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12/04/18 Arts & Culture , Australia , Diaspora & Travel , Society & Politics # , , , , , , , , , , ,

Cultural Knowledge

Cultural Knowledge

By  Rashida Murphy

 

Such a loaded term – cultural knowledge – coming as it does with its own set of expectations and hints of secrets. When I try to unpack it a little, I think about how knowledge differs from appropriation and what the keepers of cultural knowledge can do to protect themselves from stealth and theft. And the answer is – very little. We live in times of exchange and borrowings and slippages and it is hard to skid to a stop, metaphorically speaking, and say – ‘You have gone too far.’

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09/06/15 Arts & Culture , Australia , Diaspora & Travel , Society & Politics # , , , , , , , , , , ,

A Hipstamatic filter won’t fix your Nostalgia

A Hipstamatic filter won’t fix your Nostalgia

There is much written about diasporic nostalgia for a lost homeland in literature, literary theory, and even media and cultural studies scholarship. As a first generation migrant from India to Australia, I also once longed for the smell of hot samosas on a rainy day, but that is only part of the tale.

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12/05/15 Arts & Culture , Australia , Society & Politics # , , , , , , , , , , ,

An Ivy League Race Riot: A Review of Dear White People

An Ivy League Race Riot: A Review of Dear White People

By Sukhmani Khorana

 

When Prime Minister Tony Abbott recently declared that Indigenous people living in remote communities were making a ‘lifestyle choice’, he was rightly rebuked by both sides of politics for undermining Aboriginal sovereignty and spiritual connection to land. What was seldom brought up, however, was how his curious phrasing assumed that there is a norm that the ‘choice’ was deviating from. This led me to wonder about a hypothetical scenario where all of the nation’s Indigenous citizens walked the white-laced path – mortgaging an over-priced suburban house, working a 9 to 5 job in the big smoke, commuting to workplaces and shopping centres. Would that help us ‘bridge the gap’? Would that also be the end of race-based prejudice? Chances are they could still encounter casual racism and institutional stasis.

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