About Current Issue
2009 Issue
NEO: The Journey Continues
Anthony Lambert
2009 Editor
Back in 2007, at the beginning of the academic year, my colleague Willa McDonald and myself (both then members of the divisional Higher Degree Research Committee), had the idea of putting together a conference for Higher Degree Research and Honours candidates in the social sciences and humanities to present and discuss their work. The key imperatives were to encourage, to respond, to foster and to promote (among many other things). The result of those ruminations has since been two very successful conference events in 2007 and 2008 and the development of NEO: Journal for Higher Degree Research Candidates in Social Sciences and Humanities, which is the associated journal of that conference. Now supported by the new Faculty of Arts, this second edition of NEO accompanies the change to a new academic structure at Macquarie University, and in particular reflects the wide ranging and varied interests of Honours and Higher Degree Research candidates working in the disciplines such as Anthropology, Cultural Studies, Philosophy, Media, and Indigenous Studies.
In her paper ‘Playful Practice in a New Age Community’, Stephanie Betz, an Anthropology graduate, offers an insightful case study of a New Age community called Violet Cottage, arguing that the emphasis on ‘play’ enables group formation in the face of seemingly different perspectives and purposes.
From the field of Cultural Studies, Agnes Bosanquet’s paper ‘Carnal Knowledge’ explores the work of feminist critic Luce Irigaray through themes of sex, gender and desire, articulating a playful and ‘speculative philosophy’ that moves beyond understandings of sexual difference to offer a meaningful ‘poetics of carnal difference’.
Philosopher Wilson Cooper attends to the ontology of Physicalism in his paper ‘ Physicalism: Some Assumptions versus an Implication’. Exploring ‘high level causation’, Cooper charts the fortunes of ‘non-reductive physicalism’ or NRP in the latter part of the twentieth century whilst accounting for the lack of explanations for higher level phenomena that are located in a language of the physical – calling for advocates of NRP to offer a ‘causal autonomy of non-physical entities’.
Matthew Asprey Gear’s ‘Losted’ in Brownsville: Experiential Realism in Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep’ explores the production of Brownsville, New York as space and place in Roth’s 1934 novel. This paper examines the perspective of David, a small child, lost in Brownsville’s streets. In doing so, the paper offers an analysis of the relationship between urban landscape and subjectivity constitutive of both the experimental realism of the novel and the cultural geography of 1930s New York.
Connecting Media and Cultural Studies, Joel Gilberthorpe’s paper, ‘What is a text?: On the limits of a text as an object of knowledge’ returns us to questions of textuality in critical investigation and interpretation. Moving from Blanchard to Bayard and finally to Derrida, Gilberthorpe argues that texts are simultaneously intelligible and untranslatable, encouraging readers to embrace the elusive nature of ‘the text’ in order to move past the limits of one’s own engagement with textual phenomena.
From Indigenous Studies, Eloise Hummell’s paper ‘Words Don’t Come Easily: The Australian Apology to the Stolen Generations’ examines Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s 2008 apology to the Aboriginal Australians. Whilst stressing the importance and symbolic power of the apology to those taken from families and communities as well as their descendants, Hummell’s paper highlights the discursive contradictions and political rhetoric in its wording that construct racial harmony and inevitability mask the ongoing effects of colonial practices.
Offering a fresh take on debates in film history and media studies, Duncan McLean’s paper ‘The Evolution of the Term ‘New Hollywood’’ rounds out this current incarnation of NEO. McLean explores the different incarnations of the term ‘New Hollywood’ in American cinema since WWII, from the Hollywood ‘renaissance’ to ‘auteur blockbusters’ and post film school ‘movie brats’. McLean’s work marks and problematises significant changes in the practices, technologies and genres of the Hollywood film, revealing complex historical shifts that continue to shape the global creation and consumption of cinema in the new millennium.
In addition to the authors included here, and the remaining thirty-one presenters from the 2009 conference event, there are a number of people to thank and acknowledge with respect to the 2009 edition of NEO: Kristina Everett for her help with both the conference and the refereeing of papers, Ammy Kwong for her tireless administrative assistance, Naren Chitty (who steered the Higher Degree Research Committee in the Division of Society, Culture, Media and Philosophy when both the conference and the journal were being developed), Willa McDonald, editor of the first edition of NEO, and our web co-ordinator Muhammad Rahman, for his work in getting this issue online and in helping find the journal a home on the new Faculty website. I would also like to thank the following people for their contributions: Isabelle Auguste, Michaela Baker, Anne Cranny-Francis, Andrew Gorman-Murray, Nick Mansfield, Renata Murawska, Goldie Osuri, Joseph Pugliese, Holly Randell-Moon, Kate Rossmanith, Catherine Simpson, Robert Sinnerbrink, Yuji Sone, Nikki Sullivan, Nicole Matthews and Justine Toh.
As a means of introducing this issue and the work of these emerging scholars, I defer to the context of that very famous ‘Neo’ from the first film in The Matrix trilogy. In a pivotal scene Trinity tells the would-be-saviour Neo “I was looking for an answer. It's the question, Neo. It's the question that drives us. It's the question that brought you here”. Enjoy these articles not only for their insights, which are many, but also for the fresh, timely and vital questions they ask. This is what new research is meant to do.
Anthony Lambert
Faculty of Arts
Macquarie University, February 2009