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Abstract
Whereas much work in cultural and communication studies of “the subject” and subjectivity in language has focused on deconstructive theory and critique disconnected from actual practice and people, this paper applies an innovative cultural studies approach to a journalism reflective practice research project, conducted by the author, into human rights advocacy for cases of exiled writers in immigration detention centers in Australia. In the intellectual context of “counter-hegemonic” theories that use music as an analogy for affective social relations, the paper applies what is herein termed a “fugal critical analysis,” by drawing on both musical and psychological meanings of fugue (as musical counterpoint and psychological loss of awareness of self-identity following trauma) to discuss a human rights research project. The project includes conducting interviews with an exiled Ivory Coast journalist, and an Iranian poet-musician, and their advocates, including founding member of PEN's Writers in Detention committee whose publication of an exiled writers' anthology helped secure their releases on a case by case basis. The paper argues that direct engagement with cases of social injustice—here crystallized in the encounter of the interview—brings new relevance to cultural studies research practice that can effect significant changes in perception and action; in this case shifting consideration of “the subject” from the much publicized hypothetical “death of the author” of recent theory, to actual cases of exiled endangered writers, bringing cultural studies research into institutional spaces where cases can be humanely heard and supported, not merely critiqued and deconstructed.
Acknowledgements
The research project discussed in this essay was assisted by a grant from the Australian Centre for Independent Journalism, at the University of Technology, Sydney
Notes
1. Australian Human Rights Commission, http://www.hreoc.gov.au/
2. See Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books, 1993); and Musical Elaborations (London: Chatto and Windus, 1991).
3. Bakhtin coined the terms dialogism and literary polyphony as concepts of character (and subject/self) developed in dialogue with others in his analysis of Dostoevsky in Problems of Dostoevsky's Art, later translated into English as Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics; elaborated in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin, TX and London: University of Texas Press, 1981).
4. Producing a counter reading of social conditions offering possibilities for critique and change; see Les mots et les choses (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1966) trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith as The Order of Things (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), and L”Archéologie du savoir first published by Editions Gallimard in 1966, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith as The Archeology of Knowledge (London: Tavistock Publications, 1972).
5. See Kristeva's literary-cultural analysis in Pouvoirs de l'horreur (Paris: Édition du Seuil, 1980) trans. Leon S. Roudiez as Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982); on the carnivalesque “Word, Dialogue and Novel” in The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986).
6. Ruth Skilbeck, “Refugee Writers: Beyond Detention,” http://Homepagedaily.com 3/5/2009; “Make Art Not War,” http://Homepagedaily.com 3/2/2008.
7. Rosie Scott and Tom Keneally, ed., Another Country: Writers in Detention (Sydney: Halstead Press, 2004).
8. Including Professor Denise Leith author of Bearing Witness: The Lives of War Correspondents and Photojournalists (Milsons Point: Random House, 2004). In 2006, Rosie Scott was awarded the Inaugural Sydney PEN Award for her work including foundational work in forming the Writers in Detention Committee. One commendation was that: “she has shown how a writer can be a powerful activist” Sydney PEN Award (http://www.pen.org.au).
9. In Hurriyet Barbacan's Plenary Speech “300 Days: Social Inclusion and the Rudd Government,” Rights, Reconciliation, Respect, Responsibility: Planning for a Socially Inclusive Future for Australia Conference, University of Technology, Sydney, October 2, 2008.
10. Ruth Skilbeck, “Art Journalism and the Impacts of “Globalisation”: New Fugal Modalities of Story-telling in Austral-Asian Writing,” Pacific Journalism Review 14 (2008); 141–61.
11. See Said, Culture and Imperialism.
12. Mikhail Bakhtin," “Forms of Time and the Chronontope in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. . Michael Holquist, trans. Carl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin, TX and London: University of Texas Press, 1981/2004).
13. See Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (Abingolon: Routledge, 1994).
14. Leading practitioners include Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigarary, and Julia Kristeva.
15. Hence psychogenic fugue is the focus of medical research, e.g., Michael D. Kopelman, “Focal Retrograde Amnesia and the Attribution of Causality: An Exceptionally Critical Review,” Cognitive Neuropsychology, 17 (2000): 586–621; and Hans J. Markowitsch, “Functional Neuroimaging Correlates of Functional Amnesia,” Memory 7, (1999): 561–83.
16. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. trans.Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974/82). Luce Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference. trans. C. Burke and G. Gill (Ithaca, NY: 1983. Melanie Klein, Love, Guilt and Reparation and Other Works 1921–1945 by Melanie Klein (London: The Hogarth Press, 1930/75).
17. For instance in Judith Squires, The New Politics of Gender Equality (London: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2007).
18. See, for examples, chapters by Jeffrey C. Alexander and Piotr Sztompka, in Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity (Berkley, CA: University of California Press, 2004).
19. See, for example, Cathy Caruth's Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History (Baltimore, MY: John Hopkins University Press, 1996); and Caruth's Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore, MY: John Hopkins University Press, 1995).
20. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (London: Allen Lane, 1973).
21. Theo Van Leeuwen and G.R. Kress, Multimodal Discourse: The Modes and Media of Contemporary Communication (London: Edward Arnold, 2002).
22. Brentano Franz, Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (1 & 2), Linda L. McAlister, ed. trans. Antos C. Rancurello et al.(New York: Humanities Press, 1973).
23. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974/82).
24. Ruth Skilbeck, The Writers Fugue: Musicalization, Trauma and Subjectivity in the Literature of Modernity. PhD thesis. Library, University of Technology, Sydney, 2006.
25. Piotr Sztompka, “The Trauma of Social Change: A Case of Postcommunist Societies,” in Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity, ed. Jeffrey c. Alexander et al. (Berkley, CA: University of California Press, 2004).
26. Skilbeck, 2006.
27. Australian Commission for Human Rights, http://www.hreoc.gov.au/legal/submissions/2009
28. ACHR website at http://www.hreoc.gov.au/legal/submissions/2009
29. ACHR website at http://www.hreoc.gov.au/legal/submissions/2009
30. Frank Brennan, Tampering with Asylum (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2003).
31. Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, A Last Resort? National Inquiry into Children in Immigration Detention, April 2004. Australian Commission for Human Rights website, www.hreoc.gov.ac.
32. Interview with Rosie Scott, October 2007.
33. Steven Biddulph, “LOVE is Stronger than Fear. The SIEV X Memorial,” in Acting from the Heart: Australian Advocates for Asylum Seekers Tell Their Stories, ed. Sarah Mares and Louise Newman (Sydney: Finch Publishing, 2007), 182.
34. Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, A Last Resort? National Inquiry into Children in Immigration Detention, April (2004): 442–3, Australian Commission for Human Rights website, www.hreoc.gov.au.
35. Interview with Mohsen Soltany Zand, October 2007.
36. Cheikh Kone in an interview with the author April 2008, University of Technology, Sydney.
37. Discussed, for example, in Les mots et les choses (Paris: Gallimard, 1966) (The Order of Things, New York: Vintage, 1973); and Surveiller et punir (Paris: Gallimard, 1975) (Discipline and Punish, trans by Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon, 1977).
38. Australian Commission for Human Rights, http://www.hreoc.gov.au/legal/submissions/2009
39. Sharon Pickering, “Common Sense and Original Deviancy: News Discourses and Asylum Seekers in Australia,” Journal of Refugee Studies 14 (2001): 169–89, 169.
40. Immigration (Detention Reform) Bill 220. Submitted by the Australian Human Rights Commission to the Senate, July 31, 2009. Australian Human Rights Commission http://www.hreoc.gov.au
41. An advocate who had visited him in Villawood and remained good friends with him, introduced the author to Mohsen, at a spoken word poetry club at a basement bar in Sydney's King's Cross. Mohsen was performing spoken word poetry and playing improvised music accompanied by two men on traditional Persian instruments including sitars. Mohsen had agreed to requests for photographs and for an interview.
42. Skilbeck, “Make Art Not War.”
43. Sydney PEN website.
44. Sydney PEN website.
45. Skilbeck, “Refugee Writers Beyond Detention,” http://www.Homepagedaily.com 3/2/2009.
46. Interview with the author, April 12, 2008, University of Technology, Sydney.
47. Sydney PEN website.
48. Australian Commission for Human Rights, http://www.hreoc.gov.au
49. Media release, Refugee Council, September 8, 2009.
50. Media release, Refugee Council, September 8, 2009.
51. Sydney PEN website.
52. Sigmund Freud, Errinern, Wiederholen und Durcharbeiten (Weitere Ratschläge zur Technik der Psychoanalyse, II). Internationale Zeitschrift für ärtztliche Psychoanalyse 2 (1914): 485–91. In English translation: “Remembering, repeating and working-through” in Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings, trans. John Reddick (London: Penguin Books, 2003), 31–43.
53. National Union of Journalists (2004/08) Reporting Asylum and Refugee Issues, http://www.mediawise.org.uk