply enough about “dwelling” in that building, although with the advent of the media room the question of whether a “building” securely borders both “dwelling” and “thinking” is now open to question. As anxieties over border-making at all scales intensifies, the complexities and un/sureties of natural and built space take ever greater hold of the psyche, sometimes through the advance of a “high level of critical self-consciousness”, a process Frampton describes as a “double mediation” of world culture and local conditions (21). Nearly all commentators warn of a nostalgic, romantic or a sentimental regionalism, the sum total of which is aimed at privileging the local/regional and is sometimes utilised as a means of excluding the global or universal, sometimes even the national (Berry 67). Critical regionalism is itself a mediating factor between these dispositions, working its methods and practices through my own psyche into the local, the regional, the national and the global, rejecting and/or accepting elements of these domains, as my own specific context, in its multiplicity, demands it. If the politico-economic and cultural dimensions of this global/regional world have tended to undermine the process of border-making across a range of scales, we can see in domestic forms of built place the intense residue of both their continuing importance and an increased dependency on this electro-mediated world. This is especially apparent in those domiciles whose media rooms (with their satellite dishes, telephone lines, computers, television sets, games consuls, and music stereos) are connecting them to it in virtuality if not in reality. Indeed, the thought emerges (once again keeping in mind Eric Leed’s remark on the literate-configured sense of autonomy that is further enhanced by a separate physical address and residence) that the intense importance attached to domestically orientated built place by globally/regionally orientated peoples will figure as possibly the most viable means via which this sense of autonomy will transfer to electronic forms of knowledge. If, however, this here domestic habitué turns his gaze away from the screen that transports me into this global/regional milieu and I focus my attention on the physicality of the building in which I dwell, I once again stand in the presence of another beginning. This other beginning is framed diagrammatologically by the building’s architectural plans (usually conceived in either an in-situ, autochthonous, or a universal manner), and is a graphical conception that anchors my body in country long after the architects and builders have packed up their tools and left. This is so regardless of whether a home is built, bought, rented or squatted in. Ihab Hassan writes that, “Home is not where one is pushed into the light, but where one gathers it into oneself to become light” (417), an aphorism that might be rephrased as follows: “Home is not where one is pushed into the country, but where one gathers it into oneself to become country.” For the in-and-out-and-around-and-about domestic dweller of the twenty-first century, then, home is where both regional and global forms of country decisively enter the soul via the conduits of the virtuality of digital flows and the reality of architectural footings. Acknowledgements I’m indebted to both David Fosdick and Phil Roe for alerting me to the importance to the Fremantle Dockers Football Club. The research and an original draft of this essay were carried out under the auspices of a PhD scholarship from Central Queensland University, and from whom I would also like to thank Denis Cryle and Geoff Danaher for their advice. References Benjamin, Walter. “Paris — the Capital of the Nineteenth Century.” Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism. Trans. Quintin Hoare. London: New Left Books, 1973. 155–176. Bennett, Tony, Michael Emmison and John Frow. Accounting for Tastes: Australian Everyday Cultures. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999. Berry, Wendell. “The Regional Motive.” A Continuous Harmony: Essays Cultural and Agricultural. San Diego: Harcourt Brace. 63–70. Casey, Edward S. The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History. Berkeley: U of California P, 1997. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minneapolis P, 1987. Deleuze, Gilles. “The Diagram.” The Deleuze Reader. Ed. Constantin Boundas. Trans. Constantin Boundas and Jacqueline Code. New York: Columbia UP, 1993. 193–200. Frampton, Kenneth. “Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance.” The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Post-Modern Culture. Ed. Hal Foster. Port Townsend: Bay Press, 1983. 16–30. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. “Idea and Reality in Plato’s Timaeus.” Dialogue and Dialectic: Eight Hermeneutical Studies on Plato. Trans. P. Christopher Smith. New Haven: Yale UP, 1980. 156–193. Hassan, Ihab. “How Australian Is It?” The Best Australian Essays. Ed. Peter Craven. Melbourne: Black Inc., 2000. 405–417. Heidegger, Martin. “Building Dwelling Thinking.” Poetry, Language, Thought. Trans. Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper and Row, 1971. 145–161. Hughes, John. The Idea of Home: Autobiographical Essays. Sydney: Giramondo, 2004. Iyer, Pico. “Australia 1988: Five Thousand Miles from Anywhere.” Falling Off the Map: Some Lonely Places of the World. London: Jonathon Cape, 1993. 173–190. “Keeping Track.” Docker, Official Magazine of the Fremantle Football Club. Edition 3, September (2005): 21. Leed, Eric. “‘Voice’ and ‘Print’: Master Symbols in the History of Communication.” The Myths of Information: Technology and Postindustrial Culture. Ed. Kathleen Woodward. Madison, Wisconsin: Coda Press, 1980. 41–61. Lefaivre, Liane and Alexander Tzonis. “The Suppression and Rethinking of Regionalism and Tropicalism After 1945.” Tropical Architecture: Critical Regionalism in the Age of Globalization. Eds. Alexander Tzonis, Liane Lefaivre and Bruno Stagno. Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-Academy, 2001. 14–58. Lefaivre, Liane and Alexander Tzonis. Critical Regionalism: Architecture and Identity in a Globalized World. New York: Prestel, 2003. Lynch, Kevin. Managing the Sense of a Region. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT P, 1976. Mitchell, W. J. T. “Diagrammatology.” Critical Inquiry 7.3 (1981): 622–633. Morse, Margaret. “Home: Smell, Taste, Posture, Gleam.” Home, Exile, Homeland: Film, Media, and the Politics of Place. Ed. Hamid Naficy. New York and London: Routledge, 1999. 63–74. Plato. Timaeus and Critias. Trans. Desmond Lee. Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1973. Porteous, J. Douglas. “Home: The Territorial Core.” Geographical Review LXVI (1976): 383-390. Rothwell, Nicolas. Wings of the Kite-Hawk: A Journey into the Heart of Australia. Sydney: Pidador, 2003. Sallis, John. Chorology: On Beginning in Plato’s Timaeus. Bloomington: Indianapolis UP, 1999. Scott, Allen J. Regions and the World Economy: The Coming Shape of Global Production, Competition, and Political Order. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Storper, Michael. The Regional World: Territorial Development in a Global Economy. New York: The Guildford Press, 1997. Ulmer, Gregory L. Heuretics: The Logic of Invention. New York: John Hopkins UP, 1994. Ulmer, Gregory. Internet Invention: Literacy into Electracy. Longman: Boston, 2003. Wilken, Rowan. “Diagrammatology.” Illogic of Sense: The Gregory Ulmer Remix. Eds. Darren Tofts and Lisa Gye. Alt-X Press, 2007. 48–60. Available at http://www.altx.com/ebooks/ulmer.html. (Retrieved 12 June 2007)

Abstract:

Introduction In a period marked by the pervasiveness of new mobile technologies saturating urban areas of the Asia-Pacific region, it can be easy to forget the realities of life in the rural areas. In a location such as Australia, in which 80% of the population lives in urban areas, one must be reminded of the sociotechnological realities of rural existence where often-newer mobile communication devices cease to function. This paper focuses on these black spots – and often forgotten areas – where examples of older, mediated technologies such as UHF Citizen Band (CB) radios can be found as integral to practices of everyday rural life. As Anderson notes, constructs of the nation are formed through contested notions of what individuals and communities imagine and project as a sense of place. In Australia, one of the dominant contested imageries can be found in the urban and rural divide, a divide that is not just social and cultural but technological; it is marked by a digital divide. This divide neatly corresponds to the images of Australia experienced by Australians (predominantly living in urban areas) and exported tourist images of the rugged vast rural landscapes. The remote Australia Outback is a popular destination for domestic tourists. Its sparsely populated and rough terrain attracts tourists seeking a quintessentially Australian experience. Roads are often unmade and in poor condition. Fuel and food supplies and health services are widely separated and there is almost no permanent accommodation. Apart from a small number of regional centres there is no access to mobile phones or radio broadcasts. As a consequence tourists must be largely self sufficient. While the primary roads carry significant road traffic it is possible to drive all day on secondary roads without seeing another person. Isolation and self-sufficiency are both an attraction and a challenge. Travelling in campervans, towing caravans or camper trailers and staying in caravan parks, national parks, roadside stops or alone in the bush, tourists spend extended times in areas where there are few other tourists. Many tourists deal with this isolation by equipping their vehicles with CB radios. Depending on the terrain, they are able to listen to, and participate in conversations with other CB users within a 10-20 kilometre range. In some areas where there are repeater stations, the range of radio transmissions can be extended. This paper examines the role of these CB radios in the daily life of tourists in the Australian Outback. Theoretical Issues The links between travel, the new communications technologies and the diminished spatial-time divide have been explored by John Urry. According to Urry, mobile electronic devices make it possible for people “to leave traces of their selves in informational space” (266). Using these informational traces, mobile communication technologies ‘track’ the movements of travellers, enabling them to communicate synchronously. People become ’nodes in multiple networks of communication and mobility’ (266). Another consequence of readily available communication independent of location is for the meaning of social connections. Social encounters provide tourists with the opportunity to develop and affirm understandings of their shared common occupation of unfamiliar social and cultural landscapes (Harrison). Both transitory and enduring relationships provide information, companionship and resources that allow tourists to create, share and give meaning to their experiences (Stokowski). Communication technology also enables individuals to enter and remain part of social networks while physically absent and distant from them (Johnsen; Makimoto and Manners, Urry). The result is a “nomadic intimacy” in an everyday social and physical environment characterised by extended spaces and individual freedom to move around in these spaces (Fortunati). For travellers in the Australian Outback, this “nomadic intimacy” is both literal and metaphorical. Research has shown that travellers use mobile communications services and a range of other communication strategies to maintain a “symbolic proximity” with family, friends and colleagues (Wurtzel and Turner) and to promote a sense of “presence while absent”, or ‘co-presence’ (Gergen; Lury; Short, Williams and Christie; White and White, “Keeping Connected”; White and White, “Home and Away”). Central to the original notion of co-presence was that it was contingent on those involved in a given communication both being and feeling close enough to perceive each other and to be perceived in the course of their activities (Goffman). That is, the notion of co-presence initially referred to physical presence in face-to-face contact and interactions. However, increasing use of mobile phones in particular has meant that this sense of connection can be affirmed at a distance. But what happens when travellers do not have access to mobile phones and the Internet, and as a consequence, do not have access to their networks of family, friends and colleagues? How do they deal with travel and isolation in a harsh environment? These issues are the starting point for the present paper, which examines travellers’ experience of CB radio in the remote Australian Outback. This exploration of how the CB radio has been incorporated into the daily lives of these travellers can be seen as a contribution to an understanding of the domestication of mobile communications (Haddon). Methodology People were included in the study if they used CB radios while travelling in remote parts of Western Australian and the Northern Territory. The participants were approached in caravan parks, camping grounds and at roadside stops. Most were travelling in caravans while others were using camper trailers and campervans. Twenty-four travellers were interviewed, twelve men and twelve women. All were travelling with partners or spouses, and one group of two couples was travelling together. They ranged in age from twenty five to seventy years, and all were Australian residents. The duration of their travels varied from six weeks to eleven months. Participants were interviewed using a semi-structured interview schedule. The interviews were transcribed and then thematically coded with respect to regularly articulated points of view. Where points of view were distinctive, they were noted during the coding process as contrasting instances. While the relatively small sample size limits generalizability, the issues raised by the respondents provide insights into the meaning of CB radio use in the daily life of travellers in the Australian Outback. Findings Staying Safe The primary reason given for travelling with a CB radio was personal safety. The tourists interviewed were aware of the risks associated with travelling in the Outback. Health emergencies, car accidents and problems with tyres in a harsh and hot environment without ready access to water were often mentioned. ‘If you call a May Day someone will come out and answer…” (Female, 55). Another interviewee reported that: Last year we helped some folk who were bogged in the sand right at the end of the road in the middle of nowhere. The wife just started calling the various channels explaining that they were bogged and asking whether there was anyone out there….We went and towed them out. …. It would have been a long walk for them to get help. (Female, 55) Even though most interviewees had not themselves experienced a personal emergency, many recounted stories about how CB radio had been used to come to the aid of someone in distress. Road conditions were another concern. Travellers were often rightly very concerned about hazards ahead. One traveller noted: You are always going to hear someone who gives you an insight as to what is happening up ahead on the road. If there’s an accident up ahead someone’s going to get on the radio and let people know. Or there could be road works or the road could be sh*tty. (Male, 50) Safety arose in another context. Tourists share the rough and often dusty roads with road trains towing up to three trailers. These vehicles can be 50 metres long. A road train creates wind turbulence when it passes a car and trailer or caravan and the dust it raises reduces visibility. Because of this car drivers and caravanners need to be extremely careful when they pass or are passed by one. Passing a road train at 100 km can take 2.5km. Interviewees reported that they communicated with road train drivers to negotiate a safe time and place to pass. One caravanner noted: Sometimes you see a road train coming up behind you. You call him up and say ” I’ll pull over for you mate and slow down and you go”. You use it a lot because it’s safer. We are not in a hurry. Road trains are working and they are in a hurry and he (sic.) is bigger, so he has the right of way. (Male, 50) As with the dominant rationale for installing and using a CB radio, Rice and Katz showed that concern about safety is the primary motive for women acquiring a mobile phone, and safety was also important for men. The social contact enabled by CB radio provided a means of tracking the movements of other travellers who were nearby. This tracking ability engendered a sense of comfort and enabled them to communicate and exchange information synchronously in a potentially dangerous environment. As a consequence, a ‘metaworld’ (Suvantola) of ‘informational traces’ (Urry) was created. Making Oneself Known All interactions entail conventions and signals that enable a conversation to commence. These conventions were also seen to apply to CB conversations. Driving in a car or truck involves being physically enclosed with the drivers and passengers being either invisible or only partially visible to other travellers. Caravanners deal with this lack of visibility in a number of ways. Many have their first names, the name of their caravan and the channel they use on the rear of their van. A typical sign was “Bill and Rose, Travelling Everywhere, Channel 18” or “Harry and Mary, Bugger Work, Gone Fishing”, Channel 18” clearly visible to anyone coming from behind. (The male partner’s name was invariably first.) A sign that identified the occupants was seen as an invitation to chat by other travellers. One traveller said that if he saw such a sign he would call up by saying: “Hello Harry and Mary”. From then on who knows where it goes. It depends on the people. If someone comes back really cheery and a bit cheeky I can be cheery and cheeky back. (Male, 50) The names of caravans were used in other more personal ways. One couple from South Africa had given their van a Zulu name and that was seen as a way of identifying their origins and encouraging a specific kind of conversation while they were on the road. This couple reported that People call us up and ask us what it means. We have lots of calls about that. We’ve had more conversations about that than anything else. (Male, 67) Another caravanner reported that he had seen a van with “Nanna and Poppa’ on the back. They used that as a cue to start a conversation about their grandchildren. But caravan names linked to their CB radio channel can have a deeper personal meaning. One couple had their first names and the number 58 on the rear of their van. (The number 58 is beyond the range of CB channels.) On further questioning the number 58 was revealed to be the football club number of a daughter who had died. The sign was an attempt to deal with their grief and its public display a way of entering into a conversation about grief and loss. It has probably backfired because it puts people back into their shell because they think “We don’t want to talk about death”. But because of the sign we’ve met people who’ve lost a child too. (Male, 50) As Featherstone notes, drivers develop competence in switching between a range of communicative modes while they are travelling. These range from body gestures to formal signalling devices on other cars. Signage on caravans designed to invite conversation was a specialised signalling device specific to the CB user. Talking Loneliness was another theme emerging from the interviews. One of the attractions of the Outback is its sparse population. As one interviewee noted ‘You can travel all day and not see another soul’ (Female, 35). But this loneliness can be a challenge. Some of these roads are pretty lonely, the radio lets you know that there’s somebody else out there. (Male, 54) Hearing other travellers talk was comforting. As with previous research showing that travellers use mobile communications services to maintain a “symbolic proximity” (Gergen; Lury; Short, Williams and Christie; White and White, “Keeping Connected”) the CB conversations enabled the travellers to feel this sense of connection. These interactions also offered them the possibility of converting mediated relationships into face-to-face encounters along the road. That is, some travellers reported that CB-based chats with people while they were driving would lead to a decision to stop along the road for a shared morning tea or lunch. Conventions governed the use of specific channels. Some of these are government regulated, while others are user generated. For instance, Channels 18 and 40, were seen as ‘working channels’. Some interviewees felt very strongly about people who ‘cluttered up’ these channels and moved to another unused channel when they wanted to have an extended conversation. One couple was unaware of the local convention and could not understand why no one was calling them up. They later discovered that they were on the ‘wrong channel’. Interviewees travelling in a convoy would use the standard channel for travellers and then agree to move to another channel of their choice. When we travelling in a convoy we go off Channel 18 and use another channel to talk. The girls love it to talk about their knitting and work out what they’ve done wrong. We sometimes tell jokes. Also we work out what we are going to do in the next town. (Male, 67) These extended conversations parallel the lengthy conversations between drivers equipped with CB radio in the United States during the 1970’s which Dannaher described as ‘as diverse as those found at a co*cktail party’. They also provided a sense of the “nomadic intimacy” described by Fortunati. Eavesdropping While travellers used Channel 18 for conversations they set their radio to automatically scan all forty channels. When a conversation was located the radio would stop scanning and they could listen to what was being said. This meant that travellers would overhear conversations between strangers. We scan all the channels so you can hear anyone coming up behind, especially trucks and you can hear them say “that damn caravan” and you can say ’ that damn caravan will pull over at the first opportunity.” (Female, 44) But the act of listening in to other people’s conversations created moral dilemmas for some travellers. One interviewee described it as “voyeurism for the ears”. While she described listening to farm conversations as giving her an insight into daily life on huge cattle station she was tempted to butt into one conversation that she was listening to. On reflection she decided against entering the conversation. She said: I didn’t want them to know that we were eavesdropping on their conversation. I’d be embarrassed if a third-party knew that we were listening in. I guess that I’ve been taught that you shouldn’t listen in to other people’s conversations. It’s not good manners… (Female, 35) When travellers overheard conversations between road train or truck drivers they had mixed responses. These conversations were often sexually loaded and seen as coarse by the middle class travellers. Some were forgiving of the conversational excesses, distinguishing themselves from the rough and tumble world of the ‘truckies’. One traveller noted that the truck drivers use a lot of bad language, but you’ve got to go with that, because that’s the type of people they are. But you have to go with the flow. We know that we are ‘playing’ and the truckies are ‘working’ so you have to be considerate to them. (Female, 50) While the language of the truck drivers was often threatening to middle class travellers, overhearing their conversations was also seen as a comfort. One traveller remarked that sometimes you hear truckies talking about their families and they obviously know each other. It’s kind of nice to see how they think. (Female, 50) Travellers had similar feelings when they overheard conversations from cattle stations. Also, local cattle station workers and their families would use CB radios for their social and working communications. Travellers would often overhear these conversations. One traveller noted that when we are driving through a cattle station we work out which channel they are using, and we lock it on that one. And then we listen until they are out of range. We are city people and listening to the station chatter gives us a bit of an insight into what it must be like as a farmer working land out here. And then we talk about the farmers’ conversations. (Female, 35) Another traveller noted: If you are travelling and there’s nothing you can see you can listen to the farmer talking to his wife or the kids. It’s absolutely awesome to hear conversations on radio. (Female, 67) This empathic listening allows the travellers to imagine the lives of others in settings quite different from those with which they are familiar. Furthermore, hearing farmers talking about fixing the fence in the left paddock or rounding up strays makes ‘you feel that you’re not alone’. The networking of the travellers’ social life arising from listening in to others meant that they were able to learn about the environment in which they found themselves, as well as enabling them to feel that they continued to remain embedded or ‘co-present’ in social relationships in circ*mstances of considerable physical isolation. Conclusions The accounts provided by tourists illustrated the way communications technologies – in this case, CB radio – enabled people to become ’nodes in multiple networks of communication and mobility’ described by Urry and to maintain ‘co-presence’. The CB radio allowed tourists to remain part of social networks while being physically absent from them (Gergen). Their responses also demonstrated the significance of CB radio in giving meaning to the experience of travel. The CB radio was shown to be an important part of the travel experience in the remote Australian Outback. The use of CB made it possible for travellers in the Australian Outback to obtain information vital for the safe traverse of the huge distances and isolated roads. The technology enabled them to break down the atomism and frontier-like isolation of the highway. Drivers and their passengers could reach out to other travellers and avoid remaining unconnected strangers. Long hours on the road could be dealt with by listening in on others’ conversations, even though some ambivalence was expressed about this activity. Despite an awareness that they could be violating the personal boundaries of others and that their conversations could be overheard, the use of CB radio meant staying safe and enjoying guilty pleasures. Imagined or not. References Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Community. London: Verso, 1983 Dannefer, W. Dale. “The C.B. Phenomenon: A Sociological Appraisal.” Journal of Popular Culture 12 (1979): 611-19. Featherstone, Mike. “Automobilities: An Introduction.” Theory, Culture and Society 21.4/5 (2004): 1-24. Fortunati, Leopoldina. “The Mobile Phone: Towards New Categories and Social Relations.” Information, Communication and Society 5.2 (2002): 513-28. Gergen, Kenneth. “The Challenge of Absence Presence.” Perpetual Contact: Mobile Communications, Private Talk, Public Performance. Ed. James Katz. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002. 227-54. Goffman, Erving. Behavior in Public Places: Notes on the Social Organization of Gatherings. New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1963. Haddon, Leslie. “Domestication and Mobile Telephony.” Machines That Become Us: The Social Context of Personal Communication Technology. Ed. James E. Katz. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 2003. 43-55. Harrison, Julia. Being a Tourist: Finding Meaning in Pleasure Travel. Vancouver: U of British Columbia P, 2003. Johnsen, Truls Erik. “The Social Context of Mobile Use of Norwegian Teens.” Machines That Become Us: The Social Context of Personal Communication Technology. Ed. James Katz. London: Transaction Publishers, 2003. 161-69. Ling, Richard. “One Can Talk about Common Manners! The Use of Mobile Telephones in Inappropiate Situations.” Communications on the Move: The Experience of Mobile Telephony in the 1990s (Report of Cost 248: The Future European Telecommunications User Mobile Workgroup). Ed. Leslie Haddon. Farsta, Sweden: Telia AB, 1997. 97-120. Lury, Celia. “The Objects of Travel.” Touring Cultures: Transformations of Travel and Theory. Eds. Chris Rojek and John Urry. London: Routledge, 1997. 75-95. Rice, Ronald E., and James E. Katz. “Comparing Internet and Mobile Phone Usage: Digital Divides of Usage, Adoption and Dropouts.” Telecommunications Policy 27 (2003): 597-623. Short, J., E. Williams, and B. Christie. The Social Psychology of Telecommunications. New York: Wiley, 1976. Stokowski, Patricia. “Social Networks and Tourist Behavior.” American Behavioural Scientist 36.2 (1992): 212-21. Suvantola, Jaakko. Tourist’s Experience of Place. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002. Urry, John. “Mobility and Proximity.” Sociology 36.2 (2002): 255-74. ———. “Social Networks, Travel and Talk.” British Journal of Sociology 54.2 (2003): 155-75. White, Naomi Rosh, and Peter B. White. “Home and Away: Tourists in a Connected World.” Annals of Tourism Research 34. 1 (2007): 88-104. White, Peter B., and Naomi Rosh White. “Keeping Connected: Travelling with the Telephone.” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 11.2 (2005): 102-18. Williams, Stephen, and Lynda Williams. “Space Invaders: The Negotiation of Teenage Boundaries through the Mobile Phone.” The Sociological Review 53.2 (2005): 314-31. Wurtzel, Alan H., and Colin Turner. “Latent Functions of the Telephone: What Missing the Extension Means.” The Social Impact of the Telephone. Ed. Ithiel de Sola Pool. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1977. 246-61. Citation reference for this article MLA Style White, Peter B., and Naomi White. "Staying Safe and Guilty Pleasures: Tourists and CB Radio in the Australian Outback." M/C Journal 10.1 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0703/11-white-white.php>. APA Style White, P., and N. White. (Mar. 2007) "Staying Safe and Guilty Pleasures: Tourists and CB Radio in the Australian Outback," M/C Journal, 10(1). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0703/11-white-white.php>.

Abstract:

In the third episode of the British sci-fi/thriller television series Torchwood (BBC3, 2007-) the team are investigating a portable ‘ghost machine’, which allows its users to see events which occurred in the past. After visiting an old man whose younger self the device may have allowed them to witness, the team’s medic, Owen Harper, spots Bernie Harris, who’d previously been in possession of the machine. A chase ensues; they run past a park, between a gang of kids playing football, over a railway bridge, through a housing estate, and eventually Bernie is cornered in a back garden and taken away for questioning. The scene demonstrates the series’ intention to be a fast-paced, modern, glossy thriller, with loud incidental music, fast cuts, and energetic camerawork. Yet for me the scene has quite a different meaning. The housing estate they run through is the one in which I used to live; the railway bridge they run over is the one I crossed every day on my way to and from work; the street they run down is my street; and there, in the background, clear and apparent and obvious for all to see, is my home. Yes; my house was on Torchwood. As Blunt and Dowling note, “home does not simply exist, but is made … [and] … this process has both material and imaginative elements” (23). It is through such imaginative elements that we turn ‘spaces’ that are “unnamed, unhistoried, unnarativized” into ‘places’ that are “indubitably bound up with personal experience” (Darby 50). Such experiences may be ‘real’ (as in things that actually happened there) or ‘representational’ (as in seen on television); my relationship to ‘home’ is here being inflected through the “indexical bond” (Kilborn and Izod 29) that links both of these strategies. In using a scene from Torchwood to say something about my personal history, I’m taking what is, in essence, a televisual ‘space’ and converting it into a ‘place’ which is not only defined by my “profilmic” (Ward 8) relationship to it, but also helps express that relationship. Telling everyone that my house was on Torchwood certainly says something about the programme; but more fundamentally I’m engaging in a process intended to say something about me. A bit of autobiography. The house is in Splott, a residential area of Cardiff, the capital of Wales, where Torchwood is set and filmed. I lived in Cardiff from 2000 to 2006, when I worked at the University of Glamorgan. For much of that time I lived in rented accommodation in Cathays, the student area of Cardiff. But in 2005 I bought a house in Splott, and this was the first property I ever owned. A year later I moved to Norwich (virtually the other side of the UK from Cardiff) to take a job at the University of East Anglia, but I kept the house in Cardiff and now rent it out. It was while living in Norwich that my house appeared on Torchwood, and I had no idea that the programme had been filming in that area. This means that, strictly speaking, at the time it was on television the property was no longer my ‘home’, but was instead my tenants’. Yet what I want to examine here is the “geography of feeling and emotion” (Rodaway 263) which is central to the idea of ‘home’, and which has been kick-started in me since some fictional television characters ran down the street I used to live in and the ‘real’ and the ‘representational’ began to intersect. There certainly is something personal which is required in order to turn a ‘space’ into a ‘place’, but what is it that then transforms it into ‘home’? That is, for me Cardiff is more than a ‘place’ which I know. Owning a property there makes a difference, but that is to too easily equate a commercial transaction with an emotive sense of feeling. Indeed, Cardiff felt like ‘home’ before I’d bought a house, and the majority of my memories of the city are connected to other properties I’ve lived in. In a capitalist society it’s tempting to equate ‘home’ with the property we own, and this probably is the case for the majority of people (Morley 19). Nevertheless, something emotive stirred in me when I saw my house in a chase sequence on a science-fiction television programme when I live in an entirely different city. Tuan defines this as ‘topophilia’, which is “the affective bond between people and place or setting” (Topophilia 4), and it’s clear that such bonds can be highly emotionally charged and a significant aspect of one’s sense of self. This is noticeable because of the ways in which I’ve used my house’s appearance on television. I’ve not been quiet about it; I was telling everyone at work the day after it appeared. Whenever people mention Torchwood it’s something I point out. This might not sound as if that is likely to occur very often, but considering the programme is a spin-off from the highly successful revival of Doctor Who (BBC1, 1963-89, 1996, 2005-) it is part of a well-known media landscape. Both Doctor Who and Torchwood are predominantly filmed in Cardiff and the surrounding areas of South Wales, but whereas Torchwood is also narratively set in Cardiff, Doctor Who merely uses the locations to represent other places, most often London. Yet many of these places are distinctive and therefore obviously Cardiff for those who know the area. For example, the hospital in the episode ‘New Earth’ (2006) is recognisably the interior of the Wales Millennium Centre, just as the exterior location where the Tardis lands at the beginning of the episode is clearly Rhossili on the Gower Peninsula. Inevitably, the use of such locations has often disrupted my understanding of the story being told. That is, it’s hard to accept that this episode is taking place on a planet at the other end of the galaxy thousands of years into the future if the characters are standing on a cliff you recognise because you’ve been camping there. Of course, the use of locations to represent other places is necessary in media fictions, and I’m not trying to carry out some kind of trainspotter location identification in an attempt to undermine the programme’s diegesis. But it is important to note that while “remembering is a process that today is increasingly media-afflicted” (Hoskins 110), media texts can also be affected by the memories, whether communal or individual, that we bring to bear on them. A ‘real’ relationship with a place can be so intimate that it refuses to be ignored when ‘representations’ require it to be unnecessary. I’m a fan of Doctor Who and would rather not recognise the places so I can just get on with enjoying the programme. But it’s not possible to simply erase “Expressions of community” (Moores 368) which bring together identity and place, especially when that place is your home. Importantly, my idea of ‘home’ is inextricably bound up in the past. As it is a place I no longer live in, the ways in which I feel towards it are predicated on the notion that I used to live there, but no longer do. It’s clear that notions of home – especially those related to nation – are often predicated on ideas of history with significant emotional resonance (Anderson; Blunt and Dowling 140-195; Calhoun). This is a place that is an emotional rather than geographical home, even if it used to also be my home geographically. In buying a house, and engaging in the consumer culture which dominates the ways in which we turn a house into a home (oh, those endless hours at Ikea), I spent a lot of time wondering what it was that this sofa, or those lampshades, or that rug, said about me. The idea that the buildings that we own are a key way of creating and demonstrating a particular kind of identity or affiliation with a certain social group is necessary to consumer capitalism. But as I no longer live in it, the inside of this house can no longer be used as something I can show to other people hoping that they’ll ‘read’ my home how I want them to. Instead, the sense of home invigorated by my house’s appearance on Torchwood is one centred on location, related to the city and the housing estate where my house is, rather than what I did to it. ‘Home’ here becomes something symbolised by the bricks and mortar of the house I bought, but is instead more accurately located in the city and area which the house sits in; Cardiff. More importantly, Cardiff and my house become emotionally meaningful because I’m no longer there. That is, while it’s clear I had a particular relationship to Cardiff when I was a resident, this has altered since my move to Norwich. In moving to a new city – one which I had never visited before, and had no family or friends living in – it seems that my understanding of Cardiff as my ‘home’ has become intensified. This might be because continuing to own property there gives me an investment in the city, both emotionally and financially. But this idea of ‘home’ would, I think, have existed even if I’d sold my house. Instead, Cardiff-as-home is predicated on an idea of personal history and nostalgia (Wheeler; Massey). Academics are used to moving great distances in order to get jobs; indeed, “To spend an entire working career in a single department may seem to be a failure of geographical imagination” (Ley 182). The labour market insists that “All people may now be wanderers” (Bauman, Globalization 87), and hence geographical origins become something to be discussed with new colleagues. For me, like most people, this is a complicated question; does it mean where I was born, or where I grew up, or where I studied, or where I have lived most of my life? In the choices I make to answer this question, I’m acknowledging that “migration is a complex process of cultural negotiation, resistance, and adaptation” (Sinclair and Cunningham 14). As Freeman notes, “the history one tells, via memory, assumes the form of a narrative of the past that charts the trajectory of how one’s self came to be” (33, italics in original). Importantly, this narrative must be seen to make sense; that is, it must help explain the present, conforming to narrative ideas of cause and effect. In constructing a “narratable self” (Caravero 33, italics in original) I’m demonstrating how I think I came to end up where I am now, doing the job I’m doing. In order to show that “I am more than what the thin present defines” (Tuan, Space and Place 186) it’s necessary to reiterate a notion of ‘home’ which supports and illustrates the desired identity narrative. This narrative is as much about “the reflexive project of the self” (Gauntlett 99) in these “liquid times” (Bauman, Liquid Times), as it is a “performance” (Goffman) for others. The coherence and stability of my performance was undercut in a recent episode of Doctor Who – ‘Smith and Jones’ (2007) – in which a family row occurred outside a pub. I became quite distraught that I couldn’t work out where that pub was, and was later reassured to discover that it was in Pontypridd, a town a good few miles from Cardiff, and therefore it wasn’t surprising that I couldn’t recognise it. But in being distraught at not recognising locations I was demonstrating how central knowledge is to an idea of ‘home’. Knowing your way around, knowing where certain shops are, knowing the history of the place; these are all aspects of home, all parts of what Crouch calls “lay knowledge” (217). Ignorance of a space marks the outsider, who must stand on street corners with a map and ask locals for directions. For someone like me who prides himself on his sense of direction (who says I conform to gender stereotypes?) an inability to recognise a pub that I thought I should know suggested my knowledge of the area was dissipating, and so perhaps my ability to define that city as my home was becoming less valid. This must be why I take pleasure in noting that Torchwood’s diegesis is often geographically correct, for the ‘representational’ helps demonstrate my knowledge of the ‘real’ place’s layout. As Tuan notes, “When space feels thoroughly familiar to us, it has become place” (Space and Place 73), and the demonstration of that familiarity is one of the ways of reasserting one’s relationship to home. In demonstrating a knowledge of the place I’m defining as home, I’m also insisting that I’m not a tourist. Urry shows how visitors use a “tourist gaze” (The Tourist Gaze), arguing viewing is the most important activity when encountering a place, just as Tuan (Space and Place 16) and Strain (3) do. To visit somewhere is to employ “a dominance of the eye” (Urry, “Sensing the City” 71); this is why photography has become the dominant manner for recording tourist activity. Strain sees the tourist gaze as one “trained for consumerism” (15) with tourist activity defined primarily by commerce. Since Doctor Who returned Cardiff has promoted its association with the programme, opening an ‘Up Close’ exhibition and debating whether to put together a tourist trail of locations. As a fan of these programmes I’m certainly excited by all of this, and have been to the exhibition. Yet it feels odd being a tourist in a place I want to call home, and some of my activity seems an attempt to demonstrate that it was my home before it became a place I might want to visit for its associations with a television programme. For example, I never went and watched the programme being filmed, even though much of it was shot within walking distance of my house, and “The physical places of fandom clearly have an extraordinary importance for fans” (Sandvoss 61). While some of this was due to not wanting to know what was going to happen in the programme, I was uncomfortable with carrying out an activity that would turn a “landscape” into a “mediascape” (Jansson 432), replacing the ‘real’ with the ‘representational’. In insisting on seeing Cardiff, and my house, as something which existed prior to the programmes, I’m attempting to maintain the “imagined community” (Anderson) I have for my home, distinguishing it from the taint of commerce, no matter how pointless or naïve such an act is in effect. Hence, home is resolutely not a commercial place; or, at least, it is a location whose primary emotive aspects are not defined by consumerism. When houses are seen as nothing more than aspects of commerce, that’s when they remain ‘houses’ or ‘properties’; the affective aspects of ‘homes’ are instead emotionally detached from the commercial factors which bring them about. I think this is why I’m keen to demonstrate that my associations with Cardiff existed before Doctor Who started being made there, for if the place only meant anything to me because of the programme that would define me as a tourist and therefore undermine those emotional and personal aspects of the city which allow me to call it ‘home’. It also means I can be proud that such a cultural institution is being made in ‘my’ city. But it’s a city I can no longer claim residence in. This means that Torchwood and Doctor Who have become useful ways for me to ‘visit’ Cardiff. It seems I have started to adopt a ‘tourist gaze’, for the programmes visually recreate the locations and all I can do is view them, no matter how much I use my knowledge of location in an attempt to interpret those images differently from a tourist. It’s tempting to suggest that this shows how there is a “perpetual negotiation between the real event and its representation” (Bruzzi 9), and how willing I am to engage in the “mobile privatization” that Williams saw as a defining aspect of television (26). But this would be to accept the “unhomeyness” which results from “the ultimate failures of the home in postmodern times” (Lewis and Cho 74). In adopting an autobiographical approach to these issues, I hope I’ve demonstrated the ways in which individuals can experience emotional resonances related to ‘home’ which, while clearly inflected through the social, cultural, and technological aspects I’ve outlined, are nevertheless meaningful and maintain a dominance of the ‘real’ over the ‘representational’. Furthermore, my job tells me I shouldn’t feel this way about my home; or, at least, it reminds me that such emotionality can be explained away through cultural analysis. But that doesn’t in any way make ‘home’ any less powerful nor fully explain how such dry criteria mutate into humanist, emotional significance. So, I can tell you what my home is: but I’m not sure I can get you to understand how seeing my home on television makes me feel. In that sense it’s almost too neat that the episode which kick-started all of this is called ‘Ghost Machine’, for television has become the technology through which the ghosts of my home haunt me on a weekly basis, and ghosts have always been difficult to make sense of. References Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. London: Verso, 1983. Bauman, Zygmunt. Globalization: The Human Consequences. Cambridge: Polity, 1998. ———. Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty. Cambridge: Polity, 2007. Blunt, Alison, and Robyn Dowling. Home. London and New York: Routledge, 2006. Bruzzi, Stella. New Documentary: A Critical Introduction. London and New York: Routledge, 2000. Calhoun, Craig. Nations Matter: Culture, History, and the Cosmopolitan Dream. London and New York: Routledge, 2007. Caravero, Adriana. Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood. Trans. Paul A. Kottman. London and New York: Routledge, 2000/1997. Crouch, David. “Surrounded by Place: Embodied Encounters.” Tourism: Between Place and Performance. Eds. Simon Coleman and Mike Crang. New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2002. 207-18. Darby, Wendy Joy. Landscape and Identity: Geographies of Nation and Class in England. Oxford and New York: Berg, 2000. Freeman, Mark. Rewriting the Self: History, Memory, Narrative. London and New York: Routledge, 1993. Gauntlett, David. Media, Gender and Identity: An Introduction. London and New York: Routledge, 2002. Goffmann, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. London: Penguin, 1959. Hoskins, Andrew. “Television and the Collapse of Memory.” Time and Society 13.1 (2004): 109-27. Jansson, André. “Spatial Phantasmagoria: the Mediatization of Tourism Experience.” European Journal of Communication 17.4 (2002): 429-43. Kilborn, Richard, and John Izod. An Introduction to Television Documentary: Confronting Reality. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1997. Lewis, Tyson, and Daniel Cho. “Home Is Where the Neurosis Is: A Topography of the Spatial Unconscious.” Cultural Critique 64.1 (2006): 69-91. Ley, David. “Places and Contexts.” Approaches to Human Geography. Eds. Stuart Aitken and Gill Valentine. London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi: Sage, 2006. 178-83. Massey, Doris. For Space. London: Sage, 2005. Moores, Shaun. “Television, Geography and ‘Mobile Privatization’.” European Journal of Communication 8.4 (1993): 365-79. Morley, David. Home Territories: Media, Mobility and Identity. London and New York: Routledge, 2000. Rodaway, Paul. “Humanism and People-Centred Methods.” Approaches to Human Geography. Eds. Stuart Aitken and Gill Valentine. London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi: Sage, 2006. 263-72. Sandvoss, Cornel. Fans: The Mirror of Consumption. Cambridge: Polity, 2005. Sinclair, John, and Stuart Cunningham. “Go with the Flow: Diasporas and the Media.” Television and New Media 1.1 (2000): 11-31. Strain, Ellen. Public Places, Private Journeys: Ethnography, Entertainment, and the Tourist Gaze. New Brunswick, New Jersey, and London: Rutgers UP, 2003. Tuan, Yi-Fu. Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values. New York: Columbia UP, 1974. ———. Space and Place: the Perspective of Experience. London: Edward Arnold, 1977. Urry, John. “Sensing the City.” The Tourist City. Eds. Dennis R. Judd and Susan S. Fainstein. New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1999. 71-86. ———. The Tourist Gaze. 2nd ed. London: Sage, 2002. Ward, Paul. Documentary: The Margins of Reality. London and New York: Wallflower, 2005. Wheeler, Wendy. A New Modernity: Change in Science, Literature and Politics. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1999. Williams, Raymond. Television: Technology and Cultural Form. 2nd ed. London and New York: Routledge, 1990. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Mills, Brett. "What Happens When Your Home Is on Television?." M/C Journal 10.4 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/08-mills.php>. APA Style Mills, B. (Aug. 2007) "What Happens When Your Home Is on Television?," M/C Journal, 10(4). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/08-mills.php>.

Abstract:

IntroductionWhen I saw Patriots Day (Berg 2016) at my local multiplex, a family entered the theatre and sat a few rows in front of me. They had a child with them, a boy who was perhaps nine or ten years old. Upon seeing the kid, I had a physical reaction. Not quite a knee-jerk, but more of an uneasy gut punch. ‘Don't you know what this movie is about?’ I wanted to ask his parents; ‘I’ve seen Jeff Bauman’s bones, and that is not something a child should see.’ I had lived through the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing and subsequent manhunt, and the memories were vivid in my mind as I waited for the movie to start, to re-present the memory on screen. Admittedly, I had lived through it from the other side of the world, watching through the mediated windows of the computer, smartphone, and television screen. Nevertheless, I remembered it in blood-soaked colour detail, brought to me by online photo galleries, social media updates, the failed amateur sleuths of Reddit, and constant cable news updates, breaking news even when the events had temporarily stalled. Alison Landsberg has coined the term “prosthetic memory” to describe how historical events are re-created and imbued with an affective experience through cinema and other sites of mass cultural mediation, allowing those who did not experience the past to form a personal connection to and subjective memory of history (2). For the boy in the cinema, Patriots Day would most likely be his first encounter with and memory of the Boston Marathon bombing. But how does prosthetic memory apply to audience members like me, who had lived through the Boston bombing from a great distance, with personalised memories mediated by the first-person perspective of social media? Does the ease of dissemination of information, particularly eyewitness photographs and videos, create possibilities for a prosthetic experience of the present? Does the online mediation of historical events of the present translate to screen dramatisations? These questions become particularly pertinent when the first-release audience of a film has recent, living memories of the real events depicted on screen.The time between when an event occurs and when it is brought to cinemas in a true-events adaptation is decreasing. Rebecca A. Sheehan argues that the cultural value of instant information has given rise to a trend in the contemporary biopic and historical film that sees our mediated world turned into a temporal "paradox in which the present is figured as both historical and ongoing" (36). Since 2005, Sheehan writes, biographical films that depict the lives of still-living public figures or in other ways comment on the ongoing history of the present have become increasingly frequent. Sheehan cites films such as The Social Network (Fincher 2010), The Queen (Frears 2006), W. (Stone 2008), and Game Change (Roach 2012) as examples of this growing biopic trend (35-36). In addition to the instantaneous remediation of public figures in the contemporary biopic, similarly there is a stable of contemporary historical films based on the true stories of ordinary people involved in extraordinary recent events. Films such as The Impossible (Bayona 2012), World Trade Center (Stone 2006), United 93 (Greengrass 2006), and Deepwater Horizon (Berg 2016) bring the death and destruction of real-world natural disasters or terrorist attacks to a sanitised but experiential cinematic event. The sensitive nature of some of the events in question often see the films labelled “too soon” and exploitative of recent tragedy. Films such as these typically do not have known public figures as their protagonists, but they arise from a similar climate of the demands of televisual and online mediation that Sheehan describes in the “instant biopics” of her study (36). Given this rise of brief temporal space between real events and their dramatisations, in this essay, I examine Patriots Day in light of the role digital experience plays in both its dramatisation and how the film's initial audience may remember the event. As Patriots Day replicates a kind of prosthetic memory of the present, it uses the first-instance digital mediation of the event to form prosthetic memories for future viewers. Through Patriots Day, I seek to gesture toward the possibilities of first-person digital mediation of major news events in shaping dramatisations of the recent past.Digital Memories of the Boston Marathon BombingTo examine the ways the Boston Marathon bombing circulated in online space, I look at the link- and image-based online discussion platform Reddit as an example of engagement with and recirculation of the event, particularly as a form of engagement defined by photographs and videos. Because the Boston Marathon is a televised and widely-reported event, professional videographers and photographers were present at the marathon’s finish line at the time of the first explosion. Thus, the first bomb and its immediate aftermath were captured in news footage and still images. The graphic nature of some of these images depicting the violence of the scene saw traditional print and television outlets cropping or otherwise editing the photographs to make them appropriate for mass broadcast (Hughney). Some online outlets, however, showed these pictures in their unedited form, often accompanied by warnings that required readers to scroll further down the page or click through the warning to see the photographs. These distinctive capabilities of the online environment allowed individuals to choose whether to view the image, while still allowing the uncensored image to circulate and be reposted elsewhere, such as on Reddit. In addition to photos and videos shot by professionals at the finish line, witnesses armed with smart phone cameras and access to social media posted their views of the aftermath to social media like Twitter, enabling the collation of both amateur and professionally shot photographs of the scene by online news aggregators such as Buzzfeed (Broderick). The Reddit community is seen as an essential part of the Boston Bombing story for the way some of its users participated in a form of ‘crowd-sourced’ investigation that resulted in the false identification of suspects (see: Nhan et al.; Tapia et al.; Potts and Harrison). There is another aspect to Reddit’s role in the circulation and mediation of the story, however, as online venues became a go-to source for news on the unfolding event, where information was delivered faster and with greater accuracy than the often-sensationalised television news coverage (Starbird et al. 347). In addition to its role in providing information that is a part of Reddit’s culture that “value[s] evidence of some kind” to support discussion (Potts and Harrison 144), Reddit played a number of roles in the sense-making process that social media can often facilitate during crisis situations (Heverin and Zach). Through its division into “subreddits,” the individual communities and discussion areas that make up the platform, Reddit accommodates an incredibly diverse range of topics and interests. Different areas of Reddit were able to play different roles in the process of sharing information and acting in a community sense-making capacity in the aftermath of the bombing. Among the subreddits involved in attempting to make sense of the event were those that served as appropriate places for posting image galleries of both professional and amateur photographs and videos, drawn from a variety of online sources. Users of subreddits such as /r/WTF and /r/MorbidReality, for example, posted galleries of “NSFL” (Not Safe For Life) images of the bombing and its aftermath (see: touhou_hijack, titan059, f00d4tehg0dz). Additionally, the /r/Boston subreddit issued calls for anyone with photographs or videos related to the attack to upload them to the thread, as well as providing an e-mail address to submit them to the FBI (RichardHerold). The /r/FindBostonBombers subreddit became a hub for analysis of the photographs. The subreddit's investigatory work was picked up by other online and traditional media outlets (including the New York Post cover photo which misidentified two suspects), bringing wider attention to Reddit’s unfolding coverage of the bombing (Potts and Harrison 148). Landsberg’s theory of prosthetic memory, and her application of it, largely relates to mass culture’s role in “the production and dissemination of memories that have no direct connection to a person’s lived past” (20). The possibilities for news events to be recorded and disseminated by smart phones and social media, however, help to create a deeper sense of affective engagement with a distant present, creating prosthetic memories out of the mediated first-hand experiences of others. The graphic nature of the photos and videos of the Boston bombing collected by and shared on sites like Reddit, the ongoing nature of the event (which, from detonation to the capture of Dzokhar Tsarnaev, spanned five days), and the participatory activity of scouring photographs for clues to the identity of the bombers all lend a sense of ongoing, experiential engagement with first-person, audiovisual mediations of the event. These prosthetic memories of the present are, as Landsberg writes of those created from dramatisations or re-creations of the past, transferable, able to belong to those who have no “natural” claim to them (18) with an experiential element that personalises history for those who do not directly experience it (33). If widely disseminated first-person mediations of events like the Boston bombing can be thought of as a prosthetic experience of present history, how will they play a part in the prosthetic memories of the future? How will those who did not live through the Boston bombing, either as a personal experience or a digitally mediated one, incorporate this digital memory into their own experience of its cinematic re-creation? To address this question, I turn to consider Patriots Day. Of particular note is the bombing sequence’s resemblance to digital mediations of the event as a marker of a plausible docudramatic resemblance to reality.The Docudramatic Re-Presentation of Digital MemoryAs a cinematic representation of recent history, Patriots Day sits at a somewhat uncomfortable intersection of fact and fiction, of docudrama and popcorn action movie, more so than an instant history film typically would. Composite characters or entirely invented characters and narratives that play out against the backdrop of real events are nothing out of the ordinary in the historical film. However, Patriots Day's use of real material and that of pure invention coincides, frequently in stark contrast. The film's protagonist, Boston Police Sergeant Tommy Saunders (played by Mark Wahlberg) is a fictional character, the improbable hero of the story who is present at every step of the attack and the manhunt. He is there on Boylston Street when the bombs go off. He is there with the FBI, helping to identify the suspects with knowledge of Boylston Street security cameras that borders on a supernatural power. He is there at the Watertown shootout among exploding cars and one-liner quips. When Dzokhar Tsarnaev is finally located, he is, of course, first on the scene. Tommy Saunders, as embodied by Wahlberg, trades on all the connotations of both the stereotypical Boston Southie and the action hero that are embedded in Wahlberg’s star persona. As a result, Patriots Day often seems to be a depiction of an alternate universe where Mark Wahlberg in a cop uniform almost single-handedly caught a terrorist. The improbability of Saunders as a character in a true-events drama, though, is thoroughly couched in the docudramatic material of historical depiction. Steven N. Lipkin argues that docudrama is a mode of representation that performs a re-creation of memory to persuade us that it is representing the real (1). By conjuring the memory of an event into being in ways that seem plausible and anchored to the evidence of actuality—such as integrating archival footage or an indexical resemblance to the actual event or an actual person—the representational, cinematic, or fictionalised elements of docudrama are imbued with a sense of the reality they claim to represent (Lipkin 3). Patriots Day uses real visual material throughout the film. The integration of evidence is particularly notable in the bombing sequence, which combines archival footage of the 2013 race, surveillance footage of the Tsarnaev brothers approaching the finish line, and a dramatic re-creation that visually resembles the original to such an extent that its integration with archival footage is almost seamless (Landler). The conclusion of the film draws on this evidential connection to the real as well, in the way that docudrama is momentarily suspended to become documentary, as interviews with some of the real people who are depicted as characters in the film close out the story. In addition to its direct use of the actual, Patriots Day's re-creation of the bombing itself bears an indexical resemblance to the event as seen by those who were not there and relies on memories of the bombing's initial mediation to vouch for the dramatisation's accuracy. In the moments before the bombing's re-creation, actual footage of the Tsarnaevs's route down Boylston Street plays, a low ominous tone of the score building over the silent security footage. The fictional Saunders’s fictional wife (Michelle Monaghan) has come to the finish line to bring him a knee brace, and she passes Tamerlan Tsarnaev as she leaves. This shot directly crosses a visual resemblance to the actual (Themo Melikidze playing Tsarnaev, resembling the bomber through physicality and costuming) with the fictional structuring device of the film in the form of Tommy Saunders. Next, in a long shot, we see Tsarnaev bump into a man wearing a grey raglan shirt. The man turns to look at Tsarnaev. From the costuming, it is evident that this man who is not otherwise named is intended to represent Jeff Bauman, the subject of an iconic photograph from the bombing. In the photo, Bauman is shown being taken from the scene in a wheelchair with both legs amputated from below the knee by the blast (another cinematic dramatisation of the Boston bombing, Stronger, based on Bauman’s memoir of the same name, will be released in 2017). In addition to the visual signifier of Bauman from the memorable photograph, reports circulated that Bauman's ability to describe Tsarnaev to the FBI in the immediate aftermath of the bombing was instrumental in identifying the suspects (Hartmann). Here, this digital memory is re-created in a brief but recognisable moment: this is the before picture of Jeff Bauman, this is the moment of identification that was widely circulated and talked about, a memory of that one piece of good news that helped satisfy public curiosity about the status of the iconic Man in the Wheelchair.When the bombs detonate, we are brought into the smoke and ash, closer access than the original mediation afforded by the videographers at the finish line. After the first bomb detonates, the camera follows Saunders as he walks toward the smoke cloud. As the second bomb explodes, we go inside the scene. The sequence cuts from actual security camera footage that captured the blast, to a first-person perspective of the explosion, the resulting fire and smoke, and a shot that resembles the point of view of footage captured on a smart phone. The frame shakes wildly, giving the viewer disorienting flashes of the victims, a sense of the chaos without seeing anything in lasting, specific detail, before the frame tips sideways onto the pavement, stained with blood and littered with debris. Coupled with this is a soundscape that resembles both the subjective experience of a bombing victim and what their smart phone video has captured. There is the rumble of the explosion and muffled sounds of debris hidden under the noise of shockwaves of air hitting a microphone, fading into an electronic whine and tinnitus ring. A later shot shows the frame obscured by smoke, slowly clearing to give us a high angle view of the aftermath, resembling photographs taken from a window overlooking the scene on Boylston Street (see: touhou_hijack). Archival footage of first responders and points of view resembling a running cell phone camera that captures flashes of blood and open wounds combine with shots of the actors playing characters (both fictional and based on real people) that were established at the beginning of the film. There is once again a merging of the re-created and the actual, bound together by a sense of memory that encourages the viewer to take the former as plausible, based on its resemblance to the latter.When Saunders runs for the second bombing site further down the street, he looks down at two bodies on the ground. Framed in close-up, the bloodless, empty expression and bright blue shirt of Krystle Campbell are recognisable. We can ignore the inaccuracies of this element of the digital memory amidst the chaos of the sequence. Campbell died in the first bombing, not the second. The body of a woman in a black shirt is between the camera's position on the re-created Boylston Street and the actor standing in for Campbell, the opposite of how Campbell and her friend Karen Rand lay beside each other in photographs of the bombing aftermath. The police officer who takes Krystle's pulse on film and shakes her head at Wahlberg's character is a brunette, not the blonde in the widely-circulated picture of a first responder at the actual bombing. The most visceral portion of the image is there, though, re-created almost exactly as it appeared at its first point of mediation: the lifeless eyes and gaping mouth, the bright blue t-shirt. The memory of the event is conjured into being, and the cinematic image resembles the most salient elements of the memory enough for the cinematic image to be a plausible re-creation. The cinematic frame is positioned at a lower level to the original still, as though we are on the ground beside her, bringing the viewer even closer to the event, even as the frame crops out her injuries as scene photographs did not, granting a semblance of respectful distance from the real death. This re-creation of Krystle Campbell’s death is a brief flash in the sequence, but a powerful moment of recognition for those who remember its original mediation. The result is a sequence that shows the graphic violence of the actuality it represents in a series of images that invite its viewer to expand the sequence with their memory of the event the way most of them experienced it: on other screens, at the site of its first instance of digital mediation.ConclusionThrough its use of cinematography that resembles actual photographic evidence of the Boston Marathon bombing or imbues the re-creation with a sense of a first-person, digitally mediated account of the event, Patriots Day draws on its audience's digital memory of recent history to claim accuracy in its fictionalisation. Not everyone who sees Patriots Day may be as familiar with the wealth of eyewitness photographs and images of the Boston Marathon bombing as those who may have experienced and followed the events in online venues such as Reddit. Nonetheless, the fact of this material's existence shapes the event's dramatisation as the filmmakers attempt to imbue the dramatisation with a sense of accuracy and fidelity to the event. The influence of digital memory on the film’s representation of the event gestures toward the possibilities for how online engagement with major news events may play a role in their dramatisation moving forward. Events that have had eyewitness visual accounts distributed online, such as the 2015 Bataclan massacre, the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting, the 2017 Manchester Arena bombing and Westminster Bridge attack, or the 2016 police shooting of Philando Castile that was streamed on Facebook live, may become the subject of future dramatisations of recent history. The dramatic renderings of contemporary history films will undoubtedly be shaped by the recent memory of their online mediations to appeal to a sense of accuracy in the viewer's memory. As recent history films continue, digital memories of the present will help make the prosthetic memories of the future. ReferencesBroderick, Ryan. “Photos from the Scene of the Boston Marathon Explosion (Extremely Graphic).” Buzzfeed News, 16 Apr. 2013. 2 Aug. 2017 <https://www.buzzfeed.com/ryanhatesthis/first-photos-from-the-scene-of-the-boston-marathon-explosion?utm_term=.fw38Byjq1#.peNXWPe8G>.f00d4tehg0dz. “Collection of Photos from the Boston Marathon Bombing (NSFW) (NSFL-Gore).” Reddit, 16 Apr. 2013. 8 Aug. 2017 <https://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/1cfhg4/collection_of_photos_from_the_boston_marathon/>.Hartmann, Margaret. “Bombing Victim in Iconic Photo Was Key to Identifying Boston Suspects.” New York Magazine, 18 Apr. 2013. 8 Aug. 2017 <http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/04/bombing-victim-identified-suspects.html>.Heverin, Thomas, and Lisl Zach. “Use of Microblogging for Collective Sense-Making during Violent Crises: A Study of Three Campus Shootings.” Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 63.1 (2012): 34-47. Hughney, Christine. “News Media Weigh Use of Photos of Carnage.” New York Times, 17 Apr. 2013. 2 Aug. 2017 <http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/18/business/media/news-media-weigh-use-of-photos-of-carnage.html>.Landler, Edward. “Recreating the Boston Marathon Bombing in Patriots Day.” Cinemontage, 21 Dec. 2016. 8 Aug. 2017 <http://cinemontage.org/2016/12/recreating-boston-marathon-bombing-patriots-day/>.Landsberg, Alison. Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture. New York: Columbia U P, 2004. Lipkin, Steven N. Docudrama Performs the Past: Arenas of Argument in Films Based on True Stories. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2011. Nhan, Johnny, Laura Huey, and Ryan Broll. “Digilantism: An Analysis of Crowdsourcing and the Boston Marathon Bombing.” British Journal of Criminology 57 (2017): 341-361. Patriots Day. Dir. Peter Berg. CBS Films, 2016.Potts, Liza, and Angela Harrison. “Interfaces as Rhetorical Constructions. Reddit and 4chan during the Boston Marathon Bombings.” Proceedings of the 31st ACM International Conference on Design of Communication. Greenville, North Carolina, September-October 2013. 143-150. RichardHerold. “2013 Boston Marathon Attacks: Please Upload Any Photos in Relation to the Attacks That You Have.” Reddit, 15 Apr. 2013. 8 Aug. 2017 <https://www.reddit.com/r/boston/comments/1cf5wp/2013_boston_marathon_attacks_please_upload_any/>.Sheehan, Rebecca A. “Facebooking the Present: The Biopic and Cultural Instantaneity.” The Biopic in Contemporary Film Culture. Eds. Tom Brown and Bélen Vidal. New York: Routledge, 2014. 35-51. Starbird, Kate, Jim Maddock, Mania Orand, Peg Achterman, and Robert M. Mason. “Rumors, False Flags, and Digital Vigilantes: Misinformation on Twitter after the 2013 Boston Marathon Bombing.” iConference 2014 Proceedings. Berlin, March 2014. 654-662. Tapia, Andrea H., Nicolas LaLone, and Hyun-Woo Kim. “Run Amok: Group Crowd Participation in Identifying the Bomb and Bomber from the Boston Marathon Bombing.” Proceedings of the 11th International ISCRAM Conference. Eds. S.R. Hiltz, M.S. Pfaff, L. Plotnick, and P.C. Shih. University Park, Pennsylvania, May 2014. 265-274. titan059. “Pics from Boston Bombing NSFL.” Reddit, 15 Apr. 2013. 8 Aug. 2017 <https://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/1cf0po/pics_from_boston_bombing_nsfl/>.touhou_hijack. “Krystle Campbell Died Screaming. This Sequence of Photos Shows Her Final Moments.” Reddit, 18 Apr. 2013. 8 Aug. 2017 <https://www.reddit.com/r/MorbidReality/comments/1cktrx/krystle_campbell_died_screaming_this_sequence_of/>.

Abstract:

Content warning: although it was kept to a minimum, this text displays instances of (anti-Semitic) hate speech. During the 2016 U.S. election and its aftermath, multiple journalistic accounts reported on “alt-right trolls” emanating from anonymous online spaces like the imageboard 4chan (e.g. Abramson; Ellis). Having gained infamy for its nihilist trolling subcultures (Phillips, This Is Why) and the loose hacktivist movement Anonymous (Coleman), 4chan now drew headlines because of the alt-right’s “genuinely new” concoction of white supremacy, ironic Internet humour, and a lack of clear leadership (Hawley 50). The alt-right “anons”, as imageboard users call themselves, were said to primarily manifest on the “Politically Incorrect” subforum of 4chan: /pol/. Gradually, a sentiment arose in the titles of several news articles that the pro-Trump “alt-right trolls” had successfully won the metapolitical battle intertwined with the elections (Phillips, Oxygen 5). For instance, articles titled that “trolls” were “The Only True Winners of this Election” (Dewey) or even “Plotting a GOP Takeover” (Stuart).The headlines were as enticing as questionable. As trolling-expert Whitney Phillips headlined herself, the alt-right did not attain political gravity solely through its own efforts but rather was “Conjured Out of Pearl Clutching and Media Attention” (“The Alt-Right”), with news outlets being provoked to criticise, debunk, or sensationalise its trolling activities (Faris et al. 131; Phillips, “Oxygen” 5-6). Even with the right intentions, attempts at denouncement through using vague, structuralist notions–from “alt-right” and “trolls” to “the basket of deplorables” (Robertson) – arguably only strengthened the coherence of those it was meant to disavow (Phillips, Oxygen; Phillips et al.; Marantz). Phillips et al. therefore lamented such generalisations, arguing attributing Trump’s win to vague notions of “4chan”, “alt-right”, or “trolls” actually bestowed an “atemporal, almost godlike power” to what was actually an “ever-reactive anonymous online collective”. Therefore, they called to refrain from making claims about opaque spaces like 4chan without first “plotting the landscape” and “safeguarding the actual record”. Indeed, “when it comes to 4chan and Anonymous”, Phillips et al. warned, “nobody steps in the same river twice”.This text answers the call to map anonymous online groups by engaging with the complexity of testing the muddy waters of the ever-changing and dissimulative 4chan-current. It first argues how anti-structuralist research outlooks can answer to many of the pitfalls arising from this complex task. Afterwards, it traces the word trump as it was used on 4chan/pol/ to problematise some of the above-mentioned media narratives. How did anons consider Trump, and how did the /pol/-current change during the build-up of the 2016 U.S. elections and afterwards?On Researching Masked and Dissimulative ExtremistsWhile potentially playing into the self-imagination of malicious actors (Phillips et al.), the frequent appearance of overblown narratives on 4chan is unsurprising considering the peculiar affordances of imageboards. Imageboards are anonymous – no user account is required to post – and ephemeral – posts are deleted after a certain amount of activity, sometimes after days, sometimes after minutes (Bernstein et al.; Hagen). These affordances complicate studying collectives on imageboards, with the primary reasons being that 1) they prevent insights into user demographics, 2) they afford particularly dissimulative, playful discourse that can rarely be taken at face value (Auerbach; de Zeeuw and Tuters), and 3) the sheer volume of auto-deleted activity means one has to stay up-to-date with a rapid waterfall of subcultural ephemera. Additionally, the person stepping into the muddy waters of the chan-river also changes their gaze over time. For instance, Phillips bravely narrates how she once saw parts of the 4chan-stream as “fun” to only later realise the blatantly racist elements present from the start (“It Wasn’t Just”).To help render legible the changing currents of imageboard activity without relying on vague understandings of the “alt-right”, “trolls”, or “Anonymous”, anti-structuralist research outlooks form a possible answer. Around 1900, sociologists like Gabriel Tarde already argued to refrain from departing from structuralist notions of society and instead let social compositions arise through iterative tracing of minute imitations (11). As described in Bruno Latour’s Reassembling the Social, actor-network theory (ANT) revitalises the Tardean outlook by similarly criticising the notion of the “social” and “society” as distinct, sui-generis entities. Instead, ANT advocates tracing “flat” networks of agency made up of both human and non-human actors (165-72). By tracing actors and describing the emerging network of heterogeneous mediators and intermediaries (105), one can slowly but surely get a sense of collective life. ANT thus takes a page from ethnomethodology, which advocates a similar mapping of how participants of a group produce themselves as such (Garfinkel).For multiple reasons, anti-structuralist approaches like ANT can be useful in tracing elusive anonymous online groups and their changing compositions. First, instead of grasping collectives on imageboards from the outset through structuralist notions, as networked individuals, or as “amorphous and formless entities” (see e.g. Coleman 113-5), it only derives its composition after following where its actors lead. This can result in an empirical and literally objective mapping of their collectivity while refraining from mystifications and non-existent connections–so often present in popular narratives about “trolls” and the “alt-right”. At the same time, it allows prominent self-imaginations and mythologizations – or, in ANT-parlance, “localisations of the global” (Latour 173-190) – rise to the surface whenever they form important actors, which, as we will see, tends to happen on 4chan.Second, ANT offers a useful lens with which to consider how non-human actors can uphold a sense of collectivity within anonymous imageboards. This can include digital objects as part of the infrastructure–e.g. the automatically assigned post numbers having mythical value on 4chan (Beran, It Came From 69)–but also cultural objects like words or memes. Considering 4chan’s anonymity, this focus on objects instead of individuals is partly a necessity: one cannot know the exact amount and flow of users. Still, as this text seeks to show, non-human actors like words or memes can form suitable actors to map the changing collectivity of anonymous imageboard users in the absence of demographic insights.There are a few pitfalls worth noting when conducting ANT-informed research into extremist spaces like 4chan/pol/. The aforementioned ironic and dissimulative rhetoric of anonymous forum culture (de Zeeuw and Tuters) means tracing is complicated by implicit (yet omnipresent) intertextual references undecipherable to the untrained eye. Even worse, when misread or exaggerated, such tracing efforts can play into trolling tactics. This can in turn risk what Phillips calls “giving oxygen” to bigoted narratives by amplifying their presence (“Oxygen”). Since ANT does not prescribe what sort of description is needed (Latour 149), this exposure can be limited and/or critically engaged with by the researcher. Still, it is inevitable that research on extremist collectives adds at least some garbage to already polluted information ecologies (Phillips and Milner 2020), even when “just” letting the actors speak (Venturini). Indeed, this text will unfortunately also show hate speech terms below.These complications of irony and amplification can be somewhat mitigated by mixing ethnographic involvement with computational methods. Together, they can render implicit references explicit while also mapping broad patterns in imitation and preventing singular (misleading) actors from over-dominating the description. When done well, such descriptions do not only have to amplify but can also marginalise and trivialise. An accurate mapping can thereby counter sensationalist media narratives, as long as that is where the actors lead. It because of this potentiality that anti-structuralist tracing of extremist, dissimulative online groups should not be discarded outright.Stopping Momentarily to Test the WatersTo put the above into practice, what follows is a brief case study on the term trump on 4chan/pol/. Instead of following users, here the actor trump is taken an entry point for tracing various assemblages: not only referring to Donald J. Trump as an individual and his actions, but also to how /pol/-anons imagine themselves in relation to Trump. In this way, the actor trump is a fluid one: each of its iterations contains different boundaries and variants of its environment (de Laet and Mol 252). By following these environments, can we make sense of how the delirious 2016 U.S. election cycle played out on /pol/, a space described as the “skeleton key to the rise of Trump” (Beran, 4chan)?To trace trump, I use the 4plebs.com archive, containing almost all posts made on /pol/ between late-2013 and early 2018 (the time of research). I subsequently use two text mining methods to trace various connections between trump and other actors and use this to highlight specific posts. As Latour et al. note, computational methods allow “navigations” (593) of different data points to ensure diverse empirical perspectives, preventing both structuralist “zoomed-out” views and local contexts from over-dominating. Instead of moving between micro and macro views, such a navigation should therefore be understood as a “circulation” around the data, deploying various perspectives that each assemble the actors in a different way. In following this, the case study aims to demonstrate how, instead of a lengthy ethnographic account, a brief navigation using both quali- and quantitative perspectives can quickly demystify some aspects of seemingly nebulous online groups.Tracing trump: From Meme-Wizard to Anti-Semitic TargetTo get a sense of the centrality of Trump on /pol/, I start with post frequencies of trump assembled in two ways. The first (Figure 1) shows how, soon after the announcement of Trump’s presidential bid on 16 June 2015, around 100,000 comments mention the word (2% of the total amount of posts). The frequencies spike to a staggering 8% of all comments during the build-up to Trump’s win of the Republican nomination in early 2016 and presidential election in November 2016. Figure 1: The absolute and relative amount of posts on 4chan/pol/ containing the word trump (prefixes and suffixes allowed).To follow the traces between trump and the more general discourse surrounding it, I compiled a more general “trump-dense threads” dataset. These are threads containing thirty or more posts, with at least 15% of posts mentioning trump. As Figure 2 shows, at the two peaks, 8% of any thread on /pol/ was trump-dense, accounting for approximately 15,000 monthly threads. While Trump’s presence is unsurprising, these two views show just how incredibly central the former businessman was to /pol/ at the time of the 2016 U.S. election. Figure 2: The absolute and relative amount of threads on 4chan/pol/ that are “trump-dense”, meaning they have thirty comments or more, out of which at least 15% contain the word trump (prefixes and suffixes allowed).Instead of picking a certain moment from these aggregate overviews and moving to the “micro” (Latour et al.), I “circulate” further with Figure 3, showing another perspective on the trump­-dense thread dataset. It shows a scatter plot of trump-dense threads grouped per week and plotted according to how similar their vocabulary is. First, all the words per week are weighted with tf-idf, a common information retrieval algorithm that scores units on the basis if they appear a lot in one of the datasets but not in others (Spärck-Jones). The document sets are then plotted according to the similarity of their weighted vocabulary (cosine similarity). The five highest-scoring terms for the five clusters (identified with K-means) are listed in the bottom-right corner. For legibility, the scatterplot is compressed by the MDS algorithm. To get a better sense of specific vocabulary per week, terms that appeared in all weeks are filtered out (like trump or hillary). Read counterclockwise, the nodes roughly increase in time, thus showing a clear temporal change of discourse, with the first clusters being more similar in vocabulary than the last, and the weeks before and after the primary election (orange cluster) showing a clear gap. Figure 3: A scatterplot showing cosine distances between tf-idf weighted vocabularies of trump-dense threads per week. Compressed with MDS and coloured by five K-means clusters on the underlying tf-idf matrix (excluding terms that appeared in all weeks). Legend shows the top five tf-idf terms within these clusters. ★ denotes the median week in the cluster.With this map, we can trace other words appearing around trump as significant actors in the weekly documents. For instance, Trump-supportive words like stump (referring to “Can’t Stump the Trump”) and maga (“Make America Great Again”) are highly ranked in the first two clusters. In later weeks, less clearly pro-Trump terms appear: drumpf reminds of the unattractive root of the Trump family name, while impeached and mueller show the Russia probe in 2017 and 2018 were significant in the trump-dense threads of that time. This change might thus hint at growing scepticism towards Trump after his win, but it is not shown how these terms are used. Fortunately, the scatterplot offers a rudder with which to navigate to further perspectives.In keeping with Latour’s advice to keep “aggregate structures” and “local contexts” flat (165-72), I contrast the above scatterplot with a perspective on the data that keeps sentence structures intact instead of showing abstracted keyword sets. Figure 4 uses all posts mentioning trump in the median weeks of the first and last clusters in the scatterplot (indicated with ★) and visualises word trees (Wattenberg and Viégas) of most frequent words following “trump is a”. As such, they render explicit ontological associations about Trump; what is Trump, according to /pol/-anons? The first word tree shows posts from 2-8 November 2015, when fifteen Republican competitors were still in the race. As we have seen in Figure 1, Trump was in this month still “only” mentioned in around 50,000 posts (2% of the total). This word tree suggests his eventual nomination was at this point seen as an unlikely and even undesirable scenario, showing derogatory associations like retard and failure, as well as more conspiratorial words like shill, fraud, hillary plant, and hillary clinton puppet. Notably, the most prominent association, meme, and others like joke and f*cking comic relief, imply Trump was not taken too seriously (see also Figure 5). Figure 4: Word trees of words following “trump is a” in the median weeks of the first and last clusters of the scatterplot. Made with Jason Davies’s Word Tree application. Figure 5: Anons who did not take Trump seriously. Screencapture taken from archive.4plebs.org (see post 1 and post 2 in context).The first word tree contrast dramatically with the one from the last median week from 18 to 24 December 2017. Here, most associations are anti-Semitic or otherwise related to Judaism, with trump most prominently related to the hate speech term kike. This prompts several questions: did /pol/ become increasingly anti-Semitic? Did already active users radicalise, or were more anti-Semites drawn to /pol/? Or was this nefarious current always there, with Trump merely drawing anti-Semitic attention after he won the election? Although the navigation did not depart from a particular critical framework, by “just following the actors” (Venturini), it already stumbled upon important questions related to popular narratives on 4chan and the alt-right. While it is tempting to stop here and explain the change as “radicalisation”, the navigation should continue to add more empirical perspectives. When doing so, the more plausible explanation is that the unlikely success of Trump briefly attracted (relatively) more diverse and playful visitors to /pol/, obscuring the presence and steady growth of overt extremists in the process.To unpack this, I first focus on the claim that a (relatively) diverse set of users flocked to /pol/ because of the Trump campaign. /pol/’s overall posting activity rose sharply during the 2016 election, which can point to already active users becoming more active, but is likely mostly caused by new users flocking to /pol/. Indeed, this can be traced in actor language. For instance, many anons professed to be “reporting in” from other 4chan boards during crucial moments in the campaing. One of the longest threads in the trump-dense threads dataset (4,504 posts) simply announces “Cruz drops out”. In the comments below, multiple anons state they arrived from other boards to join the Trump-infused activity. For instance, Figure 6 shows an anon replying “/v/ REPORTING IN”, to which sixty other users reacted by similarly affirming themselves as representatives from other boards (e.g. “/mu/ here. Ready to MAGA”). While but another particular view, this implies Trump’s surprising nomination stimulated a crowd-like gathering of different anons jumping into the vortex of trump-related activity on /pol/. Figure 6: Replies by outside-anons “reporting in” the sticky thread announcing Ted Cruz's drop out, 4 May 2016. Screenshots taken from 4plebs.org (see post 1 and post 2 in context).Other actor-language further expresses Trump’s campaign “drew in” new and unadjusted (or: less extreme) users. Notably, many anons claimed the 2016 election led to an “invasion of Reddit users”. Figure 7 shows one such expression: an annotated timeline of /pol/’s posting activity graph (made by 4plebs), posted to /pol/ on 26 February 2016 and subsequently reposted 34 times. It interprets 2016 as a period where “Trump sh*t goes into overdrive, meme sh*t floods /pol/, /pol/ is now reddit”. Whether these claims hold any truth is difficult to establish, but the image forms an interesting case of how the entirety “/pol/” is imagined and locally articulated. Such simplistic narratives relate to what Latour calls “panoramas”: totalising notions of some imagined “whole” (188-90) that, while not to be “confused with the collective”, form crucial data since they express how actors understand their own composition (190). Especially in the volatile conditions of anonymous and ephemeral imageboards, repeated panoramic narratives can help in constructing a sense of cohesion–and thereby also form interesting actors to trace. Indeed, following the panoramic statement “/pol/ is now reddit”, other gatekeeping-efforts are not hard to find. For instance, phrases urging other anons to go “back to reddit” (occurring in 19,069 posts in the total dataset) or “back to The_Donald” (a popular pro-Trump subreddit, 1,940 posts) are also particularly popular in the dataset. Figure 7: An image circulated on /pol/ lamenting that "/pol/ is now reddit" by annotating 4plebs’s posting metrics. Screenshot taken from archive.4plebs.org (see posts).Did trump-related activity on /pol/ indeed become more “meme-y” or “Reddit-like” during the election cycle, as the above panorama articulates? The activity in the trump-dense threads seems to suggest so. Figure 8 again uses the tf-idf terms from these threads, but here with the columns denoting the weeks and the rows the top scoring tf-idf terms of their respective week. To highlight relevant actors, all terms are greyed out (see the unedited sheet here), except for several keywords that indicate particularly playful or memetic vernacular: the aforementioned stump, emperor, referring to Trump’s nickname as “God Emperor”; energy, referring to “high energy”, a common catchphrase amongst Trump supporters; magic, referring to “meme magic”, the faux-ironic belief that posting memes affects real-life events; and pepe, the infamous cartoon frog. In both the tf-idf ranking and the absolute frequencies, these keywords flourish in 2016, but disappear soon after the presidential election passes. The later weeks in 2017 and 2018 rarely contain similarly playful and memetic terms, and if they do, suggest mocking discourse regarding Trump (e.g. drumpf). This perspective thus pictures the environment around trump in the run-up to the election as a particularly memetic yet short-lived carnival. At least from this perspective, “meme sh*t” thus indeed seemed to have “flooded /pol/”, but only for a short while. Figure 8: tf-idf matrix of trump-dense threads, columns denoting weeks and rows denoting the top hundred most relevant terms per week. Download the full tf-idf matrix with all terms here.Despite this carnivalesque activity, further perspectives suggest it did not go at the expense of extremist activity on /pol/. Figure 9 shows the absolute and relative counts of the word "jew" and its derogatory synonym "kike". Each of these increases from 2015 onwards. As such, it seems to align with claims that Trump’s success and /pol/ becoming increasingly extremist were causally related (Thompson). However, apart from possibly confusing correlation with causation, the relative presence remains fairly stable, even slightly decreasing during the frenzy of the Trump campaign. Since we also saw Trump himself become a target for anti-Semitic activity, these trendlines rather imply /pol/’s extremist current grew proportionally to the overall increase in activity, and increased alongside but not but necessarily as a partisan contingent as a result of Trump’s campaign. Figure 9: The absolute and relative frequency of the terms "jew" and "kike" on 4chan/pol/.ConclusionCombined, the above navigation implies two main changes in 4chan/pol/’s trump-related current. First, the climaxes of the 2016 Republican primaries and presidential elections seem to have invoked crowd-like influxes of (relatively) heterogeneous users joining the Trump-delirium, marked by particularly memetic activity. Second, /pol/ additionally seemed to have formed a welcoming hotbed for anti-Semites and other extremists, as the absolute amount of (anti-Semitic) hate speech increased. However, while already-present and new users might have been energised by Trump, they were not necessarily loyal to him, as professed by the fact that Trump himself eventually became a target. Together with the fact that anti-Semitic hate speech stayed relatively consistent, instead of being “countercultural” (Nagle) or exclusively pro-Trump, /pol/ thus seems to have been composed of quite a stable anti-Semitic and Trump-critical contingent, increasing proportionally to /pol/’s general growth.Methodologically, this text sought to demonstrate how a brief navigation of trump on 4chan/pol/ can provide provisional yet valuable insights regarding continuously changing current of online anonymous collectives. As the cliché goes, however, this brief exploration has left more many questions, or rather, it did not “deploy the content with all its connections” (Latour 147). For instance, I have not touched on how many of the trump-dense threads are distinctly separated and pro-Trump “general threads” (Jokubauskaitė and Peeters). Considering the vastness of such tasks, the necessity remains to find appropriate ways to “accurately map” the wild currents of the dissimulative Web–despite how muddy they might get.NoteThis text is a compressed and edited version of a longer MA thesis available here.ReferencesAbramson, Seth. “Listen Up, Progressives: Here’s How to Deal with a 4Chan (“Alt-Right”) Troll.” Medium, 2 May 2017. <https://medium.com/@Seth_Abramson/listen-up-progressives-heres-how-to-deal-with-a-4chan-alt-right-troll-48594f59a303>.Auerbach, David. “Anonymity as Culture: Treatise.” Triple Canopy, n.d. 22 June 2020 <https://www.canopycanopycanopy.com/contents/anonymity_as_culture__treatise>.Beran, Dale. “4chan: The Skeleton Key to the Rise of Trump”. Medium, 14 Feb. 2017. <https://medium.com/@DaleBeran/4chan-the-skeleton-key-to-the-rise-of-trump-624e7cb798cb>.Beran, Dale. It Came from Something Awful: How a Toxic Troll Army Accidentally Memed Donald Trump into Office. 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Abstract:

IntroductionThis paper argues that the industrial contexts of re-imagining, or transforming, literary icons deploy the promotional strategies that are associated with what are usually seen as lesser, or purely commercial, genres. Promotional paratexts (Genette Paratexts; Gray; Hills) reveal transformations of content that position audiences to receive them as creative innovations, superior in many senses to their literary precursors due to the distinctive expertise of creative professionals. This interpretation leverages Matt Hills’ argument that certain kinds of “quality” screened drama are discursively framed as possessing the cultural capital associated with auterist cinema, despite their participation in the marketing logics of media franchising (Johnson). Adaptation theorist Linda Hutcheon proposes that when audiences receive literary adaptations, their pleasure inheres in a mixture of “repetition and difference”, “familiarity and novelty” (114). The difference can take many forms, but may be framed as guaranteed by the “distinction”, or—in Bourdieu’s terms—the cultural capital, of talented individuals and companies. Gerard Genette (Palimpsests) argued that “proximations” or updatings of classic literature involve acknowledging historical shifts in ideological norms as well as aesthetic techniques and tastes. When literary brands are made over using different media, there are economic lures to participation in currently fashionable technologies, as well as current political values. Linda Hutcheon also underlines the pragmatic constraints on the re-imagining of literary brands. “Expensive collaborative art forms” (87) such as films and large stage productions look for safe bets, seeking properties that have the potential to increase the audience for their franchise. Thus the marketplace influences both production and the experience of audiences. While this paper does not attempt a thoroughgoing analysis of audience reception appropriate to a fan studies approach, it borrows concepts from Matt Hills’s theorisation of marketing communication associated with screen “makeovers”. It shows that literary fiction and cinematic texts associated with celebrated authors or auteurist producer-directors share branding discourses characteristic of contemporary consumer culture. Strategies include marketing “reveals” of transformed content (Hills 319). Transformed content is presented not only as demonstrating originality and novelty; these promotional paratexts also perform displays of cultural capital on the part of production teams or of auteurist creatives (321). Case Study 1: Steven Spielberg, The Adventures of Tintin (2011) The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn is itself an adaptation of a literary brand that reimagines earlier transmedia genres. According to Spielberg’s biographer, the Tintin series of bandes dessinée (comics or graphic novels) by Belgian artist Hergé (Georges Remi), has affinities with “boys’ adventure yarns” referencing and paying homage to the “silent filmmaking and the movie serials of the 1930s and ‘40s” (McBride 530). The three comics adapted by Spielberg belong to the more escapist and less “political” phase of Hergé’s career (531). As a fast-paced action movie, building to a dramatic and spectacular closure, the major plot lines of Spielberg’s film centre on Tintin’s search for clues to the secret of a model ship he buys at a street market. Teaming up with an alcoholic sea captain, Tintin solves the mystery while bullying Captain Haddock into regaining his sobriety, his family seat, and his eagerness to partner in further heroic adventures. Spielberg’s industry stature allowed him the autonomy to combine the commercial motivations of contemporary “tentpole” cinema adaptations with aspirations towards personal reputation as an auteurist director. Many of the promotional paratexts associated with the film stress the aesthetic distinction of the director’s practice alongside the blockbuster spectacle of an action film. Reinventing the Literary Brand as FranchiseComic books constitute the “mother lode of franchises” (Balio 26) in a industry that has become increasingly global and risk-adverse (see also Burke). The fan base for comic book movies is substantial and studios pre-promote their investments at events such as the four-day Comic-Con festival held annually in San Diego (Balio 26). Described as “tentpole” films, these adaptations—often of superhero genres—are considered conservative investments by the Hollywood studios because they “constitute media events; […] lend themselves to promotional tie-ins”; are “easy sells in world markets and […] have the ability to spin off sequels to create a franchise” (Balio 26). However, Spielberg chose to adapt a brand little known in the primary market (the US), thus lacking the huge fan-based to which pre-release promotional paratexts might normally be targeted. While this might seem a risky undertaking, it does reflect “changed industry realities” that seek to leverage important international markets (McBride 531). As a producer Spielberg pursued his own strategies to minimise economic risk while allowing him creative choices. This facilitated the pursuit of professional reputation alongside commercial success. The dual release of both War Horse and Tintin exemplify the director-producer’s career practice of bracketing an “entertainment” film with a “more serious work” (McBride 530). The Adventures of Tintin was promoted largely as technical tour de force and spectacle. Conversely War Horse—also adapted from a children’s text—was conceived as a heritage/nostalgia film, marked with the attention to period detail and lyric cinematography of what Matt Hills describes as “aestheticized fiction”. Nevertheless, promotional paratexts stress the discourse of auteurist transformation even in the case of the designedly more commercial Tintin film, as I discuss further below. These pre-release promotions emphasise Spielberg’s “painterly” directorial hand, as well as the professional partnership with Peter Jackson that enabled cutting edge innovation in animation. As McBride explains, the “dual release of the two films in the US was an unusual marketing move” seemingly designed to “showcase Spielberg’s artistic versatility” (McBride 530).Promotional Paratexts and Pre-Recruitment of FansAs Jonathan Gray and Jason Mittell have explained, marketing paratexts predate screen adaptations (Gray; Mittell). As part of the commercial logic of franchise development, selective release of information about a literary brand’s transformation are designed to bring fans of the “original,” or of genre communities such as fantasy or comics audiences, on board with the adaptation. Analysing Steven Moffat’s revelations about the process of adapting and creating a modern TV series from Conan Doyle’s canon (Sherlock), Matt Hills draws attention to the focus on the literary, rather than the many screen reinventions. Moffat’s focus on his childhood passion for the Holmes stories thus grounds the team’s adaptation in a period prior to any “knowledge of rival adaptations […] and any detailed awareness of canon” (326). Spielberg (unlike Jackson) denied any such childhood affective investment, claiming to have been unaware of the similarities between Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) and the Tintin series until alerted by a French reviewer of Raiders (McBride 530). In discussing the paradoxical fidelity of his and Jackson’s reimagining of Tintin, Spielberg performed homage to the literary brand while emphasising the aesthetic limitations within the canon of prior adaptations:‘We want Tintin’s adventures to have the reality of a live-action film’, Spielberg explained during preproduction, ‘and yet Peter and I felt that shooting them in a traditional live-action format would simply not honor the distinctive look of the characters and world that Hergé created. Hergé’s characters have been reborn as living beings, expressing emotion and a soul that goes far beyond anything we’ve been able to create with computer-animated characters.’ (McBride 531)In these “reveals”, the discourse positions Spielberg and Jackson as both fans and auteurs, demonstrating affective investment in Hergé’s concepts and world-building while displaying the ingenuity of the partners as cinematic innovators.The Branded Reveal of Transformed ContentAccording to Hills, “quality TV drama” no less than “makeover TV,” is subject to branding practices such as the “reveal” of innovations attributed to creative professionals. Marketing paratexts discursively frame the “professional and creative distinction” of the teams that share and expand the narrative universe of the show’s screen or literary precursors (319–20). Distinction here refers to the cultural capital of the creative teams, as well as to the essential differences between what adaptation theorists refer to as the “hypotext” (source/original) and “hypertext” (adaptation) (Genette Paratexts; Hutcheon). The adaptation’s individualism is fore-grounded, as are the rights of creative teams to inherit, transform, and add richness to the textual universe of the precursor texts. Spielberg denied the “anxiety of influence” (Bloom) linking Tintin and Raiders, though he is reported to have enthusiastically acknowledged the similarities once alerted to them. Nevertheless, Spielberg first optioned Hergé’s series only two years later (1983). Paratexts “reveal” Hergé’s passing of the mantle from author to director, quoting his: “ ‘Yes, I think this guy can make this film. Of course it will not be my Tintin, but it can be a great Tintin’” (McBride 531).Promotional reveals in preproduction show both Spielberg and Jackson performing mutually admiring displays of distinction. Much of this is focused on the choice of motion capture animation, involving attachment of motion sensors to an actor’s body during performance, permitting mapping of realistic motion onto the animated figure. While Spielberg paid tribute to Jackson’s industry pre-eminence in this technical field, the discourse also underlines Spielberg’s own status as auteur. He claimed that Tintin allowed him to feel more like a painter than any prior film. Jackson also underlines the theme of direct imaginative control:The process of operating the small motion-capture virtual camera […] enabled Spielberg to return to the simplicity and fluidity of his 8mm amateur films […] [The small motion-capture camera] enabled Spielberg to put himself literally in the spaces occupied by the actors […] He could walk around with them […] and improvise movements for a film Jackson said they decided should have a handheld feel as much as possible […] All the production was from the imagination right to the computer. (McBride 532)Along with cinematic innovation, pre-release promotions thus rehearse the imaginative pre-eminence of Spielberg’s vision, alongside Jackson and his WETA company’s fantasy credentials, their reputation for meticulous detail, and their innovation in the use of performance capture in live-action features. This rehearsal of professional capital showcases the difference and superiority of The Adventures of Tintin to previous animated adaptations.Case Study 2: Andrew Motion: Silver, Return to Treasure Island (2012)At first glance, literary fiction would seem to be a far-cry from the commercial logics of tentpole cinema. The first work of pure fiction by a former Poet Laureate of Great Britain, updating a children’s classic, Silver: Return to Treasure Island signals itself as an exemplar of quality fiction. Yet the commercial logics of the publishing industry, no less than other media franchises, routinise practices such as author interviews at bookshop visits and festivals, generating paratexts that serve its promotional cycle. Motion’s choice of this classic for adaptation is a step further towards a popular readership than his poetry—or the memoirs, literary criticism, or creative non-fiction (“fabricated” or speculative biographies) (see Mars-Jones)—that constitute his earlier prose output. Treasure Island’s cultural status as boy’s adventure, its exotic setting, its dramatic characters long available in the public domain through earlier screen adaptations, make it a shrewd choice for appropriation in the niche market of literary fiction. Michael Cathcart’s introduction to his ABC Radio National interview with the author hones in on this:Treasure Island is one of those books that you feel as if you’ve read, event if you haven’t. Long John Silver, young Jim Hawkins, Blind Pew, Israel Hands […], these are people who stalk our collective unconscious, and they’re back. (Cathcart)Motion agrees with Cathcart that Treasure Island constitutes literary and common cultural heritage. In both interviews I analyse in the discussion here, Motion states that he “absorbed” the book, “almost by osmosis” as a child, yet returned to it with the mature, critical, evaluative appreciation of the young adult and budding poet (Darragh 27). Stevenson’s original is a “bloody good book”; the implication is that it would not otherwise have met the standards of a literary doyen, possessing a deep knowledge of, and affect for, the canon of English literature. Commercial Logic and Cultural UpdatingSilver is an unauthorised sequel—in Genette’s taxonomy, a “continuation”. However, in promotional interviews on the book and broadcast circuit, Motion claimed a kind of license from the practice of Stevenson, a fellow writer. Stevenson himself notes that a significant portion of the “bar silver” remained on the island, leaving room for a sequel to be generated. In Silver, Jim, the son of Stevenson’s Jim Hawkins, and Natty, daughter of Long John Silver and the “woman of colour”, take off to complete and confront the consequences of their parents’ adventures. In interviews, Motion identifies structural gaps in the precursor text that are discursively positioned to demand completion from, in effect, Stevenson’s literary heir: [Stevenson] was a person who was interested in sequels himself, indeed he wrote a sequel to Kidnapped [which is] proof he was interested in these things. (Cathcart)He does leave lots of doors and windows open at the end of Treasure Island […] perhaps most bewitchingly for me, as the Hispaniola sails away, they leave behind three maroons. So what happened to them? (Darragh)These promotional paratexts drop references to Great Expectations, Heart of Darkness, Lord of the Flies, Wild Sargasso Sea, the plays of Shakespeare and Tom Stoppard, the poetry of Auden and John Clare, and Stevenson’s own “self-conscious” sources: Defoe, Marryat. Discursively, they evidence “double coding” (Hills) as both homage for the canon and the literary “brand” of Stevenson’s popular original, while implicated in the commercial logic of the book industry’s marketing practices.Displays of DistinctionMotion’s interview with Sarah Darragh, for the National Association of Teachers of English, performs the role of man of letters; Motion “professes” and embodies the expertise to speak authoritatively on literature, its criticism, and its teaching. Literature in general, and Silver in particular, he claims, is not “just polemic”, that is “not how it works”, but it does has the ability to recruit readers to moral perspectives, to convey “ new ideas[s] of the self.” Silver’s distinction from Treasure Island lies in its ability to position “deep” readers to develop what is often labelled “theory of mind” (Wolf and Barzillai): “what good literature does, whether you know it or not, is to allow you to be someone else for a bit,” giving us “imaginative projection into another person’s experience” (Darragh 29). A discourse of difference and superiority is also associated with the transformed “brand.” Motion is emphatic that Silver is not a children’s book—“I wouldn’t know how to do that” (Darragh 28)—a “lesser” genre in canonical hierarchies. It is a writerly and morally purposeful fiction, “haunted” by greats of the canon and grounded in expertise in philosophical and literary heritage. In addition, he stresses the embedded seriousness of his reinvention: it is “about how to be a modern person and about greed and imperialism” (Darragh 27), as well as a deliberatively transformed artefact:The road to literary damnation is […] paved with bad sequels and prequels, and the reason that they fail […] is that they take the original on at its own game too precisely […] so I thought, casting my mind around those that work [such as] Tom Stoppard’s play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead […] or Jean Rhys’ wonderful novel Wide Sargasso Sea which is about the first Mrs Rochester in Jane Eyre […] that if I took a big step away from the original book I would solve this problem of competing with something I was likely to lose in competition with and to create something that was a sort of homage […] towards it, but that stood at a significant distance from it […]. (Cathcart) Motion thus rehearses homage and humility, while implicitly defending the transformative imagination of his “sequel” against the practice of lesser, failed, clonings.Motion’s narrative expansion of Stevenson’s fictional universe is an example of “overwriting continuity” established by his predecessor, and thus allowing him to make “meaningful claims to creative and professional distinction” while demonstrating his own “creative viewpoint” (Hills 320). The novel boldly recapitulates incidental details, settings, and dramatic embedded character-narrations from Treasure Island. Distinctively, though, its opening sequence is a paean to romantic sensibility in the tradition of Wordsworth’s The Prelude (1799–1850).The Branded Reveal of Transformed ContentSilver’s paratexts discursively construct its transformation and, by implication, improvement, from Stevenson’s original. Motion reveals the sequel’s change of zeitgeist, its ideological complexity and proximity to contemporary environmental and postcolonial values. These are represented through the superior perspective of romanticism and the scientific lens on the natural world:Treasure Island is a pre-Enlightenment story, it is pre-French Revolution, it’s the bad old world […] where people have a different ideas of democracy […] Also […] Jim is beginning to be aware of nature in a new way […] [The romantic poet, John Clare] was publishing in the 1820s but a child in the early 1800s, I rather had him in mind for Jim as somebody who was seeing the world in the same sort of way […] paying attention to the little things in nature, and feeling a sort of kinship with the natural world that we of course want to put an environmental spin on these days, but [at] the beginning of the 1800s was a new and important thing, a romantic preoccupation. (Cathcart)Motion’s allusion to Wild Sargasso Sea discursively appropriates Rhys’s feminist and postcolonial reimagination of Rochester’s creole wife, to validate his portrayal of Long John Silver’s wife, the “woman of colour.” As Christian Moraru has shown, this rewriting of race is part of a book industry trend in contemporary American adaptations of nineteenth-century texts. Interviews position readers of Silver to receive the novel in terms of increased moral complexity, sharing its awareness of the evils of slavery and violence silenced in prior adaptations.Two streams of influence [come] out of Treasure Island […] one is Pirates of the Caribbean and all that jolly jape type stuff, pirates who are essentially comic [or pantomime] characters […] And the other stream, which is the other face of Long John Silver in the original is a real menace […] What we are talking about is Somalia. Piracy is essentially a profoundly serious and repellent thing […]. (Cathcart)Motion’s transformation of Treasure Island, thus, improves on Stevenson by taking some of the menace that is “latent in the original”, yet downplayed by the genre reinvented as “jolly jape” or “gorefest.” In contrast, Silver is “a book about serious things” (Cathcart), about “greed and imperialism” and “how to be a modern person,” ideologically reconstructed as “philosophical history” by a consummate man of letters (Darragh).ConclusionWhen iconic literary brands are reimagined across media, genres and modes, creative professionals frequently need to balance various affective and commercial investments in the precursor text or property. Updatings of classic texts require interpretation and the negotiation of subtle changes in values that have occurred since the creation of the “original.” Producers in risk-averse industries such as screen and publishing media practice a certain pragmatism to ensure that fans’ nostalgia for a popular brand is not too violently scandalised, while taking care to reproduce currently popular technologies and generic conventions in the interest of maximising audience. As my analysis shows, promotional circuits associated with “quality” fiction and cinema mirror the commercial logics associated with less valorised genres. Promotional paratexts reveal transformations of content that position audiences to receive them as creative innovations, superior in many senses to their literary precursors due to the distinctive expertise of creative professionals. Paying lip-service the sophisticated reading practices of contemporary fans of both cinema and literary fiction, their discourse shows the conflicting impulses to homage, critique, originality, and recruitment of audiences.ReferencesBalio, Tino. Hollywood in the New Millennium. London: Palgrave Macmillan/British Film Institute, 2013.Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997.Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1987. Burke, Liam. The Comic Book Film Adaptation: Exploring Modern Hollywood's Leading Genre. Jackson, MS: UP of Mississippi, 2015. Cathcart, Michael (Interviewer). Andrew Motion's Silver: Return to Treasure Island. 2013. Transcript of Radio Interview. Prod. Kate Evans. 26 Jan. 2013. 10 Apr. 2013 ‹http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/booksplus/silver/4293244#transcript›.Darragh, Sarah. "In Conversation with Andrew Motion." NATE Classroom 17 (2012): 27–30.Genette, Gérard. Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree. Lincoln, NE: U of Nebraska P, 1997. ———. Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997. Gray, Jonathan. Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts. New York: New York UP, 2010.Hills, Matt. "Rebranding Dr Who and Reimagining Sherlock: 'Quality' Television as 'Makeover TV Drama'." International Journal of Cultural Studies 18.3 (2015): 317–31.Johnson, Derek. Media Franchising: Creative License and Collaboration in the Culture Industries. Postmillennial Pop. New York: New York UP, 2013.Mars-Jones, Adam. "A Thin Slice of Cake." The Guardian, 16 Feb. 2003. 5 Oct. 2015 ‹http://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/feb/16/andrewmotion.fiction›.McBride, Joseph. Steven Spielberg: A Biography. 3rd ed. London: Faber & Faber, 2012.Mittell, Jason. Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling. New York: New York UP, 2015.Moraru, Christian. Rewriting: Postmodern Narrative and Cultural Critique in the Age of Cloning. Herndon, VA: State U of New York P, 2001. Motion, Andrew. Silver: Return to Treasure Island. London: Jonathan Cape, 2012.Raiders of the Lost Ark. Dir. Steven Spielberg. Paramount/Columbia Pictures, 1981.Wolf, Maryanne, and Mirit Barzillai. "The Importance of Deep Reading." Educational Leadership. March (2009): 32–36.Wordsworth, William. The Prelude, or, Growth of a Poet's Mind: An Autobiographical Poem. London: Edward Moxon, 1850.

Abstract:

If thinking about home necessitates thinking about “place, space, scale, identity and power,” as Alison Blunt and Robyn Dowling (2) suggest, then thinking about home themes in popular music makes no less a conceptual demand. Song lyrics and titles most often invoke dominant readings such as intimacy, privacy, nurture, refuge, connectedness and shared belonging, all issues found within Blunt and Dowling’s analysis. The spatial imaginary to which these authors refer takes vivid shape through repertoires of songs dealing with houses and other specific sites, vast and distant homelands, communities or, less tangibly, geographical or cultural settings where particular relationships can be found, supporting Blunt and Dowling’s major claim that home is complex, multi-scalar and multi-layered. Shelley Mallett’s claim that the term home “functions as a repository for complex, inter-related and at times contradictory socio-cultural ideas about people’s relationships with one another…and with places, spaces and things” (84) is borne out heavily by popular music where, for almost every sentiment that the term home evokes, it seems an opposite sentiment is evoked elsewhere: familiarity versus alienation, acceptance versus rejection, love versus loneliness. Making use of conceptual groundwork by Blunt and Dowling and by Mallett and others, the following discussion canvasses a range of meanings that home has had for a variety of songwriters, singers and audiences over the years. Intended as merely partial and exploratory rather than exhaustive, it provides some insights into contrasts, ironies and relationships between home and gender, diaspora and loss. While it cannot cover all the themes, it gives prominence to the major recurring themes and a variety of important contexts that give rise to these home themes. Most prominent among those songs dealing with home has been a nostalgia and yearning, while issues of how women may have viewed the home within which they have often been restricted to a narrowly defined private sphere are almost entirely absent. This serves as a reminder that, while some themes can be conducive to the medium of popular music, others may be significantly less so. Songs may speak directly of experience but not necessarily of all experiences and certainly not of all experiences equally. B. Lee Cooper claims “most popular culture ventures rely upon formula-oriented settings and phrasings to attract interest, to spur mental or emotional involvement” (93). Notions of home have generally proved both formulaic and emotionally-charged. Commonly understood patterns of meaning and other hegemonic references generally operate more successfully than alternative reference points. Those notions with the strongest cultural currency can be conveyed succinctly and denote widely agreed upon meanings. Lyrics can seldom afford to be deeply analytical but generally must be concise and immediately evocative. Despite that, this discussion will point to diverse meanings carried by songs about home. Blunt and Dowling point out that “a house is not necessarily nor automatically a home” (3). The differences are strongly apparent in music, with only a few songs relating to houses compared with homes. When Malvina Reynolds wrote in 1962 of “little boxes, on the hillside, little boxes made of ticky-tacky,” she was certainly referring to houses, not homes, thus making it easier to bypass the relationships which might have vested the inhabitants with more warmth and individuality than their houses, in this song about conformity and hom*ogeneity. The more complex though elusive concept of home, however, is more likely to feature in love songs and to emanate from diasporal songs. Certainly these two genres are not mutually exclusive. Irish songs are particularly noteworthy for adding to the array of music written by, or representational of, those who have been forced away from home by war, poverty, strife or other circ*mstances. They manifest identities of displacement rather than of placement, as studied by Bronwen Walter, looking back at rather than from within their spatial imaginary. Phil Eva claims that during the 19th Century Irish émigrés sang songs of exile in Manchester’s streets. Since many in England’s industrial towns had been uprooted from their homes, the songs found rapport with street audiences and entered popular culture. For example, the song Killarney, of hazy origins but thought to date back to as early as 1850, tells of Killarney’s lakes and fells, Emerald isles and winding bays; Mountain paths and woodland dells… ...her [nature’s] home is surely there. As well as anthropomorphising nature and giving it a home, the song suggests a specifically geographic sense of home. Galway Bay, written by A. Fahy, does likewise, as do many other Irish songs of exile which link geography with family, kin and sometimes culture to evoke a sense of home. The final verse of Cliffs of Doneen gives a sense of both people and place making up home: Fare thee well to Doneen, fare thee well for a while And to all the kind people I’m leaving behind To the streams and the meadows where late I have been And the high rocky slopes round the cliffs of Doneen. Earlier Irish songs intertwine home with political issues. For example, Tho’ the Last Glimpse of Erin vows to Erin that “In exile thy bosum shall still be my home.” Such exile resulted from a preference of fleeing Ireland rather than bowing to English oppression, which then included a prohibition on Irish having moustaches or certain hairstyles. Thomas Moore is said to have set the words of the song to the air Coulin which itself referred to an Irish woman’s preference for her “Coulin” (a long-haired Irish youth) to the English (Nelson-Burns). Diasporal songs have continued, as has their political edge, as evidenced by global recognition of songs such as Bayan Ko (My Country), written by José Corazon de Jesus in 1929, out of love and concern for the Philippines and sung among Filipinos worldwide. Robin Cohen outlines a set of criteria for diaspora that includes a shared belief in the possibility of return to home, evident in songs such as the 1943 Welsh song A Welcome in the Hillside, in which a Welsh word translating roughly as a yearning to return home, hiraeth, is used: We’ll kiss away each hour of hiraeth When you come home again to Wales. However, the immensely popular I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen, not of Irish origin but written by Thomas Westendorf of Illinois in 1875, suggests that such emotions can have a resonance beyond the diaspora. Anti-colonial sentiments about home can also be expressed by long-time inhabitants, as Harry Belafonte demonstrated in Island in the Sun: This is my island in the sun Where my people have toiled since time begun. Though I may sail on many a sea, Her shores will always be home to me. War brought a deluge of sentimental songs lamenting separation from home and loved ones, just as likely to be parents and siblings as sweethearts. Radios allowed wider audiences and greater popularity for these songs. If separation had brought a longing previously, the added horrors of war presented a stronger contrast between that which the young soldiers were missing and that which they were experiencing. Both the First and Second World Wars gave rise to songs long since sung which originated in such separations, but these also had a strong sense of home as defined by the nationalism that has for over a century given the contours of expectations of soldiers. Focusing on home, these songs seldom speak of the details of war. Rather they are specific about what the singers have left behind and what they hope to return to. Songs of home did not have to be written specifically for the war effort nor for overseas troops. Irving Berlin’s 1942 White Christmas, written for a film, became extremely popular with US troops during WWII, instilling a sense of home that related to familiarities and festivities. Expressing a sense of home could be specific and relate to regions or towns, as did I’m Goin’ Back Again to Yarrawonga, or it could refer to any home, anywhere where there were sons away fighting. Indeed the American Civil War song When Johnny Comes Marching Home, written by Patrick Sarsfield Gilmour, was sung by both Northerners and Southerners, so adaptable was it, with home remarkably unspecified and undescribed. The 1914 British song Keep the Home Fires Burning by Ivor Novello and Lena Ford was among those that evoked a connection between home and the military effort and helped establish a responsibility on those at home to remain optimistic: Keep the Homes fires burning While your hearts are yearning, Though your lads are far away They dream of home, There’s a silver lining Through the dark clouds shining, Turn the dark clouds inside out, Till the boys come Home. No space exists in this song for critique of the reasons for war, nor of a role for women other than that of homemaker and moral guardian. It was women’s duty to ensure men enlisted and home was rendered a private site for emotional enlistment for a presumed public good, though ironically also a point of personal hope where the light of love burned for the enlistees’ safe return. Later songs about home and war challenged these traditional notions. Two serve as examples. One is Pink Floyd’s brief musical piece of the 1970s, Bring the Boys Back Home, whose words of protest against the American war on Viet Nam present home, again, as a site of safety but within a less conservative context. Home becomes implicated in a challenge to the prevailing foreign policy and the interests that influence it, undermining the normal public sphere/private sphere distinction. The other more complex song is Judy Small’s Mothers, Daughters, Wives, from 1982, set against a backdrop of home. Small eloquently describes the dynamics of the domestic space and how women understood their roles in relation to the First and Second World Wars and the Viet Nam War. Reinforcing that “The materialities and imaginaries of home are closely connected” (Blunt and Dowling 188), Small sings of how the gold frames held the photographs that mothers kissed each night And the doorframe held the shocked and silent strangers from the fight. Small provides a rare musical insight into the disjuncture between the men who left the domestic space and those who return to it, and we sense that women may have borne much of the brunt of those awful changes. The idea of domestic bliss is also challenged, though from the returned soldier’s point of view, in Redgum’s 1983 song I Was Only Nineteen, written by group member John Schuman. It touches on the tragedy of young men thrust into war situations and the horrific after-affects for them, which cannot be shrugged off on return to home. The nurturing of home has limits but the privacy associated with the domestic sphere has often concealed the violence and mental anguish that happens away from public view. But by this time most of the songs referring to home were dominated once more by sentimental love, often borne of travel as mobility rose. Journeys help “establish the thresholds and boundaries of home” and can give rise to “an idealized, ideological and ethnocentric view of home” (Mallett 78). Where previously songsters had sung of leaving home in exile or for escape from poverty, lyrics from the 1960s onwards often suggested that work had removed people from loved ones. It could be work on a day-by-day basis, as in A Hard Day’s Night from the 1964 film of the same name, where the Beatles illuminate differences between the public sphere of work and the private sphere to which they return: When I’m home, everything seems to be alright, When I’m home feeling you holding me tight, tight, yeah and reiterated by Paul McCartney in Every Night: And every night that day is through But tonight I just want to stay in And be with you. Lyrics such as these and McCartney’s call to be taken “...home to the Mull of Kintyre,” singled him out for his home-and-hearth messages (Dempsey). But work might involve longer absences and thus more deepfelt loneliness. Simon and Garfunkel’s exemplary Homeward Bound starkly portrays a site of “away-ness”: I’m sittin’ in the railway station, got a ticket for my destination… Mundaneness, monotony and predictability contrast with the home to which the singer’s thoughts are constantly escaping. The routine is familiar but the faces are those of strangers. Home here is, again, not simply a domicile but the warmth of those we know and love. Written at a railway station, Homeward Bound echoes sentiments almost identical to those of (Leaving on a) Jet Plane, written by John Denver at an airport in 1967. Denver also co-wrote (Take Me Home) Country Roads, where, in another example of anthropomorphism as a tool of establishing a strong link, he asks to be taken home to the place I belong West Virginia, mountain momma, Take me home, Country Roads. The theme has recurred in numerous songs since, spawning examples such as Darin and Alquist’s When I Get Home, Chris Daughtry’s Home, Michael Bublé’s Home and Will Smith’s Ain’t No Place Like Home, where, in an opening reminiscent of Homeward Bound, the singer is Sitting in a hotel room A thousand miles away from nowhere Sloped over a chair as I stare… Furniture from home, on the other hand, can be used to evoke contentment and bliss, as demonstrated by George Weiss and Bob Thiele’s song The Home Fire, in which both kin and the objects of home become charged with meaning: All of the folks that I love are there I got a date with my favourite chair Of course, in regard to earlier songs especially, while the traveller associates home with love, security and tenderness, back at home the waiting one may have had feelings more of frustration and oppression. One is desperate to get back home, but for all we know the other may be desperate to get out of home or to develop a life more meaningful than that which was then offered to women. If the lot of homemakers was invisible to national economies (Waring), it seemed equally invisible to mainstream songwriters. This reflects the tradition that “Despite home being generally considered a feminine, nurturing space created by women themselves, they often lack both authority and a space of their own within this realm” (Mallett 75). Few songs have offered the perspective of the one at home awaiting the return of the traveller. One exception is the Seekers’ 1965 A World of Our Own but, written by Tom Springfield, the words trilled by Judith Durham may have been more of a projection of the traveller’s hopes and expectations than a true reflection of the full experiences of housebound women of the day. Certainly, the song reinforces connections between home and intimacy and privacy: Close the door, light the lights. We’re stayin’ home tonight, Far away from the bustle and the bright city lights. Let them all fade away, just leave us alone And we’ll live in a world of our own. This also strongly supports Gaston Bachelard’s claim that one’s house in the sense of a home is one’s “first universe, a real cosmos” (qtd. in Blunt and Dowling 12). But privacy can also be a loneliness when home is not inhabited by loved ones, as in the lyrics of Don Gibson’s 1958 Oh, Lonesome Me, where Everybody’s going out and having fun I’m a fool for staying home and having none. Similar sentiments emerge in Debbie Boone’s You Light up My Life: So many nights I’d sit by my window Waiting for someone to sing me his song. Home in these situations can be just as alienating as the “away” depicted as so unfriendly by Homeward Bound’s strangers’ faces and the “million people” who still leave Michael Bublé feeling alone. Yet there are other songs that depict “away” as a prison made of freedom, insinuating that the lack of a home and consequently of the stable love and commitment presumably found there is a sad situation indeed. This is suggested by the lilting tune, if not by the lyrics themselves, in songs such as Wandrin’ Star from the musical Paint Your Wagon and Ron Miller’s I’ve Never Been to Me, which has both a male and female version with different words, reinforcing gendered experiences. The somewhat conservative lyrics in the female version made it a perfect send-up song in the 1994 film Priscilla: Queen of the Desert. In some songs the absentee is not a traveller but has been in jail. In Tie a Yellow Ribbon round the Ole Oak Tree, an ex-inmate states “I’m comin’ home. I’ve done my time.” Home here is contingent upon the availability and forgivingness of his old girl friend. Another song juxtaposing home with prison is Tom Jones’ The Green, Green Grass of Home in which the singer dreams he is returning to his home, to his parents, girlfriend and, once again, an old oak tree. However, he awakes to find he was dreaming and is about to be executed. His body will be taken home and placed under the oak tree, suggesting some resigned sense of satisfaction that he will, after all, be going home, albeit in different circ*mstances. Death and home are thus sometimes linked, with home a euphemism for the former, as suggested in many spirituals, with heaven or an afterlife being considered “going home”. The reverse is the case in the haunting Bring Him Home of the musical Les Misérables. With Marius going off to the barricades and the danger involved, Jean Valjean prays for the young man’s safe return and that he might live. Home is connected here with life, safety and ongoing love. In a number of songs about home and absence there is a sense of home being a place where morality is gently enforced, presumably by women who keep men on the straight and narrow, in line with one of the women’s roles of colonial Australia, researched by Anne Summers. These songs imply that when men wander from home, their morals also go astray. Wild Rover bemoans Oh, I’ve been a wild rover for many a year, and I’ve spent all my money on whiskey and beer… There is the resolve in the chorus, however, that home will have a reforming influence. Gene Pitney’s Twenty-Four Hours from Tulsa poses the dangers of distance from a wife’s influence, while displaying opposition to the sentimental yearning of so many other songs: Dearest darlin’, I have to write to say that I won’t be home anymore ‘cause something happened to me while I was drivin’ home And I’m not the same anymore Class as well as gender can be a debated issue in meanings attached to home, as evident in several songs that take a more jaundiced view of home, seeing it as a place from which to escape. The Animals’ powerful We Gotta Get Outta This Place clearly suggests a life of drudgery in a home town or region. Protectively, the lyrics insist “Girl, there’s a better life for me and you” but it has to be elsewhere. This runs against the grain of other British songs addressing poverty or a working class existence as something that comes with its own blessings, all to do with an area identified as home. These traits may be loyalty, familiarity or a refusal to judge and involve identities of placement rather than of displacement in, for instance, Gerry and the Pacemakers’ Ferry Cross the Mersey: People around every corner, they seem to smile and say “We don’t care what your name is, boy. We’ll never send you away.” This bears out Blunt and Dowling’s claim that “people’s senses of themselves are related to and produced through lived and metaphorical experiences of home” (252). It also resonates with some of the region-based identity and solidarity issues explored a short time later by Paul Willis in his study of working class youth in Britain, which help to inform how a sense of home can operate to constrict consciousness, ideas and aspirations. Identity features strongly in other songs about home. Several years after Neil Young recorded his 1970 song Southern Man about racism in the south of the USA, the group Lynyrd Skynyrd, responded with Sweet Home Alabama. While the meaning of its lyrics are still debated, there is no debate about the way in which the song has been embraced, as I recently discovered first-hand in Tennessee. A banjo-and-fiddle band performing the song during a gig virtually brought down the house as the predominantly southern audience clapped, whopped and stamped its feet. The real meanings of home were found not in the lyrics but in the audience’s response. Wally Johnson and Bob Brown’s 1975 Home Among the Gum Trees is a more straightforward ode to home, with lyrics that prescribe a set of non-commodified values. It is about simplicity and the right to embrace a lifestyle that includes companionship, leisure and an enjoyment of and appreciation of nature, all threatened seriously in the three decades since the song’s writing. The second verse in which large shopping complexes – and implicitly the consumerism they encourage – are eschewed (“I’d trade it all tomorrow for a little bush retreat where the kookaburras call”), is a challenge to notions of progress and reflects social movements of the day, The Green Bans Movement, for instance, took a broader and more socially conscientious attitude towards home and community, putting forward alternative sets of values and insisting people should have a say in the social and aesthetic construction of their neighbourhoods as well as the impacts of their labour (Mundey). Ironically, the song has gone on to become the theme song for a TV show about home gardens. With a strong yet more vague notion of home, Peter Allen’s I Still Call Australia Home, was more prone to commodification and has been adopted as a promotional song for Qantas. Nominating only the desire to travel and the love of freedom as Australian values, both politically and socially innocuous within the song’s context, this catchy and uplifting song, when not being used as an advertisem*nt, paradoxically works for a “diaspora” of Australians who are not in exile but have mostly travelled for reasons of pleasure or professional or financial gain. Another paradox arises from the song Home on the Range, dating back to the 19th century at a time when the frontier was still a strong concept in the USA and people were simultaneously leaving homes and reminiscing about home (Mechem). Although it was written in Kansas, the lyrics – again vague and adaptable – were changed by other travellers so that versions such as Colorado Home and My Arizona Home soon abounded. In 1947 Kansas made Home on the Range its state song, despite there being very few buffalo left there, thus highlighting a disjuncture between the modern Kansas and “a home where the buffalo roam” as described in the song. These themes, paradoxes and oppositional understandings of home only scratch the surface of the wide range of claims that are made on home throughout popular music. It has been shown that home is a flexible concept, referring to homelands, regions, communities and private houses. While predominantly used to evoke positive feelings, mostly with traditional views of the relationships that lie within homes, songs also raise challenges to notions of domesticity, the rights of those inhabiting the private sphere and the demarcation between the private and public spheres. Songs about home reflect contexts and challenges of their respective eras and remind us that vigorous discussion takes place about and within homes. The challenges are changing. Where many women once felt restrictively tied to the home – and no doubt many continue to do so – many women and men are now struggling to rediscover spatial boundaries, with production and consumption increasingly impinging upon relationships that have so frequently given the term home its meaning. With evidence that we are working longer hours and that home life, in whatever form, is frequently suffering (Beder, Hochschild), the discussion should continue. In the words of Sam Cooke, Bring it on home to me! References Bacheland, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1994. Beder, Sharon. Selling the Work Ethic: From Puritan Pulpit to Corporate PR. London: Zed Books, 2000. Blunt, Alison, and Robyn Dowling. Home. London: Routledge, 2006. Cohen, Robin. Global Diasporas: An Introduction. London: UCL Press, 1997. Cooper, B. Lee. “Good Timin’: Searching for Meaning in Clock Songs.” Popular Music and Society 30.1 (Feb. 2007): 93-106. 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Damned whor*s and God’s Police: The Colonization of Women in Australia. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975. Walter, Bronwen. Outsiders Inside: Whiteness, Place and Irish Women. London: Routledge, 2001. Waring, Marilyn. Counting for Nothing: What Men Value and What Women Are Worth. Wellington, NZ: Allen & Unwin, 1988. Willis, Paul. Learning to Labor: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs. New York: Columbia UP, 1977. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Varney, Wendy. "Homeward Bound or Housebound?: Themes of Home in Popular Music." M/C Journal 10.4 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/16-varney.php>. APA Style Varney, W. (Aug. 2007) "Homeward Bound or Housebound?: Themes of Home in Popular Music," M/C Journal, 10(4). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/16-varney.php>.