Cultural Studies Custom Essay

BEFORE COMPLETING THESE EXERCISES YOU NEED TO READ THE NOTES PROVIDED AND USE THESE FOR REFERENCES

Module 1 Lecture 1
Reflection based exercise
This first exercise encourages you to consider the general issues this unit addresses, to reflect on your own �positioning’ in relation to them, and to enter into initial dialogue with your fellow students as you do so.
After having read the introductory lecture, In half a page explain what you think Joseph means by the term �un-Australian’ in the unit title? How comfortable do you feel with the arguments that underlie his use of the term?
Now say something about your own �positioning’ in political and cultural terms. What is your take on the concept �nation’? (REMBER READ THE NOTES i HAVE PROVIDED YOU WITH AS A REFERENCE AND UNDERSTANDING). To what extent does the imaginary �Australian’ form part of your own self-understanding? Do you accept Joseph’s arguments on the role of power in forming such cultural imaginaries? To what extent are our own identities therefore a direct consequence of power relations? Finally, what possibilities are there for resistance, and what is the role of courses such as this one in facilitating oppositional voices and positions?
As well as noting your response in the text-box below, post them in the online Discussions, as a way of introducing yourself to your tutor and your fellow students.

LECTURE 2
You will need this file in order to complete this exercise which has been provided for you
Extract 1: From the Victorian �Aboriginal Protection Act, 1869’
Exercise 1: Law and Aboriginal Australia
Evaluative and Analytic based exercise
• As you know from reading through the �Exercise Methodologies’ on the Online (Blackboard CE6) Home Page of every unit, Analytic exercises require not only recognition of underlying meanings and their implications in a text, but also evidence or theoretical justification of why you think a text produces particular meanings over others. Evaluation requires making judgements about the value of ideas or theories, and comparing and discriminating between ideas.
• Feedback for this exercise will be given in the form of comments when you have handed this in as part of your assessment.
Step 1:
In no more than 1 and a half A4 pages respond to the following question:
Bearing in mind Joseph’s arguments that �the nation-state and the institution of law … work together to construct particular forms and representations of the nation through the practices and processes of criminalisation’, this exercise asks you to critically evaluate the underlying assumptions on nation, crime and punishment reflected in Australian law. Three extracts from Australian laws drafted to deal with the �aboriginal problem’ have been included (they can be downloaded by clicking on the �text-file’ link in the Activity Box). The first is drawn from the Victorian �Aboriginal Protection Act, 1869’; the second from the Queensland Government’s �Aboriginals Protection and the Restriction of the Sale of Opium Bill, 1897’. The third comes from the recently introduced �Northern Territory National Emergency Response Act, 2007’. Your discussion should be based on the extracts provided. But you are also encouraged to research the background of these documents in greater depth, and to read other sections of the laws in order to supplement your understanding. In doing so, you should pay particular attention to the role of �prescribed places’ in the 2007 legislation and the ways they might resemble, or differ from, the �reserves’ discussed in the nineteenth century Acts.
In your answer you should look beyond the surface forms of the legal language used, and try to elucidate the underlying (and therefore typically unstated) assumptions influencing the texts: assumptions about the nature of indigenous Australians and their communities, about authority and the law as it relates to aboriginal people, and about the idea of Australia as a �nation state’ itself. The following questions might help you focus your response:
• How is Australia as an �imagined nation’ figured in these documents?
• How is the authority of �law’, its classification of criminality, crimes and their punishments represented, and how do they reflect the underlying principles of European jurisprudence as Joseph has discussed them in his lecture?
• What space is assigned to traditional aboriginal society, its laws and identities in these documents?
• Finally how does a comparison of these documents suggest that the relation between law, authority (both legislative and judicial) and Aboriginal people and their culture has changed in the period from 1869 to 2007?
Module 1 Lecture 3
You will need article Ouyang Yu Lawson, Gunn and the white Chinman to complete this exercise which has been provided for you
Exercise 1: Different discourses, different voices
Comparative and evaluative based exercise
• Evaluation and comparison requires making judgements about the value of ideas or theories, and comparing and discriminating between ideas.
• Feedback for this exercise will be given in the form of comments when you have handed this in as part of your assessment.
Step 1:
This exercise asks you to assess the complex of discursive identities Ouyang Yu deploys in his writing by comparing his poetry and his scholarship. The text-file for this exercise contains a scholarly article by Ouyang Yu on the representation of Chinese culture and its people in early Australian fiction (�Lawson, Gunn and the �White Chinaman”: A look at how Chinese are Made White in Henry Lawson and Miss Aeneas Gunn’s Writing’, Literary Journal of North Queensland 30.2 (2003), pp. 10-23. Base your answer to the following questions on this article, and on one or more poems from the two collections of Yu’s verse Joseph has discussed in his lecture:
• To begin, in no more than 10 lines, summarize Yu’s article, and comment on the quality of argument he presents in support of his central thesis.
• Now, in no less than half, and no more than 1, A4 page, discuss the different personae Yu projects in his poetry, and in his academic prose. What aspects of the language seem to you most important in defining the different �voices’ he uses? How does this comparison complicate any conclusions we might reach, on the basis of the poetry alone, about the way Yu has used his writing in English to negotiate a complex and fractured set of diasporic identities? Where is the �real’ Ouyang Yu?
In answering this question, you are best advised to concentrate on comparing a specific passage or aspect of the article to your chosen poem(s). Try to explain the role language, image, metaphor and so on play in constructing the different personae. In developing your response, you should also take into account Yu’s own history as diasporic Chinese-Australian. The best place to go for information on this is the article by Wenche Ommundsen (�Not for the Faint-Hearted: Ouyang Yu: the Angry Chinese Poet’), available from

Module 2 Lecture 4
Exercise 1: Spaces of Cultural Difference
You will need article “Map of china town Sydney” which has been provided for you to complete this question
In no more than 1 and a half A4 pages respond to the following question:
This exercise asks you to think about the relationship between diasporic and local architectural styles in an Australian context. Most major Australian cities imagine their topography or geography, at least partly, in cultural terms, associating specific areas, suburbs or precincts with identifiable cultural groups (whether this perception accords with �reality’ is irrelevant for this exercise, but none-the-less important). The architecture of built space in such areas, and the use of specific decorative styles and motifs, create spatial discourses of ethnic or cultural identity and difference: of the diasporic as �Other’ to the �normalized’ identities of mainstream Australia.
In Sydney, two of the most visible examples of this are the Dixon Street area in Haymarket, Sydney’s �Chinatown’, and the Cambramatta business and shopping precinct, which is strongly associated in the popular imagination and tabloid press with Vietnamese immigration. Another more recent example is the suburb of Lakemba, associated with Muslim, or at least Middle Eastern, communities and groups.
In the previously attached PDF document there are some images of Sydney’s Chinatown. You can, if you wish, base your answer to this exercise on these images, and on any additional research you are able to carry out on Sydney’s Chinatown.
But I would encourage you, instead, to draw on your own experience in your response: this could involve recalling a visit to �Chinatown’ or a similar �ethnic’ area in Sydney, or in another Australian city or town. But the most ideal scenario would be for you to visit such a place in person, bearing the questions below in mind. (Note that there is no need to respond to all of these questions in detail. They are intended simply to focus your attention on some of the issues you could consider).
• First, comment on how is the transition from the space of the surrounding city, as dominant �Australian’ cultural domain, is marked at the boundary of this �ethnic’ sub-space through changes of architectural style, of decorative motif, colour, texture and so on. How obvious is it when the threshold between dominant and subordinate space is crossed?
• How do these architectural features, motifs or styles mark the space and its identities as culturally �Other’?
• What other factors are involved? What is the role, for example, of sound and smell? What is the symbolic role of colour, light, texture in marking the transition between space and sub-space? To what extent are these aspects charged with �racialized’ meaning?
• What does your analysis suggest about the covert discourse of dominant or �mainstream’ Australian culture and its identities, to which the �ethnic’ (Chinese, Vietnamese, �Middle Eastern’ etc.) is projected as �Other’?
• Finally, what attempt, if any, is made through the architectural shaping of space, and the use of other symbolic or semiotic systems, to negotiate differences between the host culture and that of the diasporic community: that is, to bridge the gap between �us’ and �them’?