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0000-0002-0271-4715
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James Cook University
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Publisher: James Cook University
Date: 20-12-2016
DOI: 10.25120/ETROPIC.15.2.2016.3537
Abstract: The landscape of the tropics is being viewed from a fresh tropical lens. This year, the United Nations declared 29June the ‘International Day of the Tropics’ – a day dedicated to celebrating and raising awareness of the tropical regions of the world. The ‘International Day of the Tropics’ testifies to the growing awareness of the significance of the tropics for the entire globe.This global dynamic calls for new engagements with and within the tropics. In the past, the tropics has been largely defined by the views of outsiders as the region captured the imagination of ancient philosophers and colonial explorers, of artists and scientists. During the inauguration for the ‘International Day of the Tropics’, a ‘tropics lens’ for assessing how knowledge and ideas benefitting the tropical region was proposed. This new lens requires the views of creative and innovative scholars: of critical and indigenous thinkers, explorers of the imagination, new media artists, of social scientists and colleagues in cognate disciplines.
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 03-04-2018
Publisher: Springer Singapore
Date: 2013
Publisher: Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Date: 2014
DOI: 10.1017/JTP.2014.4
Abstract: This paper provides landmarks for the study of the historical development and current expansion of academic psychology and clinical psychology education in Australia and three countries of the Malay Archipelago (Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore). It reviews literature on the history of clinical psychology, and information from universities and psychological associations, and includes an overview of the current providers and forms of psychology education programmes and their curricula. A critical analysis informed by cultural anthropology indicates that psychology has only to a small extent been adjusted to different cultural contexts, while ‘western’ models of the discipline remain dominant. The neglect of attention to culture in psychology and clinical psychology raises important questions about the future of the discipline in the tropical regions of Australia and the Malay Archipelago.
Publisher: James Cook University
Date: 30-05-2019
DOI: 10.25120/ETROPIC.18.1.2019.3685
Abstract: The Gothic is undergoing a pronounced resurgence in academic and popular cultures. Propelled by fears associated with massive social transformations produced by globalisation, the neoliberal order and environmental uncertainty – tropes of the Gothic resonate. The gothic allows us to delve into the unknown, the liminal, the unseen into hidden histories and feelings. It calls up unspoken truths and secret desires.In the tropics, the gothic manifests in specific ways according to spaces, places, cultures and their encounters. Within the fraught geographies and histories of colonisation and aggression that have been especially acute across the tropical regions of the world, the tropical gothic engages with orientalism and postcolonialism. The tropics, as the region of the greatest bio ersity in the world, is under enormous stress, hence tropical gothic also engages with gothic ecocriticism, senses of space, landscape and place. Globalisation and neoliberalism likewise impact the tropics, and the gothic imagery of these ‘v iric’ capitalist forces – which impinge upon the livelihoods, traditions and the very survival of peoples of the tropics – is explored through urban gothic, popular culture, posthumanism and queer theory.As the papers in this special issue demonstrate, a gothic sensibility enables humans to respond to the seemingly dark, nebulous forces that threaten existence. These papers engage with specific instances of Tropical Gothic in West Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, Southeast Asia, northern Australia, and the American Deep South.
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 02-10-2019
Publisher: James Cook University
Date: 04-09-2018
DOI: 10.25120/ETROPIC.17.2.2018.3660
Abstract: The tropical metropolis of Singapore is on a quest to become a creative city. Its policies explicate the need to transform into a ‘renaissance city’, a global hub of creative industries and economies. Yet, for Singapore – better known for its panoptic rather than creative imaginary – the question remains ‘how does the government’s policy of creativity translate on the ground?’ As a theory and method of critically meandering through the city in order to participate and observe quotidian practices at the street level, flânerie offers a way of engaging and contributing to an ethnography of urban life. This paper explores flânerie through the perspective of the female flâneuse. Two vignettes – one concerning heritage and the other graffiti – provide thick descriptions of encounters with creative practices in Singapore.
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 17-11-2020
DOI: 10.1111/AEQ.12322
Publisher: James Cook University
Date: 02-08-2016
DOI: 10.25120/ETROPIC.12.1.2013.3350
Abstract: Academic research is inherently linked to public domains: civic society, community groups, NGOs, places and spaces, including cyberspace. Public domains are also where academics share their research – with each other, graduate and undergraduate students, civil society and the general public.
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 2003
DOI: 10.1191/1474474003EU262OA
Abstract: The people of the subsistence whale-hunting village of Lamalera in Eastern Indonesia continue to hunt whales according to the traditions of the ancestors, and through this ritual practice the memory of the ancestors is brought to life. Similarly, in the retelling of the myth of the heroic origin voyage the ancestors are reawakened. This paper engages in a rereading of texts that seek to trace the Lamaleran origin myth back to its beginning. It suggests that even as we write about myths we are simultaneously originating our own stories through them. Thus, as academics journey via these myths back through the islands of the eastern archipelagos in search of origins - from Lamalera on the island of Lembata, to the land of Lepan Batan, through the province of Maluku and back to Sulawesi - the structure of this story acts to originate their own discourses. All such origin stories are involved in intricate relations of becoming through the very myths they desire to uncover.
Publisher: James Cook University
Date: 02-08-2016
DOI: 10.25120/ETROPIC.12.1.2013.3351
Abstract: Thinking through network theories (network science, actor-network theory, rhizomatics) and the phenomenology of space and place, this paper argues for the significance of academic research networks and their meeting spaces-places in the ‘public domain’ of colloquia.In the global neoliberal education landscape of university rankings, institutions wishing to become research rich need to provide the infrastructure, funding, time and recognition for their academics to build critical mass under strategic research themes, to develop international research networks, and to come together in the public domains of academic symposia, colloquia and conferences in order to incubate ideas and produce scholarly inspired, richly specific, and critically analysed publications.Adapting the practice of a multi-sited ethnographic approach with network mapping, this paper takes as its case study the Laboratoire International Associé (LIA) TransOceanik. It outlines the international networks of LIA TransOceanik and the series of symposia, colloquia and conferences that maintain its transoceanic links between researchers and ideas.
Publisher: James Cook University
Date: 10-09-2021
DOI: 10.25120/ETROPIC.20.2.2021.3803
Abstract: In this Introduction, we set the Special Issue on 'Tropical Imaginaries and Climate Crisis' within the context of a call for relational climate discourses as they arise from particular locations in the tropics. Although climate change is global, it is not experienced everywhere the same and has pronounced effects in the tropics. This is also the region that experienced the ravages – to humans and environments – of colonialism. It is the region of the planet’s greatest bio ersity and will experience the largest extinction losses. We advocate that climate science requires climate imagination – and specifically a tropical imagination – to bring science systems into relation with the human, cultural, social and natural. In short, this Special Issue contributes to calls to humanise climate change. Yet this is not to place the human at the centre of climate stories, rather we embrace more-than-human worlds and the expansion of relational ways of knowing and being. This paper outlines notions of tropicality and rhizomatics that are pertinent to relational discourses, and introduces the twelve papers – articles, essays and speculative fiction pieces – that give voice to tropical imaginaries and climate change in the tropics.
Publisher: James Cook University
Date: 25-04-2018
DOI: 10.25120/ETROPIC.17.1.2018.3638
Abstract: This special issue of eTropic concerns living cities in the tropics and how they are conceived through the imagination. The collection of papers reminds us that urban environments are both created and creative spaces concerned with peopled and lived experiences and their interaction with material, cultural and natural environments. The issue is interested in processes of tropical space and place-making, with an emphasis on key areas that make up lived cities in the tropics: architecture, design, creative industries and economies, circular economy, neoliberalism, displacement, heritage, urban myths, narratives, cultural and natural landscapes, sustainable practices, and everyday life.
Publisher: James Cook University
Date: 19-04-2021
DOI: 10.25120/ETROPIC.20.1.2021.3802
Abstract: The Tropics have long been associated with exotic diseases and epidemics. This historical imaginary arose with Aristotle’s notion of the tropics as the ‘torrid zone’, a geographical region virtually uninhabitable to temperate peoples due to the hostility of its climate, and persisted in colonial imaginaries of the tropics as pestilential latitudes requiring slave labour. The tropical sites of colonialism gave rise to urgent studies of tropical diseases which lead to (racialised) changes in urban planning. The Tropics as a region of pandemic, plague and pestilence has been challenged during the COVID-19 pandemic. The novel coronavirus did not (simply) originate in the tropics, nor have peoples of the tropics been specifically or exclusively infected. The papers collected in this Special Issue disrupt the imaginary of pandemics, plague and pestilence in association with the tropics through critical, nuanced, and situated inquiries from cultural history, ethnography, cultural studies, science and technology studies, Indigenous knowledge, philosophy, anthropology, urban studies, cultural geography, literature and film analyses, and expressed through distinctive academic articles, poetry and speculative fiction.
Publisher: James Cook University
Date: 18-10-2019
DOI: 10.25120/ETROPIC.18.2.2019.3701
Abstract: The eTropic special issue on the theme Tropical Gothic was first conceived in 2017. From the beginning there was a sense of how the theme had a certain resonance. By 2018, the term had appeared as a hashtag in social media for new music album entitled Tropical Gothic.These resonances are important as they reveal the build up of an idea at a particular time. This paper follows a rhizomatic path as it traces Tropical Gothic through the creative works of a music album, its cover art, and further to other influences including film and literature.These literary and creative works likewise resonate with the papers brought together in this second issue on the theme Tropical Gothic.
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 12-2001
DOI: 10.1177/14661380122231028
Abstract: This article probes the sense of loss attendant upon beginning fieldwork in the whale-hunting village of Lamalera in Eastern Indonesia. This feeling of ontological absence was heightened when four boats were towed away by a harpooned whale, a tragedy which invoked the origin story of the first whale hunt that tells how Lamalera ancestors disappeared at sea. Each of these tales, those of the ethnographer and those of the whale hunters, speaks of the psychoanalytic fear of lack. Yet the details of their narration suggest that the syncopated moments in these heroic quests are cracks through which a different story may begin to emerge. Informed by theories ranging from feminism to phenomenology to anthropology, this article proposes that the space of no-thing offers new ways of being and knowing. Syncope is thus a vital moment in the stories that inform our lives, whether these be fiction, tales of adventure, fieldwork experiences, cultural performances and myths - or the disciplined story of the practice of anthropology itself.
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 03-2005
Abstract: This article arises from a performance of the exchange of whale meat as experienced during ethnographic fieldwork in the subsistence whale hunting village of Lamalera, Eastern Indonesia. The animist-Catholic beliefs of Lamalerans serve to sustain this ancestral ritual. Underlying orthodox western analyses of gift and exchange is a notion of economics based on a principle of scarcity. The article demonstrates how this assumption is associated with the psychoanalytic fear of lack, and offers an alternative reading of gift and exchange informed by: feminist theories of an economy of excess Confucian notions of the ceremonial and Buddhist and Taoist philosophies of no-thing as the space of never-ending potential.
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 04-2008
Publisher: James Cook University
Date: 21-12-2020
DOI: 10.25120/ETROPIC.19.2.2020.3739
Abstract: Sea level rise due to climate change is predicted to be higher in the Tropics. As a low-lying, highly urbanised island near the equator, Singapore is taking an active response to this problem, including through large land reclamation projects. Incorporating both environmental and aesthetic elements, these projects also serve to bolster Singapore’s reputation as a shining ex le of a global city, a leading arts centre in Southeast Asia, and an economic hub to the world. This paper draws attention to urban development through an ethnographic reading of Yeo Siew Hua’s film A Land Imagined. A Singaporean tropical-noir mystery thriller, the film follows the rhizomatic path of a police investigator and his partner as they attempt to solve the disappearance of two foreign labourers. Interwoven within the film is a critique of Singapore’s treatment of migrant workers as it constructs the imaginary of the ‘Singapore Dream’.
Publisher: James Cook University
Date: 20-12-2016
DOI: 10.25120/ETROPIC.15.2.2016.3547
Abstract: The United Nations declaration of the ‘International Day of the Tropics’ intends to raise awareness of the importance of the tropical regions of the world – from their ecological and cultural ersity, to their unequal share of the burden of poverty. The date of the international day of the tropics on the 29th June each year, also celebrates the anniversary of the launch of the inaugural State of the Tropics 2014 report by Nobel Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi. This link to ‘The Lady’, as she is simply referred to by admirers, reminds me of an earlier time, twenty years previously, when Suu Kyi gave a recorded keynote address (she was still under house arrest) for the NGO Forum on Women which was also held in conjunction with the UN Fourth World Conference on Women, in China.This connection between the tropics and women matters because many parts of the tropics continue to struggle against poverty and it is well documented that women and children bear the largest burden of poverty. The tropics are home to a reported 40% of the world’s population, with that population undergoing immense growth. Estimates are that by 2050 more than two-thirds of the world’s children under 15 years of age will be living in the tropics. This means the tropical zones of the world are also home to a vast number of women whose voices are striving to be heard.This paper examines, in an exploratory voice, how women’s networks contribute to their empowerment, especially in regions of tropical Asia. Influenced by interdisciplinary theories of network science and the philosophy of rhizomatics, the paper analyses the power of networks across multiple plateaux. Starting with the networks evoked in a feminine artwork, the analysis flings across to women’s networks – those that are empowered and those that remained disempowered – and finally emerges through education networks.
Publisher: James Cook University
Date: 23-07-2023
DOI: 10.25120/ETROPIC.22.2.2023.4005
Abstract: The papers collected together in this special issue on the theme ‘decoloniality and tropicality’ discuss and demonstrate how we can move towards disentangling ourselves from persistent colonial epistemologies and ontologies. Engaging theories of decoloniality and postcolonialism with tropicality, the articles explore the material poetics of philosophical reverie the 'tropical natureculture' imaginaries of sex tourism, ecotourism, and militourism deep readings of an anthropophagic movement, ecocritical literature, and the ecoGothic the spaces of a tropical flâneuse and diasporic vernacular architecture and in the decoloniality of education, a historical analysis of colonial female education and a film analysis for contemporary educational praxis.
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 04-2000
Publisher: Global Science and Technology Forum Pte Ltd
Date: 26-08-2013
Publisher: James Cook University
Date: 02-08-2016
DOI: 10.25120/ETROPIC.14.2.2015.3376
Abstract: This special issue draws on ideas from two international meetings of the TransOceanik Associated International Laboratory (LIA). One was held in Paris at the Collège de France in 2014, and the other in Brazil at the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Florianopolis, in 2013. The meetings explored the themes ‘Behind the scenes’ (L’envers du décor) and ‘Blurred Interfaces’ (Interfaces troubles). The papers and filmed discussions presented here show the emergence of lines between transoceanic scenes which have been rendered invisible by colonial history. These threads begin to appear in various forms, including through resistance and Kriolisation in Indigenous North-Western Australia (Préaud) or through the tracing of political histories of colonial territories and slavery across the Pacific, Indian and Atlantic oceans, and their connection with the contemporary neoliberal order and slavery (Vergès). Also analysed are different forms of performance of historical invisibility: the Carnival of Martinique, for instance, is a stage for the interstitial spaces of French colonialism in the Caribbean islands (Bruneteaux) while the Umbanda Afro-Brazilian cult is encouraging the emergence of indigenous entities alongside the African Orixas in Manaus, Brazil (Montardo). The voice of indigenous people is also coming out from invisibility through different political scenes such as the cosmopolitical discourse of a Yanomami Association in Brazil (Araujo). Despite discrimination and violence faced by many indigenous peoples, Brazil encourages lines of connection and difference through various initiatives, such as a film festival residency programme in Recife that brought together two indigenous film makers, one from Brazil and one from Australia (Athias). Included in this collection is a filmed discussion (Vimeo and Transcript) between four indigenous scholars – three from Brazil (Antunes, Narciso & Tschucambang) and one from Australia (Lenoy) – as they share experiences of the political struggles involved in bringing their cultural heritages into visibility. This special edition of Etropic seeks to sketch these cartographies of lines of existence and their translocal connections that, although ‘invisibilised’ by history and the current economic and political stage, are threading their way to the front, or working to make a better life in the back stage.
Publisher: James Cook University
Date: 21-12-2020
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 25-02-2013
DOI: 10.7603/S40601-013-0033-X
Abstract: Wireless Learning Technologies (WLTs) are set to replace the traditional methods of information sharing and set the trend for future information presentation and collaborative multiuser sharing. Wireless learning technologies (WLTs) used in education include mobile technologies such as smartphones, tablets and laptops as well as systems designed to be used specifically in technology-rich collaborative learning spaces. Such spaces are networked both technologically as well as through student-to-student interactions. This paper undertakes a literature review of wireless learning technologies for multi-platform compatibility over a multitude of personal devices and operating systems. It discusses the use of WLT for new collaborative spaces of learning. The paper further undertakes a comparative descriptive analysis between a space recently discussed in the teaching and learning literature with a case study of one classroom based on the authorial team’s participation and observation.
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 02-01-2020
Publisher: James Cook University
Date: 07-2022
DOI: 10.25120/ETROPIC.21.1.2022.3877
Abstract: Landscape integrates both natural and cultural aspects of a particular geographical area. Environmental elements include geological landforms, waterscapes, seascapes, climate and weather, flora and fauna. They also necessarily involve human perception and inscription which reflect histories of extraction and excavation, of planting and settlement, of design and pollution. Natural elements and cultural shaping by humans – past, present, and future – means landscapes reflect living entanglements involving people, materiality, space and place. A landscape’s physicality is entwined with layers of human meaning and value – and tropical landscapes have particular significance. The Tropics is far more than geographic and needs to be understood through the notion of tropicality. Tropicality refers to how the tropics are construed as the exoticised Other of the temperate Western world as this is informed by cultural, imperial, and scientific practices. In this imaginary – in which the tropics are depicted through nature tropes as either fecund paradise or fetid hell – the temperate is portrayed as civilised and the tropical as requiring cultivation. In order to frame this Special Issue through an ex le that evokes tropicality we undertake an ethnographic and ecocritical reading of Avatar. The film Avatar is redolent with images of tropical landscapes and their nature-culture entanglements. It furthermore reveals classic pictorial tropes of exoticism, which are in turn informed by colonialism and its underlying notions of technologism verses primitivism. Furthermore, Avatar calls to mind the theories of rhizomatics and archipelagic consciousness.
Publisher: Springer Singapore
Date: 2013
Publisher: James Cook University
Date: 30-05-2017
DOI: 10.25120/ETROPIC.16.1.2017.3578
Abstract: This paper discusses traditional v ire tropes as a tool for innovation and novel experiences in the history of video games. A selection of games and v ires will be analysed in terms of gameplay and storytelling elements to show how the rich mythology and folklore that characterises these liminal beings can be successfully employed in a variety of settings and contexts. We draw on ex les from the early days of video games with titles like “Dracula” (Imagic for Intellivision, 1982) set in a virtual London and evoking European folklore, to the rich possibilities offered by “V ire the Masquerade: Bloodlines” (Activision for PC, 2004) which conjures up the sub-tropical New Orleans v ire tradition, and then turn to the latest experimental games using the ex le of “Tainted” (ITE/NUS for PC, 2016), which taps into the rich Pontianak v ire-ghost myths of the Malay Archipelago. Different experiences will be discussed via explanatory lenses – such as Labov’s (1972, 1997) narrative analysis and the AGE/6-11 framework (Dillon, 2010, 2016) – to gain insights into how to build compelling myth-based narrative in games in original and surprising ways. The paper also analyses how specific v ire myths reflect socio-cultural issues of particular times and places. Thus, every telling of such myths – whether though oral tales, novels, cinema, or video games – brings the myth alive to engage with liminal or repressed aspects of a society.
Publisher: James Cook University
Date: 04-09-2018
DOI: 10.25120/ETROPIC.17.2.2018.3651
Abstract: This is the second part of the eTropic special issue theme on Tropical Imaginaries and Living Cities. While the first part of this series concentrated predominately on concrete cities and the material imagination, this second issue explores notions of the tropics and cities through literary and artistic works. Thus in this collection of papers the tropical imaginary comes to the forefront while the metropolis provides the space or canvas for the imagination.Many of the cities called up in this collection have physical presence, places such as Darwin, Singapore, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Paris, Berlin, Venice, Havana, and Kuching. Other cities conjured here may morph into various otherworldly forms such as haunted spaces or spaceships or dissolve into a hazy backdrop as memory and imagination take the stage. Yet these urban spaces are nevertheless always alive, their virtual presence becomes the matrix that holds the imagination. The literary and creative works examined here flow from martial arts, through literary works including novels, short stories, poetry, and speculative fiction, and then transition into visual art through science-fiction magazine covers, art on walls and heritage arts spaces, to come to a close with film.
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 10-2003
DOI: 10.1177/14696053030033002
Abstract: Reading this article is to embark on an adventure through certain ethnographic and archaeological texts about a specific form of boat construction. The voyage sets out from the village of Lamalera in Eastern Indonesia where whaling boats continue to be built according to traditions passed on by the ancestors. However, while researchers write about boats, they simultaneously board the boats in order to construct the sequence of their narratives. Whether they journey back through the eastern archipelagos in search of the origin of a boat's design or follow the plank by plank construction sequence or whether they find a leak in previous boat building discourse - all are involved in intricate relations of becoming through the materiality of the very boats they desire to observe and describe. Narratives are premised on unquestioned notions of linear time and travel. In this article, however, readers find themselves carried along on a different voyage, where time and travel are always in the here and now.
Publisher: Springer Singapore
Date: 2013
Publisher: James Cook University
Date: 03-07-2023
DOI: 10.25120/ETROPIC.22.1.2023.3998
Abstract: This special issue is a collection of papers that addresses and enacts the theme of decolonizing the tropics. Each article provides a sense of how we can untangle ourselves from entrenched colonial epistemologies and ontologies through detailed articulations of research practice. Drawing together humanities and social sciences, the papers collectively address questions of whose voices are heard or silenced, what positions we write from, how we are allowed to articulate our ideas, and through which mediums we present our research. In doing so, the contributions foreground the critical importance of these and other questions in any move towards decolonizing the tropics.
Publisher: James Cook University
Date: 25-04-2018
DOI: 10.25120/ETROPIC.17.1.2018.3643
Abstract: The flâneur became a literary figure of 19th century Paris and was taken up as a theoretical figure in the early 20th century. During these periods the city was undergoing massive social, architectural and infrastructural change. Today, the notion of the flâneur is experiencing a renaissance as cities are undergoing significant restructuring towards creative industries and economies. At the same time, two distinctive aspects of the theory of the flâneur are facing critique. One is to do with geography. The theory is based on cities of the global north, such as Paris, London and New York, and thus inherently entwined with the colonial metropole. The other aspect concerns gender. The flâneur invokes a masculine gaze, and the possibility of a female flâneuse remains under debate.The current century has been witness to the rapid growth of cities, including in the tropics and Asia. This literature review – in the style of a perambulation – explores flânerie with ex les of tropical Asian cities. Singapore is of special interest as it strives to become a ‘renaissance city’ – a global city of the arts, based on creative industries and economies. As a theory and method of critically meandering the creative city, flânerie offers a way of engaging and contributing to an ethnography of urban life. Furthermore, such a method may usefully rework the notion of the gaze of the flâneur to include the use of photography.
Publisher: James Cook University
Date: 07-10-2022
DOI: 10.25120/ETROPIC.21.2.2022.3925
Abstract: Indigenous Australians are outstanding for the way their ontologies and practices do not rely on a Western dichotomy that opposes material and spiritual realms. Their multiple totemic visions of the Dreaming space-time always state a material actualisation in landscape and the reproduction of all forms of life based on the pluriversal agency of animals, plants, minerals, rain, wind, fire and stars. Such cosmovisions resonate with current debates in the fields of critical posthumanism and new materialism through an Animist materialism. Indeed, Indigenous Australian’s complex social practices offer ways of thinking and being for the whole planet in this time of climate crisis. This is particularly crucial for the tropical world which is so strongly impacted by climate change. Indigenous Australian cosmovisions offer to tropical studies a way of thinking politically about climate and the materiality of life. Thus, Tropical Materialisms are enhanced by the vast body of Indigenous experiences and creative productions in and beyond the tropics. The material analysis of the Aboriginal author Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu, demonstrates how the book dared to challenge the Western written history, and to show a new relationality of being of humans with the more-than-human world.
Publisher: James Cook University
Date: 30-05-2017
DOI: 10.25120/ETROPIC.16.1.2017.3574
Abstract: V ires and other blood-sucking monstrous beings constitute some of the most famous myths, legends and stories that continue to haunt contemporary societies. This special issue examines the presence of these beings within cities and their rural surrounds. The contributions to this special issue reflect upon v ires and other monstrosities in relation to the tropical regions of the world from historical pasts to present-day manifestations, and imaginary tropical futures, including: the British colonial empire in the tropical east, New Orleans in the deep south of the United States, across the border to Mexico and Latin American communities, over to India and Southeast Asia, including Bangkok in Thailand, Singapore, and Sabah on the island of Borneo, and to the tropical east coast of Australia. However, the concept of the tropics is not simply a geographical construct, the imaginary of the tropics also emerges out of the spaces of mythology and oral storytelling, ethnographic reports, literature, science fiction magazines, film and television, video games and the internet.
Publisher: James Cook University
Date: 07-10-2022
DOI: 10.25120/ETROPIC.21.2.2022.3929
Abstract: Tropical Materialisms concur on at least three things: humans are always entangled with non-human/material agents such entanglement is necessary for any creative act to take place and these same entanglements allow us to interrogate and re-evaluate preconceived notions about the world. This Special Issue aligns itself with the fields of new materialism and posthumanism. What is particularly exciting is the opportunity to rearticulate these fields in tropical terms, that is, with scholarly and creative practices from and about the tropical world. This focus is crucial given that current scholarship in new materialism and posthumanism predominantly comes from European temperate contexts and is informed by Western philosophies. In order to decolonize the ontological turn, this Special Issue recognises not only that colonial knowledge systems impacted the tropics, but also that matter’s liveliness was and is well understood in Indigenous cosmologies, ancient philosophies and ‘animist materialism’. The papers collected together in this special issue offers materialisms informed by decolonizing intuitions. They variously demonstrate how the tropics, as geographic zone and as pertaining to poetics (via "tropes"), can theoretically inform and historically problematise new materialism and posthumanism. They offer new vocabularies through which discourses on "tropical materialism" may be initiated and a cartography of practices across disciplinary fields which demonstrate what this "tropical materialism" may be. The Special Issue collection it itself a form of poiesis: a creative engagement with the world.
Location: United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
No related grants have been discovered for Anita Lundberg.