Crossroads in Cultural Studies Conference 14-17th December 2016 Program Index

This paper focuses on contemporary indigenous fiction’s challenge to the liberal, political construction of
minority religious practices and community life as incompatible with modernity, progress, and secularism. I
argue that Leslie Marmon Silko’s Gardens in the Dunes and Linda Hogan’s People of the Whale demonstrate
how secularism narratives condition our relationship to the environment. Drawing upon early colonial
writings and Supreme Court cases, I argue that U.S. legal constructions of property and citizenship are linked,
as both are rooted in a Protestant ethos that shapes the animating myth about what it means to be
“American.” Literature that critiques secular narratives from the vantage point of indigenous culture and
history underscores the relationship between U.S. secular nationalism and its Protestant foundations. It
demonstrates how the influence of this relationship extends beyond indigenous peoples to a range of
communities, laws, cultural practices, and domestic and foreign policies, as well as how it continues to
inform contemporary thinking. Both Silko’s and Hogan’s novels reflect the problematic secular legacy of
defining citizenship, and indeed human-ness, through abstract values instead of recognizing it as an
embodied practice embedded in particular geographies. They point to broader networks between empire,
globalization, and secularization by drawing on a variety of literary influences and tying together myriad
histories of exclusion. Silko and Hogan insist that spatial narratives mediate the relationship between
individuals, communities, and the state. Rather than using the language of stewardship – which depends on
ownership – both novels narrate a belonging within and to the biosphere that challenges discourses of the
human. Gardens in the Dunes responds to the conservation and preservation ethos that Federal Indian Law
enacts by narrating alternative epistemologies of the Anthropocene. People of the Whale takes up questions
of sovereignty, stewardship, and the law, and addresses separation by embracing connections between
diverse human cultural communities and the rest of the biosphere. Both texts underscore the embodied,
affective, and lived practices that shape the forms that freedom, community, religion, and the individual can
take. These material conditions define the possibilities and impossibilities of form, and by rewriting formal
restrictions, authors like Silko and Hogan call attention to the conditions of their making and perform the
possibility of reworking broader political realities.
Amanda Modell Australian Musical Ecologies: Whale Dreaming Songs and the Fight for the Great Australian Bight
On April 20, British Petroleum re-submitted its application to drill in the Great Australian Bight, and a
coalition of environmental groups, Indigenous leaders and musicians called the Great Australian Bight
Alliance is vigorously fighting the oil giant. South Australia’s Mirning people, who perform “whale dreaming”
rites in which humans and whales make music together to unite the past, present and future, are
represented on the Alliance by Bunna Lawrie, front man of the Aboriginal rock band Coloured Stone, which
incorporates “whale dreaming” songs into its performances. How do whale dreaming rites offer ways of rethinking
what it means to be human under the Anthropocene, and how are they being mobilized to resist
transnational capital and resource extraction? From this key site of Australasian Cultural Studies, I argue the
whale dreaming rites constitute acoustic ontologies as powerful sites of resistance and refusal to settler
colonialism, heteropatriarchy and late capitalism.
5V
Intercultural and cosmopolitan possibilities in music and theatre (Chair, TBA)
Timothy Kazuo Steains Intercultural Theatre and Embodying Difference: Oppenheimer Noh, an English Language
Noh Play
Oppenheimer Noh is a collaboration between the Australian academic and Zen Buddhist Allan Marett, the US
American founder of the English language noh company Theatre Nohgaku Richard Emmert, and Japanese
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