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CROSSROADS IN CULTURAL STUDIES
Fourth International Conference
June 29 - July 2, 2002, Tampere, Finland
Politics and Poetics of Post-Colonialism and
Ethnicity
Organiser: Mikko Tuhkanen
Schmidlechner, Karin Maria (University
of Graz, Austria) CROSS CULTURAL MARRIAGES IN AUSTRIA
This paper is dealing with cross-cultural marriages, a special form of marriage
migration, in Austria. The term "cross-cultural" marriage is applied
to marriages contracted between two people who do not share the same
nationality, language, religion, ethnicity, or other cultural characteristics.
My research is based on interviews with Austrian women who live in
cross-cultural relationships in Graz, the capital of the Austrian province of
Styria. There recently immigrants and especially black immigrants have been
experiencing a lot of hostility from the citicens due to campaigns of
conservative and national political parties and newspapers. I want to find out
how these couples are able to live in a climate of xenophobia and how their
relationships are influenced by these circumstances. In particular I will focus
on the especially difficult situation of women with black husbands (and their
children) in Austrian province of Styria. There recently immigrants and
especially black immigrants have been experiencing a lot of hostility from the
citicens due to campaigns of conservative and national political parties and
newspapers. I want to find out how these couples are able to live in a climate
of xenophobia and how their relationships are influenced by these circumstances.
In particular I will focus on the especially difficult situation of women with
black husbands (and their children).
Wong, Lorraine (The University of Hong
Kong, Hong Kong SAR) BEFORE ORIENTALISM: GEORGE PSALMANAZAR AND HIS
"FORMOSA"
Forgers, plagiarists, tricksters and charlatans ironically reflect the growth of
capitalism in eighteenth century England, manipulating the sweeping process of
the capitalist mode of (re)production in everyday reality and no less in the
realm of knowledge and meanings. There seems to be an element of accuracy in
this characterization of George Psalmanazar-the Formosan impostor who debated
with scientists from the Royal Society and supposedly went so far as to teach a
faked "Formosan" language in Oxford. This paper on Psalmanazar
discusses the performativity of meaning production and examines the circulation
of meaning-as-face value regulated by the semiotics of material culture and the
ethos of capitalism. This is intended to show that the grand narrative of the
Enlightenment as a philosophical discourse of positivism has a dialectical
relationship with pre-Orientalism: the free-floating curiosity in the
marketplace before the rise of formal empire, academic modernity, or rather,
Orientalism in Said's sense.
Chang, Yih-Fan (National Kaohsiung
Normal University, Taiwan) THE POLITICS OF POST-COLONIALISM AND THE POETICS OF
POST-MODERNISM IN TOM STOPPARD'S INDIAN INK
The British playwright Tom Stoppard's Indian Ink (1995) is about
inter-borrowings between different cultures, the (im)possibilities of
trans-cultural understanding, and the intricate questions of gender, empire and
interpretations. Stoppard uses extensive counterpoints whereby he juxtaposes the
colonial India in the 1930 and the post-colonial Britain of the 1980s. He
deliberately blurs the differences between the past and the present through the
use of a simple set. The images of the past and the present are juxtaposed into
a characteristic Stoppardian pastich to "stimulate
chronology/simultaneity." Moreover, the parallel plots which progress
interchangeably in chronological order implicate and intrude each other. The
point made through such extensive use of postmodern poetics underlines the
complexity of postcolonial politics, in particular that which is shaping the
Anglo-Indian relationships. The encounter of postmodern poetics and postcolonial
politics, moreover, underscores "the impossibility of events in the past
yielding to valid interpretation in the present" (Clinton 270).
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