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

This paper examines the whiteness of alternative food spaces in Australia and how it functions in processes
of gentrification that grant possession of urban spaces to some, while dispossessing others. Scholars, such as
Aileen Moreton-Robinson, argue that whiteness functions as an invisible measure of who can hold
possession, which is intimately part of the history of dispossession and undermining of Indigenous
ownership. Drawing on this scholarship, this paper critically examines the rising profile of alternative
agricultural practices in Australian cities. While urban planners and politicians praise alternative food
practices for renewing abandoned industrial sites and providing a place for community engagement and
flourishing, there has also been criticism that these spaces are exclusionary. This paper examines the role of
whiteness in alternative agriculture and the way alternative food represent symbolic and actual sites of
exclusion and marginalization of individuals and communities.
Delores Phillips Glimpsed through the stitching of the person suits we wear: Cannibalism, savagery, and civilizing
appetites
Cannibalism constitutes the brightest of lines distinguishing civilization from savagery. My presentation will
analyze the operations of this distinction by considering the taming of the cannibal by tracing his literal
domestication from the film Cannibal Holocaust (1980), through Ravenous (1999), and into Cannibal: A Love
Story (2014) and the first season of the television series Hannibal (2013). The cannibal moves away from the
jungle and the frontier and into the kitchen, where the depictions of the preparation of human flesh take the
shape of exercises in haute cuisine, and the cannibal represents the apex of epicurean refinement. The
paper will then consider the discovery of the remains of an anonymous young woman who had been eaten
by her fellow settlers in Jamestowne’s “starving time” in the winter of 1609-1610 and cannibalism’s uneasy
incorporation in the Smithsonian’s Written in Bone exhibit. My presentation will suggest that the moniker
“survival” appended to the cannibalistic practices of the winter of 1609 carries with it the racial and class
freight of colonial rhetoric, which makes cannibalism incommensurate with how Americans remember the
birth of their country – and that this constitutes further domestication of the figure of the cannibal,
necessary for moments we target as our historical and cultural infancy. The presentation will examine what
happens when the food practices that we use to classify ourselves expand to encapsulate those that mark
out savage, other spaces: it will ask the critical question of how cannibalism alienates ourselves from
ourselves once integrated into our culinary history.
PARALLEL SESSIONS 10
10A
Media, Space, and Mobilities (Chair, Fran Martin)
Helen Hok-Sze Leung
Film Cities On The Margin: Examining Vancouver and Hong Kong
The film industries of both Hong Kong and Vancouver have been analyzed as examples of what Michael
Curtin calls “media capital”. The case of Hong Kong has largely been discussed pessimistically as a narrative
of decline or one that is symptomatic of failed creative city policies and of economic and cultural
“Mainlandization” (assimilation by the Mainland China). By contrast, analyses of Vancouver have
emphasized the importance of the city’s service industry to Hollywood and the persistence of its small but
resilient independent film scene. My presentation will examine these two film cities’ respective challenges in
negotiating their “junior” or marginal status vis-a-vis a hegemonic neighbouring film industry (China and
Hollywood respectively). I will also explore the often overlooked history of creative and industry
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