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

7B
Hope, loss and space-time (Chair, Eve Vincent)
Lauri Lahikainen
Solidarity, Hospitality and Radical Hope in the Anthropocene
Dwelling in an environment is considered a source of ethical and epistemic subjectivity in environmental
ethics. But global environmental changes will transform the conditions of being at home everywhere, even
for those who stay at one place. Ethical life in the erratic earth will require a new sort of solidarity. I will
approach the problem of solidarity by reading Derrida’s account of hospitality through the concept of radical
hope. The conceptual schema of host and stranger will become newly problematic, since the background of
hosting others will be mutated and strange. Radical hope is the conviction that even in conditions of radical
and catastrophic change, a new form of life with new forms of goodness is possible, and it is worthwhile to
seek those forms in a spirit of solidarity and hospitality. Speculative fiction and narratives of diasporic
experience may be sources of learning how to live in the Anthropocene.
Katrina Schlunke
“It now resembles Berlin, 1945”: Disaster, Time and Unseemly Feeling
What is the time of disaster? In 2013 the Australian Daily Telegraph compared the sight of an Australian
village street burnt by bushfire to “Berlin, 1945”, a comparison used for other natural disaster sites. Such
comparisons may reflect a desire to translate the disaster within a known bank of globally circulated
historical images while also representing the “out of world” experience of the disaster through these “out of
time” similes. These comparisons are deeply unethical in their rendering as comparable, incommensurate
historical experiences but in their production of cross-cultural and trans-temporal connection, they may also
be an acknowledgement of the ways in which hybrid sets of images stemming from different times and
places come together as part of the atemporal affects of disaster. Comparisons with “Berlin, 1945” neatly
expose the “out of time” experience that follows from the death of the everyday objects that once
materialised ordinary time while reasserting the teleology of modernity that can only ever be about
reconstruction and further development (ie look at Berlin now). The comparison with war damage also
obliquely suggests the “unnatural”, or human induced aspects of the disaster which in the instance of fire
and its relation to global climate change is also a challenge to time as an infinite. This paper suggests that by
exploring the temporal dimension of contemporary disaster we may find new forms of connection within the
anthropocene.
Boi Huyen Ngo Water buffalos as a metaphor of the Vietnamese Australian poetics of loss and uncanny homelands
Just as the Vietnamese word for water (nước) is the same word for homeland, the water buffalo is a symbol
of the nostalgic homeland within the cultural affects of Vietnamese Australians. This is in contrary to the
cultural perceptions of the water buffalo in Australia, which are seen as dangerous and feral. The paper will
explore the cultural poetics and histories of the water buffalo in Australia and Vietnam. Although European
Australians categorise the water buffalo as feral, Aboriginals categorise the water buffalo as wild and hence
Indigenised. This difference within ideas of cultural and natural (un)belonging extends to how other-ing the
water buffalo (within cultural practices such as hunting practices) is interwoven with the other-ing of
Indigenous and Asian Australian migrants. There are uncanny and poetic parallels between the history of the
water buffalo and lived experiences of Vietnamese Australian refugee-hood and through this, a new ethos
will be proposed within understandings of refugees to Australia and the Anthropocene.
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