My reflection revolves around the aporiae of critical appreciation in World Literature, suspended between an educated, erudite—or cultured—set of criteria and the expectation of extracultural validity of literature. I play, deliberately and ironically, with the double resonance of the adjective ‘cultured’, evoking concomitantly the profundity of cultivation and the limiting inscription in the boundaries of a culture (in the singular). Evoking the evolution of literary criticism as it constantly strives to enlarge its horizons and overcome limitations, be they of classical Comparative Literature, the postcolonial school, or new approaches to World Literature, I will argue in favour of radical aesthetic pluralism, and thus postulate readings that transcend the limitations of the cultured perspectives. Contrary to various attempts at formulating the premises of universal aesthetic judgement—contrary even to postcolonial critical frameworks—such radical pluralism, respecting the spheres of obscurity and untranslatability, creates sufficient space for the recognition of idiosyncratic values of texts, including, as I will later exemplify, those of West African Pulaar literature. Tracing a possible continuation of the historical line of criticism, which has constantly striven to transform and adapt its theoretical premises to include greater and greater variety of literary creation, I will argue in favour of transindigenous and transcolonial approaches as means of drawing, in the minutest details, the global map of literatures.
Painting is a multi-dimensional practice, including both four-dimensional and fivedimensional qualities. These dimensions are active through pictorial forces within the ground of a painting—an interface that Antonin Artaud called the subjectile, a conjunction of the words subject and projectile.2 The current embrace of materiality and vitalism within contemporary art practices locally and internationally,3 draws attention to place-based relationships with biological and geological matter that traverse colonial dualities and categorisations of nature and culture.4 Further understanding of multidimensional and more-than-human approaches to painting can be developed through extension of Artaud’s ideas, using the subjectile to consider biological and geological figure/ground dynamics and forces. This article extends Artaud’s ideas by proposing the terms biosubjectile and geosubjectile to consider paintings and their surfaces as both living and inorganic systems. I reflect on my own bio and geo-based artworks, which generate multi-dimensional and polymorphic forms with a view to resisting or complicating both subjective experience and objective judgements of pictorial resolution, craft and aesthetics.
This article will argue for mindful awareness and curiosity as correctives to the mindless judgements that sometimes arise from interpreting events that are similar as though they are identical. To make a case for mindfulness as an antidote to judgement, the essay will examine four literary texts that all describe a similar event, an event that triggers judgements within the characters involved in the story world. It will then step back from what’s happening in that literary world and trace the differences in details and actions across those four texts, highlighting how readers have over centuries recognised—and yet still often conflated—those differences. The essay will continue to pan out to look at the resulting judgements that have arisen in the process: how realworld readers have tended to fall into the same pattern of judgement that the literary text cautions against. From that textual example and the historic reception of these texts, the essay will then show how an understanding and practice of mindful attention can help prevent similar unquestioned judgements.
Witchcraft has been the focus of widespread controversy, denunciation and critique as a way of living and social phenomenon for centuries. In the state in India with the largest Adivasi Indigenous population, Jharkhand, the belief in witchcraft cannot be distinguished from native religiosity, tradition and rule. This has resulted in widespread persecution of women, the impact of which has been social ostracism, physical abuse and deprivation. This article is about the witchcraft phenomenon in Jharkhand, which involves judgement both psycho-legally and sociologically, where knowledge about witchcraft sways between condemnation, scepticism and cultural relativism. The social and historical context of belief in witchcraft in Jharkhand can be traced back to Indigenous animistic beliefs, where supernatural agencies are interpreted to be part and parcel of illness and bad luck. Colonial juridical imposition sought to go around or suppress such practices like superstition, irrespective of their socio-cultural significance. Post-colonial legal action like the Prevention of Witch (Daain) Practices Act, 2001, has sought to criminalise witch-hunting but not to subvert the socio-economic and gendered structures upon which it is based. Thus, contravening the law, violence related to witchcraft occurs frequently and more so against vulnerable females like widows and women who are property/wealth holders. Judgement of witchcraft occurs at the community level, being an instrument of social control in reaction to inter-personal conflict, economic hardship or unforeseen events such as epidemics and crop loss. Witchhunting is gendered insofar as patriarchal states co-opt supernatural belief to exercise power and disproportionately accuse and victimise women. Government offices in the court system mostly fail to make effective interventions in native knowledge systems. Institutions decentre belief in witchcraft to superstition instead of situating them in their theological and social contexts. Feminist scholars demonstrate that witch-hunting is nothing more than an exercise of patriarchal domination, further projecting domination over women’s bodies and estates,5 and argue that cultural relativism should not be used as an excuse for violence in a gendered environment. Native activists, however, warn against foreign interventions that disrespect traditional law.
I grew up understanding love through actions, through food. For Samoans in Aotearoa, visiting someone’s house means bringing something to share. No one leaves hungry. At family dinners, children are served first, their plates loaded, as a gesture of care. We collect kai moana together, we prepare food together, and we cook together even when the ingredients come in a Salvation Army box. Despite displacement, these rituals continue in the New Zealand context, where traditional language, clothing and ceremony are sometimes absent, transferred from traditional kitchens to plastic trays and foil wraps. Food is one of our strongest living ties to cultural identity. I’ve seen it in my Thai flatmate, in my Māori whānau and in many diasporic communities. Everyday practices quietly hold people together. My art emerges from a space where Indigenous and non-Indigenous worldviews are in constant dialogue. It is a space shaped by the principles of Te Ao Māori. the persistence of Māori activism and the responsibilities that come with inhabiting this whenua. Because this place is unsettled, active and contested, I, as a base line, have the freedom to create in ways that feel both anchored and exploratory—a freedom I acknowledge as a privilege. In many parts of the world, political thought that challenges the status quo is not only discouraged but actively suppressed. The ability to question, reflect and speak through creative practice is not something I take for granted. It’s about recognising the layered context I live in, where Te Tiriti o Waitangi offers an ongoing framework for negotiation and responsibility, but where my values as an artist are also grounded in simple, inherited acts of love, sharing and survival. This article is a reflection on my installation at the Dunedin School of Art in November 2024. Taking the form of a personal, autoethnographic narrative, it counters a reading of the work’s various packaged-food-related objects that draws only from critical theory. That intellectual reading, I suggest, is liable to result in the judgement of a marginalised cultural group as passive consumers of inauthentic mass-produced commodities. I argue instead for embracing the contradictions the items embody, whereby they are equally signs of disconnection and connection for Samoan New Zealand families.
Ngaa tuku o Maahina is a roopuu [group] whose kaupapa [purpose] relates to the multiple interconnected strands of knowledge of ngaa maramataka [site specific lunar calendars]. We are Hagen Tautari, Horomona Horo, Te Taima Barrett, Hollie Tawhiao, Toni Herangi, Ra Keelan and Joe Citizen. At our inaugural hui [gathering], Toni brought along a taonga [prized treasure] which had been in her family for generations – dated 1898, this photolithographed collection in te reo Māori [the Māori language] and English, has copies of He Whakaputanga (Declaration of independence), Te Tiriti o Waitangi (Treaty of Waitangi) and other associated papers. To some, this is might appear to simply be copies of older original documents. In te ao Māori [the Māori world], however, this collection has its own mauri [life-essence], mana [spiritual authority and prestige] and haa [breath] and retains links to the tuupuna [ancestors] through their tohu [signs]. Our koorero [discussion] became centred on its preservation – simply photographing it and uploading copies of it online would make it vulnerable to AI that employ web-scraping and web-crawling practices, to thieve knowledge and assimilate it into a supposedly universalist framework. This koorero brought to our attention the wider take [subject] of how we should navigate the colonial tendencies of AI – the structural violence that arises from those culturally specific practices that assume a priori truths as universally foundational. By appraising the Eurocentric and human-centric assumptions behind data recognition through the automation of iterative logic loops, we acknowledge the entanglements of historically systemic problems: how cognitivism and positivism underpin supremacist claims of liberatory technological progress; how material realism and representational indexicality have traditionally dismissed and abused indigenous knowledge frameworks; how military-industrial control culture has normalised surveillance and transnational capitalism; and how reductionist methodologies reify libertarian claims of individual freedoms as commodified transactions between atomistic entities.
INTRODUCTION: The theme, ‘network,’ speaks to the idea that relationships between phenomena are more important than—and indeed produce or perform—things and beings themselves. Some such things and beings might typically be regarded as relatively proximate, the connections well-known and reiterated; others more distant and the act of connecting them daring, difficult or speculative. These latter relationships often depend on a willingness to traverse multiple areas of knowledge or disciplines, which is precisely what this journal, The Journal for Thematic Dialogue, encourages. In recent decades, there has been much ‘thematic dialogue’ about the place of human beings in the greater scheme of things. Contrary to dominant tendencies in Western thought since the Enlightenment, a ‘networked’ perspective suggests that the putative intelligence of people does not make them separate from everything else on the planet; but, at the same time, this same intelligence, or an assumption of its distinctiveness and superiority, has succeeded in having an exceptional—to the point of catastrophic—impact on the planet’s ecosystem. If there is any way out of this pickle, or at least of surviving in the midst of it a little while longer, it would seem propitious to regard human beings merely as constituent factors in a much vaster and multitudinous assemblage, constellation or ecology, not as the centre around which everything else revolves, while, at the same time, recognising that this puts us in a place of responsibility—to care for everything else we connect with, for the sake of sustaining the wider network and by extension our place within it.
This article presents a qualitative, autoethnographic exploration of personal realities and lived experiences in rugby. The literature highlights the potential harm of imposing a Westernised 'one size fits all' team culture, particularly in relation to its impact on Māori identity and aspirations. Herein we advocate for more inclusive environments that honour the intersections of diverse values, beliefs systems and perspectives of Māori, Pasifika and other marginalised communities. As an authorship team we sit within a research excellence group at the Centre of Indigenous Science. This space validates Māori and Indigenous identity, nurtures personal growth and embraces every facet of existence, from whakapapa to cultural identity, including our shared passion for rugby. This systematic literature review pursues two primary research objectives: firstly, it aims to identify and compare the challenges confronted by wāhine Māori in rugby, examining both Western and te ao Māori perspectives. Secondly, it uncovers effective strategies for addressing these challenges, with the ultimate goal of safeguarding and empowering flourishing wāhine Māori identities (tuakiri) in rugby.
This paper provides an introduction to a research-creation project, focusing on developing a prototype Virtual Reality (VR) educational tool. Younger people in Malaysia have limited exposure to or interest in information relating to the elderly, resulting in an intergenerational disconnect. The wider project aims to develop a VR teaching tool inspired by an existing role-playing simulation game (Aging Game). As a storytelling-based experience, VR can be used to share the discomfort faced by older people when using information and communications technology (ICT) such as computers/cell phones, internet and social media.The project is to explore the potential VR has to act as a bridge between the generations and to raise awareness in younger people about intergenerationalissues. The primary focus of this discussion paper is to discuss design and modification of the VR tool for creating interactive experiences that inhabit both the real and the unreal (virtual) world.
Aboriginal language revival is a recent phenomenon in Australia (Rigney 2006; Troy 2012). Prior to British colonisation, Australia had over 250 distinct languages that could be subdivided into 600-700 dialects, clearly, Australia was composed of ‘multicultural and multilingual societies’ (Rigney 2006, 385). Today only 18 Indigenous languages are spoken by all generations of people within a given language group (Social Justice Report 2009). In response to the urgent need to protect Indigenous languages, in August 2009, the Australian Government launched for the first time a strategy titled Indigenous Languages - A National Approach 2009 (Social Justice Report 2009). It highlighted the Government’s plan to preserve and revitalise Indigenous languages through targeted actions. More recently, in 2016 the state of New South Wales introduced Indigenous languages in the secondary school curriculum, with other states following. Australian universities are increasingly offering tertiary courses (Bagshaw, 2015). Subsequently, the Aboriginal Languages Act 2017 was passed in New South Wales with a 5-year plan to reawaken and nurture Aboriginal languages. Meanwhile, Australian Aboriginal women play a key role in reclaiming language and their voice in the policy arena by contributing to radical pedagogies and healing through language revival programs. To this end, Indigenous scholars in Australia see their work as drawing on generations of women, particularly in the context of Grandmother’s Laws, and their contribution to resistance, challenge to stereotypes and focus on survival as an outcome (Watson 2015; Behrendt 2019). Grandmother’s law is part of Indigenous law where men and women hold equal positions with reciprocal rights and responsibilities for maintaining societal equilibrium in their own Nations and in their own languages. These interdependent roles are designated as women’s and men’s law and are also referred to as “Women’s Business” (Burarrwanga 2019, p.72) and “Men’s Business” (Canuto et al. 2018). “Grandfathers look outwardly, protecting home community, Land and camp” (Wall 2017). Grandmothers look inwardly, teaching and nurturing younger generations in having respect and responsibility to care for Country, to benefit both Land and people and to maintain cultural connection with family, language, and Land (Wall 2017). As a result, competing tensions exist in the area of Indigenous language learning with government policies on the one hand providing western models for language learning within educational institutions while on the other, Indigenous community led structures are informing vital ways of re-centring language pathways. The aim of this paper is to build on and contribute to work in the area of Indigenous languages in Australia by examining the intersectionality relevant to the revival of an Indigenous language in order to understand the ways in which different forms of language knowledges intersect and interact to shape experiences of oppression and privilege to address and challenge systemic forms of inequality and discrimination. It draws on a framework that is informed by the relation between knowledge and pedagogy (Apple 1993; Aronowitz & Giroux 1985) and by Indigenous pedagogy frameworks (Watson & Heath, 2004; Watson, 2015). This framework acts as a useful, yet destabilising factor that brings into question how teachers teach and what systems of knowledge are applied. The study draws on interviews with Indigenous educators in both an Australian educational institution and a community context to examine the relation between people and society in the process of language revival as well as the challenges posed and solutions offered by the way various forms of language knowledges intersect.
This article presents a qualitative, autoethnographic exploration of personal realities and lived experiences in rugby. The literature highlights the potential harm of imposing a Westernised 'one size fits all' team culture, particularly in relation to its impact on Māori identity and aspirations. Herein we advocate for more inclusive environments that honour the intersections of diverse values, beliefs systems and perspectives of Māori, Pasifika and other marginalised communities. As an authorship team we sit within a research excellence group at the Centre of Indigenous Science. This space validates Māori and Indigenous identity, nurtures personal growth and embraces every facet of existence, from whakapapa to cultural identity, including our shared passion for rugby. This systematic literature review pursues two primary research objectives: firstly, it aims to identify and compare the challenges confronted by wāhine Māori in rugby, examining both Western and te ao Māori perspectives. Secondly, it uncovers effective strategies for addressing these challenges, with the ultimate goal of safeguarding and empowering flourishing wāhine Māori identities (tuakiri) in rugby.
This essay aims to present the intersections that constitute the cultural identity of Malaysian Chinese and suggest how their migration and settlement experiences have shaped their sense of who they are and who they are becoming through personal and family histories. I utilise a methodology analogous to the microhistory framework, where the individual assumes an active role in the process of memory formation and exercises agency in the selection, alteration and transmission of memories. This perspective encourages “understanding people in light of their own experience and their reactions to that experience.”1 Most scholarly publications on Malaysian Chinese identity use a macro-level approach, emphasising the study of social and political institutions while giving less attention to personal introspection and micro-level research. A September 17, 2022, New Straits Times article quoted Danny Wong, a Malaysian historian from Sabah, as saying that family history, tales and memoirs help people comprehend both their past and their future trajectory. Wong believes that scrutinising one’s personal history through the medium of family narratives can lead to a critical evaluation of the interconnectedness of familial, communal and national dynamics. My artworks, reproduced in this article, aim to visually portray these submerged and accumulated layers of intersecting identity through a microhistorical perspective. Through my art, I present the intersecting and multi-layered inner reality that has accumulated traces of lived experiences. This inner reality is distinguished by its multicultural, multi-religious, multi-lingual character and multiracial experiences that combine to influence identity formation, under the impact of constantly changing social environments. The evolution of these inner realities is conveyed using visual assemblages combining printmaking, photography and digital manipulation in order to visually represent the socio-cultural formation of a Malaysian Chinese individual. The artworks reproduced convey the mutable nature of ethnic identity in conjunction with variables such as geographic location, degree of interaction, era, and age group.
Te reo Māori (the Māori language) is an oral language, so these “Te Kore, to Te Pō, to Te Ao Marama” words are most commonly encountered as spoken. Unlike Western traditions, precontact Māori cultures did not impose Cartesian divisions between nature and culture on the world. Nor does te reo position entities in an oppositional manner, as for instance the Greek prefix ‘in-’ does on the words ‘tangible’ and ‘intangible.’ Similarly, the Greek prefix ‘inter-’ inscribes the possibility that within oppositional entities there is always an in-between. Sound vibrates, resonates and reverberates, sound is always inherent to material movement, both in its generation and propagation. Vibrations are one of the ways that the material world makes itself felt. If language is communication, then in this understanding it is not just a human prerogative.
