Academic literature on the topic 'Afghan War, 2001- – Personal narratives, American'

AbstractDuring the twentieth century, Ireland, north and south, was infiltrated to varying degrees by a transnational quasi-religious and political movement, Moral Re-Armament (M.R.A.). From its founding in the early 1920s by an American evangelist and former Lutheran pastor, Frank Buchman, through the peak of moral revivalism in the 1930s, its Cold War work after 1945 and its reinvention as a secular, multi-faith, reconciliation organisation in the 1960s, this article examines M.R.A.'s structural and ideological origins and its evolution in Ireland, the U.S. and Britain. Based on primary source materials, it argues that Ireland, characterised by two ideologically narrow cultural and political monoliths, was not immune to external spiritual and quasi-political influences and that M.R.A.'s activities in Ireland confirm these distinctive religious and political cultures while also revealing similarities. Moreover, it reveals that non-governmental M.R.A. adherents were in advance of governments in their desire for peaceful solutions to the Irish partition issue and the Cold War more generally. The article, therefore, examines an international movement which had personal, national and global significance within the context of transnational religious, political and foreign policy studies as well as the national narratives of Northern Ireland and Ireland.

In the years surrounding the turn of the millennium, there emerged an assemblage of American and Spanish horror films fixated on uncanny child characters. Caught in the symbolic abyss between death and life, these figures are central to the films’ building of suspense and Gothic frisson—they are at once familiar and unfamiliar, vulnerable and threatening, innocent yet unnervingly inscrutable. Despite being conceived and produced in two very different cultural climates, these films construct the child as an embodiment of trauma in parallel ways. In turn, these Gothic children express the wavering of narratives of progress which suffused the liminal moment of the millennial turn. Steven Bruhm suggests that there is “a startling emphasis on children as the bearers of death” (author’s emphasis 98) in popular Gothic fiction at the turn of the new millennium, and that this contemporary Gothic “has a particular emotive force for us because it brings into high relief exactly what the child knows ... Invariably, the Gothic child knows too much, and that knowledge makes us more than a little nervous” (103). A comparative analysis of trans-millennial American and Spanish supernatural horror films reveals the specifically threatening register of the Gothic child’s knowledge, and that the gradual revelation of this knowledge aestheticizes the mechanics of trauma. This “traumatic” aesthetic also entails a disruption to linear progress, exposing the ways in which Gothic representations of the child’s uncanny knowledge express anxieties about the collapse of temporal progress. The eeriness associated with the child’s knowledge is thus tied to a temporal disjuncture; as Margarita Georgieva explains, child-centred Gothic fiction meditates on the fact that “childhood is quickly lost, never regained and, therefore, outside of the tangible adult world” (191). American films such as The Sixth Sense (M. Night Shyamalan, 1999) and Stir of Echoes (David Koepp, 1999), and Spanish films The Nameless (Jaume Balagueró, 1999) and The Devil’s Backbone (Guillermo del Toro, 2001), and also American-Spanish co-productions such as The Others (Alejandro Amenábar, 2001) and Fragile (Jaume Balagueró, 2005), expose the tangle of contradictions which lurk beneath romanticised definitions of childhood innocence and nostalgia for an adult’s “lost” childhood. The child characters in these films tend to be either ghosts or in-between figures, seemingly alive yet acting as mediators between the realms of the living and the dead, the past and the present. Through this liminal position, these children wreak havoc on the symbolic coherence of the films’ diegetic worlds. In so doing, they incarnate the ontological wound described by Cathy Caruth in her definition of trauma: “a breach in the mind’s experience of time, self, and the world” caused by an event that “is experienced too soon, too unexpectedly, to be fully known and is therefore not available to consciousness until it imposes itself ... repeatedly ... in the nightmares and repetitive actions” (4) of those who have experienced trauma. The Gothic aesthetic of these children expresses the ways in which trauma is locatable not in the original traumatic past event, but rather in “the way it was precisely not known in the first instance”, through revealing that it is trauma’s unassimilated element which “returns to haunt the survivor later on” (Caruth, author’s emphasis 4). The uncanny frisson in these films arises through the gradual exposition of the child character’s knowledge of this unassimilated element. As a result, these children trouble secure processes of symbolic functioning, embodying Anne Williams’ suggestion that “Gothic conventions imply a fascination with … possible fissures in the system of the symbolic as a whole” (141). I suggest that, reflecting Bruhm’s assertion above, these children are eerie because they have access to memories and knowledge as yet unassimilated within the realm of adult understanding, which is expressed in these films through the Gothic resurfacing of past traumas. Through an analysis of two of the most transnationally successful and influential films to emerge from this trend—The Sixth Sense (1999) and The Devil’s Backbone (2001)—this article explores the intersecting but tellingly distinctive ways in which the American and Spanish horror films figure the child as a vessel for previously repressed trauma. In both films, the eeriness of the children, Cole and Santi respectively, is associated with their temporal liminality and subsequent ability to invoke grisly secrets of the past, which in turn unsettles solid conceptions of identity. In The Sixth Sense, as in other American ghost films of this period, it is an adult character’s subjectivity which is untethered by the traumas of the uncanny child; Bruhm suggests that the contemporary Gothic “attacks adult self-identity on multiple fronts” (107), and in American films the uncanny child tends to launch this traumatic assault from within an adult character’s own psyche. Yet in the Spanish films, the Gothic child tends not to threaten an individual adult figure’s self-identity, instead constituting a challenge to secure concepts of socio-cultural identity. In The Sixth Sense, Cole raises a formerly repressed trauma in the mind of central adult character Malcolm Crowe, while simultaneously disturbing the viewer’s secure grasp on the film’s narrative world. Ultimately, Cole raises Freudian-inflected anxieties surrounding childhood’s disruption to coherent adult subjectivity, functioning as a receptacle for the adult’s repressed secrets. Cole’s gradual exposure of these secrets simulates the effects of trauma for both Malcolm and the viewer via a Gothic unsettling of meaning. While The Sixth Sense is set in the present, The Devil’s Backbone is set during the Spanish Civil War (1936-39)—a violent and traumatic period of Spain’s history, the ramifications of which have been largely unexplored in Spanish popular culture until very recently as a result of forty years of strict censorship under General Franco, whose dictatorship eroded following his death in 1975. Unlike Cole, Santi does not arouse a previously submerged trauma within an adult character’s mind, instead serving to allegorically raise socio-cultural trauma. Santi functions as an incarnation of Gilles Deleuze’s “child seer”, a figure who Deleuze claims first emerged in Italian neo-realist films of the 1940s as a response to the massive cultural rupture of World War II (3). The child seer is characterised by his entrapment in the gap between the perception of a traumatic event, and the understanding and subsequent action required to move on from it. Thus, upon experiencing a disturbing event, he suffers a breach in comprehension which disrupts the typical sensory-motor chain of perception-understanding-action, rendering him physically and mentally unable to escape his situation. Yet in experiencing this incapacity, the seer gains a powerful insight beyond the limits of linear temporality. On becoming a ghost, Santi escapes coherent space-time, and invokes the repressed spectre of Spain’s violent Civil War past, inciting an eerie collision of past and present. This temporal disruption has deep allegorical implications for contemporary Spain through the child’s symbolic status as vessel for the future. Santi’s embodiment of cultural trauma ensures that Spain’s past, as constructed by the film, eerily folds into the nation’s extra-diegetic present. The Sixth Sense In The Sixth Sense, adult protagonist Malcolm Crowe is a child psychiatrist, thus unravelling the riddles of the child’s psyche is positioned as the central quest of the film’s narrative. The dramatic twist in the film’s final scene reveals that the analysis of the child Cole’s “phobia” has in fact exhumed dormant spectres within Malcolm’s own mind, exposing the Gothic mechanisms whereby the uncanny child becomes conflated with the adult’s repressed trauma. This impression is heightened by the narrative structure of The Sixth Sense, in which the twist in the final scene shifts the meaning of all that has happened before. Both the audience and Malcolm are led to assume that they have uncovered and come to terms with Cole’s secret once it becomes clear two-thirds into the film that he “sees dead people”. However, the climactic twist exposes that Cole has in fact been hiding another secret which is not so easily ameliorated: that Malcolm is one of these dead people, having died in the film’s opening sequence. If the film’s narrative “pulling the rug out” from under the audience functions as intended, at the climax of the film both Malcolm and viewer simultaneously become privy to a layer of Cole’s secret previously inaccessible to us, both that Malcolm has been dead all along and that, subsequently, the hidden quest underlying the surface narrative has been Malcolm’s journey to come to terms with this disturbing truth. Thus, the uncanny child functions as a symbolic stage for the adult protagonist’s unassimilated trauma, and the unsettling nature of this experience is extended to the viewer via the gradual exposure of Cole’s secret. Further intensifying the uncanny effects of this Gothic disruption to adult knowledge, Cole also functions like a reincarnation of the crisis which has undermined Malcolm’s coherent identity as a successful child psychiatrist: his failure to cure former patient Vincent. Thus, Cole is like uncanny déjà vu for Malcolm and the viewer, an almost literal re-evocation of Malcolm’s past trauma. Both Vincent and Cole have a patch of grey hair at the back of their head, symbolising their access to knowledge too great for their youth, and as Malcolm explains, “They’re both so similar. Same mannerisms, same expressions, same things hanging over their heads.” At the opening of the film, Vincent is depicted as a wretched madman. He appears crying and half naked in Malcolm’s bathroom, having broken into his house, before shooting Malcolm and then turning the gun on himself. Thus, Vincent is an abject image of Malcolm’s failure, and his taunting words expose a rupture in Malcolm’s paternalistic, professional identity by hinting at his lack of awareness. “You don’t know so many things” Vincent remarks, and sarcastically undermines Malcolm’s “saviour” status by taunting, “Don’t you know me, hero?”. Functioning as a repetition of this trauma, Cole provides Malcolm with an opportunity to discover the “so many things” that he does not know, and also to once again become a “hero”. Cole functions as a literalisation of Malcolm’s compulsion to repeat the trauma which has exposed a breach in his sense of self, and to gain mastery over it. On first viewing, the audience is led to believe that this narrative is the primary one in the film, and that the film is wrapped up when Malcolm finally achieves his goal and becomes Cole’s hero. However, the final revelation that Cole has been keeping yet another secret from Malcolm—that Malcolm has been dead all along—reveals that this trauma is actually irrevocable: Malcolm was in fact killed by Vincent at the beginning of the film, thus the adult’s subjective breach (symbolised by his gunshot wound, which he suddenly notices for the first time) cannot be filled or repaired. All Malcolm can do at the close of the film is disappear, as a close-up of his face fades into the mediated image of him, now his only form of existence in the world as we know it, on the home videotapes of his wedding which play as his wife sleeps. Thus, Cole evokes the experience of a violent, unassimilated trauma which is experienced “too soon, too unexpectedly to be fully known in the first instance” (Caruth 4), a breach in subjectivity which has only become consciously known to Malcolm through the “nightmare repetition” figured by Cole. This experience of a traumatic disruption to the wholeness and coherence of subjective reality is echoed by the viewer’s own experience of The Sixth Sense, if the twist-narrative functions as intended. While on first viewing we are led to believe that we are watching a straightforward ghost story about a paternalistic psychologist helping a young child with an uncanny gift, we learn in the final scene that there has been an underlying double reality haunting the surface narrative all along. Central to this twist is the recognition that Cole was always aware of this second reality, but has been concealing it from Malcolm—underscoring the ways in which Malcolm’s trauma is bound up largely with what he was unable to comprehend and assimilate when the traumatic event of his death first occurred. The eerie effects of Malcolm’s traumatic confrontation with the child’s Gothic knowledge is extended to the viewer via the film’s narrative structure. Erlend Lavik discusses The Sixth Sense and other twist films in terms of a particular relationship between the syuzhet (the way in which a story’s components are organized) and the fabula (the raw components which constitute the story). He explains that in such films, there is a “doubling of the syuzhet, where we are led to construct a fabula that initially seems quite straightforward until suddenly a new piece of information is introduced that subverts (or decentres) the fictional world we have created. We come to realize the presence of another fabula running parallel to the first one but ‘beneath’ it, hidden from view” (Lavik 56). The revelation that Malcolm has been a ghost all along shatters the fabula that most viewers construct upon first viewing the film. The impression that an eerie, previously hidden double of accepted reality has bubbled to the surface of our perceptions is deeply uncanny, evoking the experience of filmic déjà vu. This is of course heightened by the fact that the viewer is compelled to re-watch the film in order to construct the second, and more “correct”, fabula. In doing so, the viewer experiences a “narrative bifurcation whereby we come to notice how traces of the correct fabula were actually available to us the first time” (Lavik 59). The process of re-watching the film in an attempt to solve the riddles of Malcolm’s existence reveals the viewer’s compulsion to undergo their own “detective work” in a parallel of Malcolm’s analysis of Cole: the exposure of the child’s secret turns a mirror upon the protagonist and audience which exposes a fracture in the adult’s subjectivity. Discussing the detective story, Slavoj Žižek explains that “the detective's role is ... to demonstrate how ‘the impossible is possible’ ... that is, to resymbolize the traumatic shock, to integrate it into symbolic reality” (58). On first viewing, this detective work is realized through Malcolm’s quest to comprehend Cole’s secrets, and then to situate the abject ghosts the child sees into a secure framework whereby they disappear if Cole helps them. The compulsion to re-watch the film in order to better understand how Malcolm experiences time, consciousness and communication (or lack there-of) represents an analogous attempt to re-integrate the traumatic shock raised by the twist-ending by imposing more secure symbolic frameworks upon the film’s diegetic world: to suture the traumatic breach in meaning. However, there are many irremediable gaps in Malcolm’s experiences—we do not actually see him trying to pay for the bus, or meeting Cole’s mother for the first time, or pondering the fact that no other human being has spoken to him directly for six months apart from Cole—fissures which repeat viewings cannot repair. The Devil’s Backbone The Devil’s Backbone is set in the final years of the Civil War, a liminal period in which the advancement of Spain’s national narrative is disturbingly uncertain. The film takes place in an orphanage for young boys from Republican families whose parents have been killed or captured in the Civil War. In the middle of the orphanage’s courtyard stands an unexploded bomb, an ominous and volatile reminder of the war. As well as being haunted by this unexploded bomb, the orphanage is also haunted by a child ghost, Santi, a former inhabitant of the orphanage who disappeared on the same night that the bomb landed in the orphanage’s grounds. We learn mid-way through the film that Santi in fact drowned in the orphanage’s cavernous cistern: after being struck on the head by the angry groundskeeper, Santi was left unable to swim, and is shown sinking helplessly into the water’s murky depths. Thus, Santi’s death represents the ultimate extreme of the child seer’s traumatic entrapment between perceiving and understanding the traumatic event, and the physical action required to escape it. Both the ghostly Santi and the unexploded bomb exude an eerie power despite, and perhaps because of, their apparent physical incapacity. Such corporeal powerlessness is the defining feature of Deleuze’s “child seer”, as the breach in the sensory-motor chain comes to imbue the child who encounters trauma with a penetrating gaze which sees beyond temporal borders. Once he becomes a ghost, Santi escapes the bounds of linear time altogether, becoming forever fused to the moment of his drowning. Santi’s spectral presence warps the ether around him as if he is permanently underwater, and the blood from his head wound constantly floats upwards. The sensory-motor chain becomes completely severed in a cinematic moment which can be likened to Deleuze “crystal of time”. Like the dual layers of narrative in The Sixth Sense, this crystal of time sparks a moment of Gothic frisson as linear time collapses and dual modes of temporality are expressed simultaneously: the chronological moment of Santi’s death—a ‘dead’ present that has already passed—and the fractured, traumatic memories of this past which linger in the present—what Deleuze would call a ‘virtual’ past which “coincides with the present that it was” (79). The traumatic effect of this collapse of temporal boundaries is enhanced by the fact that the shot of Santi drowning is repeated multiple times throughout the film—including in the opening minutes, before the audience is able to comprehend what we are seeing and where this scene fits into the film’s chronology. Ultimately, this cinematic crystal symbolically ungrounds linear narratives of Spanish history, which position the cultural rupture of the Civil War as a remnant of Spain’s past which has successfully been overcome. Through uncanny repetition, Santi’s death refuses to remain lodged in an immobilized “historical” past—a present that has passed—but remains forever alongside the present as an ethereal past that “is”. Santi’s raising of Gothic knowledge incites the wavering of not an adult character’s self-identity, as in The Sixth Sense, but a trembling in conceptual models of linear cultural progress. As a ghost, Santi is visually constructed as a broken porcelain doll, with cracks visible all over his body, emphasising his physical fragility; however, in his ghostly form it is this very fragility which becomes uncanny and threatening. His cracked body fetishizes his status as a subject who is not fully formed or complete. Thus, the film presents the post-Civil War child as a being who has been shattered and broken while undergoing the delicate process of being formed: an eerie incarnation of a trauma that has occurred “too soon” to be properly integrated. Santi’s broken body visualises the mechanisms whereby the violent conditions and mentalities of war permeate the child’s being in irreversible ways. Because he is soldered to the space and time of his death, he is caught forever as an expression of trauma in the inescapable gap between perception, assimilation and action. His haunting involves the intrusion of this liminal space onto the solid boundaries and binaries of the diegetic present; his abject presence forces other characters, and viewers, to experience the frisson of this previously concealed traumatic encounter. In so doing, Santi allegorically triggers the irruption of a fissure in the progression of Spain’s socio-cultural narrative. He embodies the ominous possibility that Spain’s grisly recent past may return within the child mutated by wartime trauma to engulf the future. The final scene of the film ideates the threshold of this volatile future, as the orphaned children stand as a group staring out at the endless expanse of desert beyond the orphanage’s bounds, all the adult characters having killed each other in a microcosm of the Civil War. Ultimately, both Cole and Santi enforce an eerie moment of recognition that the previously unassimilated traumas of the past live on within the present: a Gothic drawing forth of buried knowledge that exposes cracks in coherent meaning. In The Sixth Sense, Cole reveals the extent to which trauma is located in “the way it was precisely not known in the first instance” (Caruth 4), haunting Malcolm with his previous failure before exposing the all-encompassing extent to which this past trauma has fractured Malcom’s subjectivity. Santi of The Devil’s Backbone alludes to the ways in which this process of eliding past trauma extra-diegetically haunts contemporary Spain, particularly because those who were children during the Civil War are now the adult filmmakers, political leaders and constituents of Spanish society. These disturbances of historical and personal progress are rendered particularly threatening emerging as they do at the millennial turn, a symbolic temporal threshold which divides the recent past and the “new” present. The Gothic child in these contexts points to the danger inherent in misrecognizing traumatic histories—both personal and socio-cultural—as presents that have long-since passed instead of pasts that are. ReferencesBruhm, Steven. “Nightmare on Sesame Street: or, The Self-Possessed Child.” Gothic Studies 8.2 (2006): 98-210. Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. London: Continuum Books, 2005. The Devil’s Backbone. Dir. Guillermo del Toro. Perf. Fernando Tielve, Junio Valverde and Eduardo Diego. El Deseo S.A., 2001. Georgieva, Margarita. The Gothic Child. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Fragile. Dir. Jaume Balageuró. Perf. Calista Flockhart, Richard Roxburgh and Ivana Baquero. Castelao Producciones, 2005. Lavik, Erlend. “Narrative Structure in The Sixth Sense: A New Twist in ‘Twist Movies?’” The Velvet Light Trap 58 (2006): 55-64. The Nameless. Dir. Jaumé Balaguero. Perf. Emma Vilarasau, Karra Elejalde and Tristán Ulloa. Filmax S.A., 1999. The Orphanage. Dir. Juan Antonio Bayona. Perf. Belén Rueda, Fernando Cayo and Roger Príncep. Esta Vivo! Laboratorio de Nuevos Talentos, 2007. The Others. Dir. Alejandro Amenábar. Perf. Nicole Kidman, Alakina Mann and James Bentley. Sociedad General de Cine, 2001. The Sixth Sense. Dir. M. Night Shyalaman. Perf. Haley Joel Osment, Bruce Willis and Toni Collette. Hollywood Pictures, 1999. Stir of Echoes. Dir. David Koepp. Perf. Kevin Bacon, Zachary David Cope and Kathryn Erbe. Artisan Entertainment, 1999. Williams, Anne. Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Žižek, Slavoj. Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991.

This article explores resilience as it is experienced by refugees in the context of a relational community, visiting the notions of trauma, a thicker description of resilience and the trajectory toward positive growth through community. It calls for going beyond a Western biomedical therapeutic approach of exploration and adopting more of an emic perspective incorporating the worldview of the refugees. The challenge is for service providers working with refugees (who have experienced trauma) to move forward from a ‘harm minimisation’ model of care to recognition of a facilitative, productive community of people who are in a transitional phase between homelands. Contextualising Trauma Prior to the 1980s, the term ‘trauma’ was not widely used in literature on refugees and refugee mental health, hardly existing as a topic of inquiry until the mid-1980’s (Summerfield 422). It first gained prominence in relation to soldiers who had returned from Vietnam and in need of medical attention after being traumatised by war. The term then expanded to include victims of wars and those who had witnessed traumatic events. Seahorn and Seahorn outline that severe trauma “paralyses you with numbness and uses denial, avoidance, isolation as coping mechanisms so you don’t have to deal with your memories”, impacting a person‘s ability to risk being connected to others, detaching and withdrawing; resulting in extreme loneliness, emptiness, sadness, anxiety and depression (6). During the Civil War in the USA the impact of trauma was referred to as Irritable Heart and then World War I and II referred to it as Shell Shock, Neurosis, Combat Fatigue, or Combat Exhaustion (Seahorn & Seahorn 66, 67). During the twenty-five years following the Vietnam War, the medicalisation of trauma intensified and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) became recognised as a medical-psychiatric disorder in 1980 in the American Psychiatric Association international diagnostic tool Diagnostic Statistical Manual (DSM–III). An expanded description and diagnosis of PTSD appears in the DSM-IV, influenced by the writings of Harvard psychologist and scholar, Judith Herman (Scheper-Hughes 38) The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-IV) of Mental Disorders (American Psychiatric Association, 2000) outlines that experiencing the threat of death, injury to oneself or another or finding out about an unexpected or violent death, serious harm, or threat of the same kind to a family member or close person are considered traumatic events (Chung 11); including domestic violence, incest and rape (Scheper-Hughes 38). Another significant development in the medicalisation of trauma occurred in 1998 when the Victorian Foundation for Survivors of Torture (VFST) released an influential report titled ‘Rebuilding Shattered Lives’. This then gave clinical practice a clearer direction in helping people who had experienced war, trauma and forced migration by providing a framework for therapeutic work. The emphasis became strongly linked to personal recovery of individuals suffering trauma, using case management as the preferred intervention strategy. A whole industry soon developed around medical intervention treating people suffering from trauma related problems (Eyber). Though there was increased recognition for the medicalised discourse of trauma and post-traumatic stress, there was critique of an over-reliance of psychiatric models of trauma (Bracken, et al. 15, Summerfield 421, 423). There was also expressed concern that an overemphasis on individual recovery overlooked the socio-political aspects that amplify trauma (Bracken et al. 8). The DSM-IV criteria for PTSD model began to be questioned regarding the category of symptoms being culturally defined from a Western perspective. Weiss et al. assert that large numbers of traumatized people also did not meet the DSM-III-R criteria for PTSD (366). To categorize refugees’ experiences into recognizable, generalisable psychological conditions overlooked a more localized culturally specific understanding of trauma. The meanings given to collective experience and the healing strategies vary across different socio-cultural groupings (Eyber). For example, some people interpret suffering as a normal part of life in bringing them closer to God and in helping gain a better understanding of the level of trauma in the lives of others. Scheper-Hughes raise concern that the PTSD model is “based on a conception of human nature and human life as fundamentally vulnerable, frail, and humans as endowed with few and faulty defence mechanisms”, and underestimates the human capacity to not only survive but to thrive during and following adversity (37, 42). As a helping modality, biomedical intervention may have limitations through its lack of focus regarding people’s agency, coping strategies and local cultural understandings of distress (Eyber). The benefits of a Western therapeutic model might be minimal when some may have their own culturally relevant coping strategies that may vary to Western models. Bracken et al. document case studies where the burial rituals in Mozambique, obligations to the dead in Cambodia, shared solidarity in prison and the mending of relationships after rape in Uganda all contributed to the healing process of distress (8). Orosa et al. (1) asserts that belief systems have contributed in helping refugees deal with trauma; Brune et al. (1) points to belief systems being a protective factor against post-traumatic disorders; and Peres et al. highlight that a religious worldview gives hope, purpose and meaning within suffering. Adopting a Thicker Description of Resilience Service providers working with refugees often talk of refugees as ‘vulnerable’ or ‘at risk’ populations and strive for ‘harm minimisation’ among the population within their care. This follows a critical psychological tradition, what (Ungar, Constructionist) refers to as a positivist mode of inquiry that emphasises the predictable relationship between risk and protective factors (risk and coping strategies) being based on a ‘deficient’ outlook rather than a ‘future potential’ viewpoint and lacking reference to notions of resilience or self-empowerment (342). At-risk discourses tend to focus upon antisocial behaviours and appropriate treatment for relieving suffering rather than cultural competencies that may be developing in the midst of challenging circumstances. Mares and Newman document how the lives of many refugee advocates have been changed through the relational contribution asylum seekers have made personally to them in an Australian context (159). Individuals may find meaning in communal obligations, contributing to the lives of others and a heightened solidarity (Wilson 42, 44) in contrast to an individual striving for happiness and self-fulfilment. Early naturalistic accounts of mental health, influenced by the traditions of Western psychology, presented thin descriptions of resilience as a quality innate to individuals that made them invulnerable or strong, despite exposure to substantial risk (Ungar, Thicker 91). The interest then moved towards a non-naturalistic contextually relevant understanding of resilience viewed in the social context of people’s lives. Authors such as Benson, Tricket and Birman (qtd. in Ungar, Thicker) started focusing upon community resilience, community capacity and asset-building communities; looking at areas such as - “spending time with friends, exercising control over aspects of their lives, seeking meaningful involvement in their community, attaching to others and avoiding threats to self-esteem” (91). In so doing far more emphasis was given in developing what Ungar (Thicker) refers to as ‘a thicker description of resilience’ as it relates to the lives of refugees that considers more than an ability to survive and thrive or an internal psychological state of wellbeing (89). Ungar (Thicker) describes a thicker description of resilience as revealing “a seamless set of negotiations between individuals who take initiative, and an environment with crisscrossing resources that impact one on the other in endless and unpredictable combinations” (95). A thicker description of resilience means adopting more of what Eyber proposes as an emic approach, taking on an ‘insider perspective’, incorporating the worldview of the people experiencing the distress; in contrast to an etic perspective using a Western biomedical understanding of distress, examined from a position outside the social or cultural system in which it takes place. Drawing on a more anthropological tradition, intervention is able to be built with local resources and strategies that people can utilize with attention being given to cultural traditions within a socio-cultural understanding. Developing an emic approach is to engage in intercultural dialogue, raise dilemmas, test assumptions, document hopes and beliefs and explore their implications. Under this approach, healing is more about developing intelligibility through one’s own cultural and social matrix (Bracken, qtd. in Westoby and Ingamells 1767). This then moves beyond using a Western therapeutic approach of exploration which may draw on the rhetoric of resilience, but the coping strategies of the vulnerable are often disempowered through adopting a ‘therapy culture’ (Furedi, qtd. in Westoby and Ingamells 1769). Westoby and Ingamells point out that the danger is by using a “therapeutic gaze that interprets emotions through the prism of disease and pathology”, it then “replaces a socio-political interpretation of situations” (1769). This is not to dismiss the importance of restoring individual well-being, but to broaden the approach adopted in contextualising it within a socio-cultural frame. The Relational Aspect of Resilience Previously, the concept of the ‘resilient individual’ has been of interest within the psychological and self-help literature (Garmezy, qtd. in Wilson) giving weight to the aspect of it being an innate trait that individuals possess or harness (258). Yet there is a need to explore the relational aspect of resilience as it is embedded in the network of relationships within social settings. A person’s identity and well-being is better understood in observing their capacity to manage their responses to adverse circumstances in an interpersonal community through the networks of relationships. Brison, highlights the collective strength of individuals in social networks and the importance of social support in the process of recovery from trauma, that the self is vulnerable to be affected by violence but resilient to be reconstructed through the help of others (qtd. in Wilson 125). This calls for what Wilson refers to as a more interdisciplinary perspective drawing on cultural studies and sociology (2). It also acknowledges that although individual traits influence the action of resilience, it can be learned and developed in adverse situations through social interactions. To date, within sociology and cultural studies, there is not a well-developed perspective on the topic of resilience. Resilience involves a complex ongoing interaction between individuals and their social worlds (Wilson 16) that helps them make sense of their world and adjust to the context of resettlement. It includes developing a perspective of people drawing upon negative experiences as productive cultural resources for growth, which involves seeing themselves as agents of their own future rather than suffering from a sense of victimhood (Wilson 46, 258). Wilson further outlines the display of a resilience-related capacity to positively interpret and derive meaning from what might have been otherwise negative migration experiences (Wilson 47). Wu refers to ‘imagineering’ alternative futures, for people to see beyond the current adverse circumstances and to imagine other possibilities. People respond to and navigate their experience of trauma in unique, unexpected and productive ways (Wilson 29). Trauma can cripple individual potential and yet individuals can also learn to turn such an experience into a positive, productive resource for personal growth. Grief, despair and powerlessness can be channelled into hope for improved life opportunities. Social networks can act as protection against adversity and trauma; meaningful interpersonal relationships and a sense of belonging assist individuals in recovering from emotional strain. Wilson asserts that social capabilities assist people in turning what would otherwise be negative experiences into productive cultural resources (13). Graybeal (238) and Saleeby (297) explore resilience as a strength-based practice, where individuals, families and communities are seen in relation to their capacities, talents, competencies, possibilities, visions, values and hopes; rather than through their deficiencies, pathologies or disorders. This does not present an idea of invulnerability to adversity but points to resources for navigating adversity. Resilience is not merely an individual trait or a set of intrinsic behaviours that can be displayed in ‘resilient individuals’. Resilience, rather than being an unchanging attribute, is a complex socio-cultural phenomenon, a relational concept of a dynamic nature that is situated in interpersonal relations (Wilson 258). Positive Growth through a Community Based Approach Through migrating to another country (in the context of refugees), Falicov, points out that people often experience a profound loss of their social network and cultural roots, resulting in a sense of homelessness between two worlds, belonging to neither (qtd. in Walsh 220). In the ideological narratives of refugee movements and diasporas, the exile present may be collectively portrayed as a liminality, outside normal time and place, a passage between past and future (Eastmond 255). The concept of the ‘liminal’ was popularised by Victor Turner, who proposed that different kinds of marginalised people and communities go through phases of separation, ‘liminali’ (state of limbo) and reincorporation (qtd. in Tofighian 101). Difficulties arise when there is no closure of the liminal period (fleeing their former country and yet not being able to integrate in the country of destination). If there is no reincorporation into mainstream society then people become unsettled and feel displaced. This has implications for their sense of identity as they suffer from possible cultural destabilisation, not being able to integrate into the host society. The loss of social supports may be especially severe and long-lasting in the context of displacement. In gaining an understanding of resilience in the context of displacement, it is important to consider social settings and person-environment transactions as displaced people seek to experience a sense of community in alternative ways. Mays proposed that alternative forms of community are central to community survival and resilience. Community is a source of wellbeing for building and strengthening positive relations and networks (Mays 590). Cottrell, uses the concept of ‘community competence’, where a community provides opportunities and conditions that enable groups to navigate their problems and develop capacity and resourcefulness to cope positively with adversity (qtd. in Sonn and Fisher 4, 5). Chaskin, sees community as a resilient entity, countering adversity and promoting the well-being of its members (qtd. in Canavan 6). As a point of departure from the concept of community in the conventional sense, I am interested in what Ahmed and Fortier state as moments or sites of connection between people who would normally not have such connection (254). The participants may come together without any presumptions of ‘being in common’ or ‘being uncommon’ (Ahmed and Fortier 254). This community shows little differentiation between those who are welcome and those who are not in the demarcation of the boundaries of community. The community I refer to presents the idea as ‘common ground’ rather than commonality. Ahmed and Fortier make reference to a ‘moral community’, a “community of care and responsibility, where members readily acknowledge the ‘social obligations’ and willingness to assist the other” (Home office, qtd. in Ahmed and Fortier 253). Ahmed and Fortier note that strong communities produce caring citizens who ensure the future of caring communities (253). Community can also be referred to as the ‘soul’, something that stems out of the struggle that creates a sense of solidarity and cohesion among group members (Keil, qtd. in Sonn and Fisher 17). Often shared experiences of despair can intensify connections between people. These settings modify the impact of oppression through people maintaining positive experiences of belonging and develop a positive sense of identity. This has enabled people to hold onto and reconstruct the sociocultural supplies that have come under threat (Sonn and Fisher 17). People are able to feel valued as human beings, form positive attachments, experience community, a sense of belonging, reconstruct group identities and develop skills to cope with the outside world (Sonn and Fisher, 20). Community networks are significant in contributing to personal transformation. Walsh states that “community networks can be essential resources in trauma recovery when their strengths and potential are mobilised” (208). Walsh also points out that the suffering and struggle to recover after a traumatic experience often results in remarkable transformation and positive growth (208). Studies in post-traumatic growth (Calhoun & Tedeschi) have found positive changes such as: the emergence of new opportunities, the formation of deeper relationships and compassion for others, feelings strengthened to meet future life challenges, reordered priorities, fuller appreciation of life and a deepening spirituality (in Walsh 208). As Walsh explains “The effects of trauma depend greatly on whether those wounded can seek comfort, reassurance and safety with others. Strong connections with trust that others will be there for them when needed, counteract feelings of insecurity, hopelessness, and meaninglessness” (208). Wilson (256) developed a new paradigm in shifting the focus from an individualised approach to trauma recovery, to a community-based approach in his research of young Sudanese refugees. Rutter and Walsh, stress that mental health professionals can best foster trauma recovery by shifting from a predominantly individual pathology focus to other treatment approaches, utilising communities as a capacity for healing and resilience (qtd. in Walsh 208). Walsh highlights that “coming to terms with traumatic loss involves making meaning of the trauma experience, putting it in perspective, and weaving the experience of loss and recovery into the fabric of individual and collective identity and life passage” (210). Landau and Saul, have found that community resilience involves building community and enhancing social connectedness by strengthening the system of social support, coalition building and information and resource sharing, collective storytelling, and re-establishing the rhythms and routines of life (qtd. in Walsh 219). Bracken et al. suggest that one of the fundamental principles in recovery over time is intrinsically linked to reconstruction of social networks (15). This is not expecting resolution in some complete ‘once and for all’ getting over it, getting closure of something, or simply recovering and moving on, but tapping into a collective recovery approach, being a gradual process over time. Conclusion A focus on biomedical intervention using a biomedical understanding of distress may be limiting as a helping modality for refugees. Such an approach can undermine peoples’ agency, coping strategies and local cultural understandings of distress. Drawing on sociology and cultural studies, utilising a more emic approach, brings new insights to understanding resilience and how people respond to trauma in unique, unexpected and productive ways for positive personal growth while navigating the experience. This includes considering social settings and person-environment transactions in gaining an understanding of resilience. Although individual traits influence the action of resilience, it can be learned and developed in adverse situations through social interactions. Social networks and capabilities can act as a protection against adversity and trauma, assisting people to turn what would otherwise be negative experiences into productive cultural resources (Wilson 13) for improved life opportunities. The promotion of social competence is viewed as a preventative intervention to promote resilient outcomes, as social skill facilitates social integration (Nettles and Mason 363). As Wilson (258) asserts that resilience is not merely an individual trait or a set of intrinsic behaviours that ‘resilient individuals’ display; it is a complex, socio-cultural phenomenon that is situated in interpersonal relations within a community setting. References Ahmed, Sara, and Anne-Marie Fortier. “Re-Imagining Communities.” International of Cultural Studies 6.3 (2003): 251-59. Bracken, Patrick. J., Joan E. Giller, and Derek Summerfield. Psychological Response to War and Atrocity: The Limitations of Current Concepts. Elsevier Science, 1995. 8 Aug, 2013 ‹http://www.freedomfromtorture.org/sites/default/files/documents/Summerfield-PsychologicalResponses.pdf>. Brune, Michael, Christian Haasen, Michael Krausz, Oktay Yagdiran, Enrique Bustos and David Eisenman. “Belief Systems as Coping Factors for Traumatized Refugees: A Pilot Study.” Eur Psychiatry 17 (2002): 451-58. Canavan, John. “Resilience: Cautiously Welcoming a Contested Concept.” Child Care in Practice 14.1 (2008): 1-7. Chung, Juna. Refugee and Immigrant Survivors of Trauma: A Curriculum for Social Workers. Master’s Thesis for California State University. Long Beach, 2010. 1-29. Eastmond, Maria. “Stories of Lived Experience: Narratives in Forced Migration Research.” Journal of Refugee Studies 20.2 (2007): 248-64. Eyber, Carola “Cultural and Anthropological Studies.” In Forced Migration Online, 2002. 8 Aug, 2013. ‹http://www.forcedmigration.org/research-resources/expert-guides/psychosocial- issues/cultural-and-anthropological-studies>. Graybeal, Clay. “Strengths-Based Social Work Assessment: Transforming the Dominant Paradigm.” Families in Society 82.3 (2001): 233-42. Kleinman, Arthur. “Triumph or Pyrrhic Victory? The Inclusion of Culture in DSM-IV.” Harvard Rev Psychiatry 4 (1997): 343-44. Mares, Sarah, and Louise Newman, eds. Acting from the Heart- Australian Advocates for Asylum Seekers Tell Their Stories. Sydney: Finch Publishing, 2007. Mays, Vicki M. “Identity Development of Black Americans: The Role of History and the Importance of Ethnicity.” American Journal of Psychotherapy 40.4 (1986): 582-93. Nettles, Saundra Murray, and Michael J. Mason. “Zones of Narrative Safety: Promoting Psychosocial Resilience in Young People.” The Journal of Primary Prevention 25.3 (2004): 359-73. Orosa, Francisco J.E., Michael Brune, Katrin Julia Fischer-Ortman, and Christian Haasen. “Belief Systems as Coping Factors in Traumatized Refugees: A Prospective Study.” Traumatology 17.1 (2011); 1-7. Peres, Julio F.P., Alexander Moreira-Almeida, Antonia, G. Nasello, and Harold, G. Koenig. “Spirituality and Resilience in Trauma Victims.” J Relig Health (2006): 1-8. Saleebey, Dennis. “The Strengths Perspective in Social Work Practice: Extensions and Cautions.” Social Work 41.3 (1996): 296-305. Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. “A Talent for Life: Reflections on Human Vulnerability and Resilience.” Ethnos 73.1 (2008): 25-56. Seahorn, Janet, J. and Anthony E. Seahorn. Tears of a Warrior. Ft Collins, USA: Team Pursuits, 2008. Sonn, Christopher, and Adrian Fisher. “Sense of Community: Community Resilient Responses to Oppression and Change.” Unpublished article. Curtin University of Technology & Victoria University of Technology: undated. Summerfield, Derek. “Childhood, War, Refugeedom and ‘Trauma’: Three Core Questions for Medical Health Professionals.” Transcultural Psychiatry 37.3 (2000): 417-433. Tofighian, Omid. “Prolonged Liminality and Comparative Examples of Rioting Down Under”. Fear and Hope: The Art of Asylum Seekers in Australian Detention Centres Literature and Aesthetics (Special Edition) 21 (2011): 97-103. Ungar, Michael. “A Constructionist Discourse on Resilience: Multiple Contexts, Multiple Realities Among at-Risk Children and Youth.” Youth Society 35.3 (2004): 341-365. Ungar, Michael. “A Thicker Description of Resilience.” The International Journal of Narrative Therapy and Community Work 3 & 4 (2005): 85-96. Walsh, Froma. “Traumatic Loss and Major Disasters: Strengthening Family and Community Resilience.” Family Process 46.2 (2007): 207-227. Weiss, Daniel. S., Charles R. Marmar, William. E. Schlenger, John. A. Fairbank, Kathleen Jordon, Richard L. Hough, and Richard A. Kulka. “The Prevalence of Lifetime and Partial Post- Traumatic Stress Disorder in Vietnam Theater Veterans.” Journal of Traumatic Stress 5.3 (1992):365-76. Westoby, Peter, and Ann Ingamells. “A Critically Informed Perspective of Working with Resettling Refugee Groups in Australia.” British Journal of Social Work 40 (2010): 1759-76. Wilson, Michael. “Accumulating Resilience: An Investigation of the Migration and Resettlement Experiences of Young Sudanese People in the Western Sydney Area.” PHD Thesis. University of Western Sydney ( 2012): 1-297. Wu, K. M. “Hope and World Survival.” Philosophy Forum 12.1-2 (1972): 131-48.

What strikes me about the habits of the people who spend so much time on the Net—well, it’s so new that we don't know what will come next—is in fact precisely how niche in character it is. You ask people what nets they are on, and they’re all so specialised! The Argentines on the Argentine Net and so forth. And it’s particularly the Argentines who are not in Argentina. (Anderson, in Gower, par. 5) The preceding quotation, taken from his 1996 interview with Eric Gower, sees Benedict Anderson reflecting on the formation of imagined, transnational communities on the Internet. Anderson is, of course, famous for his work on how nationalism, as an “imagined community,” gets constructed through the shared consumption of print media (6-7, 26-27); although its readers will never all see each other face to face, people consuming a newspaper or novel in a shared language perceive themselves as members of a collective. In this more recent interview, Anderson recognised the specific groupings of people in online communities: Argentines who find themselves outside of Argentina link up online in an imagined diaspora community. Over the course of the last decade and a half since Anderson spoke about Argentinian migrants and diaspora communities, we have witnessed an exponential growth of new forms of digital communication, including social networking sites (e.g. Facebook), Weblogs, micro-blogging (e.g. Twitter), and video-sharing sites (e.g. YouTube). Alongside these new means of communication, our current epoch of globalisation is also characterised by migration flows across, and between, all continents. In his book Modernity at Large, Arjun Appadurai recognised that “the twin forces of mass migration and electronic mediation” have altered the ways the imagination operates. Furthermore, these two pillars, human motion and digital mediation, are in constant “flux” (44). The circulation of people and digitally mediatised content proceeds across and beyond boundaries of the nation-state and provides ground for alternative community and identity formations. Appadurai’s intervention has resulted in increasing awareness of local, transnational, and global networking flows of people, ideas, and culturally hybrid artefacts. In this article, we analyse the various innovative tactics taken up by migrant youth to imagine digital diasporas. Inspired by scholars such as Appadurai, Avtar Brah and Paul Gilroy, we tease out—from a postcolonial perspective—how digital diasporas have evolved over time from a more traditional understanding as constituted either by a vertical relationship to a distant homeland or a horizontal connection to the scattered transnational community (see Safran, Cohen) to move towards a notion of “hypertextual diaspora.” With hypertextual diaspora, these central axes which constitute the understanding of diaspora are reshuffled in favour of more rhizomatic formations where affiliations, locations, and spaces are constantly destabilised and renegotiated. Needless to say, diasporas are not homogeneous and resist generalisation, but in this article we highlight common ways in which young migrant Internet users renew the practices around diaspora connections. Drawing from research on various migrant populations around the globe, we distinguish three common strategies: (1) the forging of transnational public spheres, based on maintaining virtual social relations by people scattered across the globe; (2) new forms of digital diasporic youth branding; and (3) the cultural production of innovative hypertexts in the context of more rhizomatic digital diaspora formations. Before turning to discuss these three strategies, the potential of a postcolonial framework to recognise multiple intersections of diaspora and digital mediation is elaborated. Hypertext as a Postcolonial Figuration Postcolonial scholars, Appadurai, Gilroy, and Brah among others, have been attentive to diasporic experiences, but they have paid little attention to the specificity of digitally mediated diaspora experiences. As Maria Fernández observes, postcolonial studies have been “notoriously absent from electronic media practice, theory, and criticism” (59). Our exploration of what happens when diasporic youth go online is a first step towards addressing this gap. Conceptually, this is clearly an urgent need since diasporas and the digital inform each other in the most profound and dynamic of ways: “the Internet virtually recreates all those sites which have metaphorically been eroded by living in the diaspora” (Ponzanesi, “Diasporic Narratives” 396). Writings on the Internet tend to favour either the “gold-rush” mentality, seeing the Web as a great equaliser and bringer of neoliberal progress for all, or the more pessimistic/technophobic approach, claiming that technologically determined spaces are exclusionary, white by default, masculine-oriented, and heteronormative (Everett 30, Van Doorn and Van Zoonen 261). For example, the recent study by Ito et al. shows that young people are not interested in merely performing a fiction in a parallel online world; rather, the Internet gets embedded in their everyday reality (Ito et al. 19-24). Real-life commercial incentives, power hierarchies, and hegemonies also get extended to the digital realm (Schäfer 167-74). Online interaction remains pre-structured, based on programmers’ decisions and value-laden algorithms: “people do not need a passport to travel in cyberspace but they certainly do need to play by the rules in order to function electronically” (Ponzanesi, “Diasporic Narratives” 405). We began our article with a statement by Benedict Anderson, stressing how people in the Argentinian diaspora find their space on the Internet. Online avenues increasingly allow users to traverse and add hyperlinks to their personal websites in the forms of profile pages, the publishing of preferences, and possibilities of participating in and affiliating with interest-based communities. Online journals, social networking sites, streaming audio/video pages, and online forums are all dynamic hypertexts based on Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) coding. HTML is the protocol of documents that refer to each other, constituting the backbone of the Web; every text that you find on the Internet is connected to a web of other texts through hyperlinks. These links are in essence at equal distance from each other. As well as being a technological device, hypertext is also a metaphor to think with. Figuratively speaking, hypertext can be understood as a non-hierarchical and a-centred modality. Hypertext incorporates multiplicity; different pathways are possible simultaneously, as it has “multiple entryways and exits” and it “connects any point to any other point” (Landow 58-61). Feminist theorist Donna Haraway recognised the dynamic character of hypertext: “the metaphor of hypertext insists on making connections as practice.” However, she adds, “the trope does not suggest which connections make sense for which purposes and which patches we might want to follow or avoid.” We can begin to see the value of approaching the Internet from the perspective of hypertext to make an “inquiry into which connections matter, why, and for whom” (128-30). Postcolonial scholar Jaishree K. Odin theorised how hypertextual webs might benefit subjects “living at the borders.” She describes how subaltern subjects, by weaving their own hypertextual path, can express their multivocality and negotiate cultural differences. She connects the figure of hypertext with that of the postcolonial: The hypertextual and the postcolonial are thus part of the changing topology that maps the constantly shifting, interpenetrating, and folding relations that bodies and texts experience in information culture. Both discourses are characterised by multivocality, multilinearity, openendedness, active encounter, and traversal. (599) These conceptions of cyberspace and its hypertextual foundations coalesce with understandings of “in-between”, “third”, and “diaspora media space” as set out by postcolonial theorists such as Bhabha and Brah. Bhabha elaborates on diaspora as a space where different experiences can be articulated: “These ‘in-between’ spaces provide the terrain for elaborating strategies of selfhood—singular or communal—that initiate new signs of identity, and innovative sites of collaboration, and contestation (4). (Dis-)located between the local and the global, Brah adds: “diaspora space is the point at which boundaries of inclusion and exclusion, of belonging and otherness, of ‘us’ and ‘them,’ are contested” (205). As youths who were born in the diaspora have begun to manifest themselves online, digital diasporas have evolved from transnational public spheres to differential hypertexts. First, we describe how transnational public spheres form one dimension of the mediation of diasporic experiences. Subsequently, we focus on diasporic forms of youth branding and hypertext aesthetics to show how digitally mediated practices can go beyond and transgress traditional formations of diasporas as vertically connected to a homeland and horizontally distributed in the creation of transnational public spheres. Digital Diasporas as Diasporic Public Spheres Mass migration and digital mediation have led to a situation where relationships are maintained over large geographical distances, beyond national boundaries. The Internet is used to create transnational imagined audiences formed by dispersed people, which Appadurai describes as “diasporic public spheres”. He observes that, as digital media “increasingly link producers and audiences across national boundaries, and as these audiences themselves start new conversations between those who move and those who stay, we find a growing number of diasporic public spheres” (22). Media and communication researchers have paid a lot of attention to this transnational dimension of the networking of dispersed people (see Brinkerhoff, Alonso and Oiarzabal). We focus here on three examples from three different continents. Most famously, media ethnographers Daniel Miller and Don Slater focused on the Trinidadian diaspora. They describe how “de Rumshop Lime”, a collective online chat room, is used by young people at home and abroad to “lime”, meaning to chat and hang out. Describing the users of the chat, “the webmaster [a Trini living away] proudly proclaimed them to have come from 40 different countries” (though massively dominated by North America) (88). Writing about people in the Greek diaspora, communication researcher Myria Georgiou traced how its mediation evolved from letters, word of mouth, and bulletins to satellite television, telephone, and the Internet (147). From the introduction of the Web, globally dispersed people went online to get in contact with each other. Meanwhile, feminist film scholar Anna Everett draws on the case of Naijanet, the virtual community of “Nigerians Living Abroad”. She shows how Nigerians living in the diaspora from the 1990s onwards connected in global transnational communities, forging “new black public spheres” (35). These studies point at how diasporic people have turned to the Internet to establish and maintain social relations, give and receive support, and share general concerns. Establishing transnational communicative networks allows users to imagine shared audiences of fellow diasporians. Diasporic imagination, however, goes beyond singular notions of this more traditional idea of the transnational public sphere, as it “has nowadays acquired a great figurative flexibility which mostly refers to practices of transgression and hybridisation” (Ponzanesi, “Diasporic Subjects” 208). Below we recognise another dimension of digital diasporas: the articulation of diasporic attachment for branding oneself. Mocro and Nikkei: Diasporic Attachments as a Way to Brand Oneself In this section, we consider how hybrid cultural practices are carried out over geographical distances. Across spaces on the Web, young migrants express new forms of belonging in their dealing with the oppositional motivations of continuity and change. The generational specificity of this experience can be drawn out on the basis of the distinction between “roots” and “routes” made by Paul Gilroy. In his seminal book The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, Gilroy writes about black populations on both sides of the Atlantic. The double consciousness of migrant subjects is reflected by affiliating roots and routes as part of a complex cultural identification (19 and 190). As two sides of the same coin, roots refer to the stable and continuing elements of identities, while routes refer to disruption and change. Gilroy criticises those who are “more interested in the relationship of identity to roots and rootedness than in seeing identity as a process of movement and mediation which is more appropriately approached via the homonym routes” (19). He stresses the importance of not just focusing on one of either roots or routes but argues for an examination of their interplay. Forming a response to discrimination and exclusion, young migrants in online networks turn to more positive experiences such as identification with one’s heritage inspired by generational specific cultural affiliations. Here, we focus on two examples that cross two continents, showing routed online attachments to “be(com)ing Mocro”, and “be(coming) Nikkei”. Figure 1. “Leipe Mocro Flavour” music video (Ali B) The first example, being and becoming “Mocro”, refers to a local, bi-national consciousness. The term Mocro originated on the streets of the Netherlands during the late 1990s and is now commonly understood as a Dutch honorary nickname for youths with Moroccan roots living in the Netherlands and Belgium. A 2003 song, Leipe mocro flavour (“Crazy Mocro Flavour”) by Moroccan-Dutch rapper Ali B, familiarised a larger group of people with the label (see Figure 1). Ali B’s song is exemplary for a wider community of youngsters who have come to identify themselves as Mocros. One example is the Marokkanen met Brainz – Hyves (Mo), a community page within the Dutch social networking site Hyves. On this page, 2,200 youths who identify as Mocro get together to push against common stereotypes of Moroccan-Dutch boys as troublemakers and thieves and Islamic Moroccan-Dutch girls as veiled carriers of backward traditions (Leurs, forthcoming). Its description reads, “I assume that this Hyves will be the largest [Mocro community]. Because logically Moroccans have brains” (our translation): What can you find here? Discussions about politics, religion, current affairs, history, love and relationships. News about Moroccan/Arabic Parties. And whatever you want to tell others. Use your brains. Second, “Nikkei” directs our attention to Japanese migrants and their descendants. The Discover Nikkei website, set up by the Japanese American National Museum, provides a revealing description of being and becoming Nikkei: As Nikkei communities form in Japan and throughout the world, the process of community formation reveals the ongoing fluidity of Nikkei populations, the evasive nature of Nikkei identity, and the transnational dimensions of their community formations and what it means to be Nikkei. (Japanese American National Museum) This site was set up by the Japanese American National Museum for Nikkei in the global diaspora to connect and share stories. Nikkei youths of course also connect elsewhere. In her ethnographic online study, Shana Aoyama found that the social networking site Hi5 is taken up in Peru by young people of Japanese heritage as an avenue for identity exploration. She found group confirmation based on the performance of Nikkei-ness, as well as expressions of individuality. She writes, “instead of heading in one specific direction, the Internet use of Nikkei creates a starburst shape of identity construction and negotiation” (119). Mocro-ness and Nikkei-ness are common collective identification markers that are not just straightforward nationalisms. They refer back to different homelands, while simultaneously they also clearly mark one’s situation of being routed outside of this homeland. Mocro stems from postcolonial migratory flows from the Global South to the West. Nikkei-ness relates to the interesting case of the Japanese diaspora, which is little accounted for, although there are many Japanese communities present in North and South America from before the Second World War. The context of Peru is revealing, as it was the first South American country to accept Japanese migrants. It now hosts the second largest South American Japanese diaspora after Brazil (Lama), and Peru’s former president, Alberto Fujimoro, is also of Japanese origin. We can see how the importance of the nation-state gets blurred as diasporic youth, through cultural hybridisation of youth culture and ethnic ties, initiates subcultures and offers resistance to mainstream western cultural forms. Digital spaces are used to exert youthful diaspora branding. Networked branding includes expressing cultural identities that are communal and individual but also both local and global, illustrative of how “by virtue of being global the Internet can gift people back their sense of themselves as special and particular” (Miller and Slater 115). In the next section, we set out how youthful diaspora branding is part of a larger, more rhizomatic formation of multivocal hypertext aesthetics. Hypertext Aesthetics In this section, we set out how an in-between, or “liminal”, position, in postcolonial theory terms, can be a source of differential and multivocal cultural production. Appadurai, Bhabha, and Gilroy recognise that liminal positions increasingly leave their mark on the global and local flows of cultural objects, such as food, cinema, music, and fashion. Here, our focus is on how migrant youths turn to hypertextual forms of cultural production for a differential expression of digital diasporas. Hypertexts are textual fields made up of hyperlinks. Odin states that travelling through cyberspace by clicking and forging hypertext links is a form of multivocal digital diaspora aesthetics: The perpetual negotiation of difference that the border subject engages in creates a new space that demands its own aesthetic. This new aesthetic, which I term “hypertext” or “postcolonial,” represents the need to switch from the linear, univocal, closed, authoritative aesthetic involving passive encounters characterising the performance of the same to that of non-linear, multivocal, open, non-hierarchical aesthetic involving active encounters that are marked by repetition of the same with and in difference. (Cited in Landow 356-7) On their profile pages, migrant youth digitally author themselves in distinct ways by linking up to various sites. They craft their personal hypertext. These hypertexts display multivocal diaspora aesthetics which are personal and specific; they display personal intersections of affiliations that are not easily generalisable. In several Dutch-language online spaces, subjects from Dutch-Moroccan backgrounds have taken up the label Mocro as an identity marker. Across social networking sites such as Hyves and Facebook, the term gets included in nicknames and community pages. Think of nicknames such as “My own Mocro styly”, “Mocro-licious”, “Mocro-chick”. The term Mocro itself is often already multilayered, as it is often combined with age, gender, sexual preference, religion, sport, music, and generationally specific cultural affiliations. Furthermore, youths connect to a variety of groups ranging from feminist interests (“Women in Charge”), Dutch nationalism (“I Love Holland”), ethnic affiliations (“The Moroccan Kitchen”) to clothing (the brand H&M), and global junk food (McDonalds). These diverse affiliations—that are advertised online simultaneously—add nuance to the typical, one-dimensional stereotype about migrant youth, integration, and Islam in the context of Europe and Netherlands (Leurs, forthcoming). On the online social networking site Hi5, Nikkei youths in Peru, just like any other teenagers, express their individuality by decorating their personal profile page with texts, audio, photos, and videos. Besides personal information such as age, gender, and school information, Aoyama found that “a starburst” of diverse affiliations is published, including those that signal Japanese-ness such as the Hello Kitty brand, anime videos, Kanji writing, kimonos, and celebrities. Also Nikkei hyperlink to elements that can be identified as “Latino” and “Chino” (Chinese) (104-10). Furthermore, users can show their multiple affiliations by joining different “groups” (after which a hyperlink to the group community appears on the profile page). Aoyama writes “these groups stretch across a large and varied scope of topics, including that of national, racial/ethnic, and cultural identities” (2). These examples illustrate how digital diasporas encompass personalised multivocal hypertexts. With the widely accepted adagio “you are what you link” (Adamic and Adar), hypertextual webs can be understood as productions that reveal how diasporic youths choose to express themselves as individuals through complex sets of non-homogeneous identifications. Migrant youth connects to ethnic origin and global networks in eclectic and creative ways. The concept of “digital diaspora” therefore encapsulates both material and virtual (dis)connections that are identifiable through common traits, strategies, and aesthetics. Yet these hypertextual connections are also highly personalised and unique, offering a testimony to the fluid negotiations and intersections between the local and the global, the rooted and the diasporic. Conclusions In this article, we have argued that migrant youths render digital diasporas more complex by including branding and hypertextual aesthetics in transnational public spheres. Digital diasporas may no longer be understood simply in terms of their vertical relations to a homeland or place of origin or as horizontally connected to a clearly marked transnational community; rather, they must also be seen as engaging in rhizomatic digital practices, which reshuffle traditional understandings of origin and belonging. Contemporary youthful digital diasporas are therefore far more complex in their engagement with digital media than most existing theory allows: connections are hybridised, and affiliations are turned into practices of diasporic branding and becoming. There is a generational specificity to multivocal diaspora aesthetics; this specificity lies in the ways migrant youths show communal recognition and express their individuality through hypertext which combines affiliation to their national/ethnic “roots” with an embrace of other youth subcultures, many of them transnational. These two axes are constantly reshuffled and renegotiated online where, thanks to the technological possibilities of HTML hypertext, a whole range of identities and identifications may be brought together at any given time. We trust that these insights will be of interest in future discussion of online networks, transnational communities, identity formation, and hypertext aesthetics where much urgent and topical work remains to be done. References Adamic, Lada A., and Eytan Adar. “You Are What You Link.” 2001 Tenth International World Wide Web Conference, Hong Kong. 26 Apr. 2010. ‹http://www10.org/program/society/yawyl/YouAreWhatYouLink.htm›. Ali B. “Leipe Mocro Flavour.” ALIB.NL / SPEC Entertainment. 2007. 4 Oct. 2010 ‹http://www3.alib.nl/popupAlibtv.php?catId=42&contentId=544›. Alonso, Andoni, and Pedro J. Oiarzabal. Diasporas in the New Media Age. Reno: U of Nevada P, 2010. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Rev. ed. London: Verso, 2006 (1983). Aoyama, Shana. Nikkei-Ness: A Cyber-Ethnographic Exploration of Identity among the Japanese Peruvians of Peru. Unpublished MA thesis. South Hadley: Mount Holyoke, 2007. 1 Feb. 2010 ‹http://hdl.handle.net/10166/736›. Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1996. Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge, 1994. Brah, Avtar. Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities. London: Routledge, 1996. Brinkerhoff, Jennifer M. Digital Diasporas: Identity and Transnational Engagement. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009. Cohen, Robin. Global Diasporas: An Introduction. London: U College London P, 1997. Everett, Anna. Digital Diaspora: A Race for Cyberspace. Albany: SUNY, 2009. Fernández, María. “Postcolonial Media Theory.” Art Journal 58.3 (1999): 58-73. Georgiou, Myria. Diaspora, Identity and the Media: Diasporic Transnationalism and Mediated Spatialities. Creskill: Hampton Press, 2006. Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. London: Verso, 1993. Gower, Eric. “When the Virtual Becomes the Real: A Talk with Benedict Anderson.” NIRA Review, 1996. 19 Apr. 2010 ‹http://www.nira.or.jp/past/publ/review/96spring/intervi.html›. Haraway, Donna. Modest Witness@Second Millennium. FemaleMan Meets OncoMouse: Feminism and Technoscience. New York: Routledge, 1997. Ito, Mizuko, et al. Hanging Out, Messing Out, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning with New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2010. Japanese American National Museum. “Discover Nikkei: Japanese Migrants and Their Descendants.” Discover Nikkei, 2005. 4 Oct. 2010. ‹http://www.discovernikkei.org/en/›. Lama, Abraham. “Home Is Where the Heartbreak Is for Japanese-Peruvians.” Asia Times 16 Oct. 1999. 6 May 2010 ‹http://www.atimes.com/japan-econ/AJ16Dh01.html›. Landow, George P. Hypertext 3.0. Critical Theory and New Media in an Era of Globalization. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2006. Leurs, Koen. Identity, Migration and Digital Media. Utrecht: Utrecht University. PhD Thesis, forthcoming. Miller, Daniel, and Don Slater. The Internet: An Etnographic Approach. Oxford: Berg, 2000. Mo. “Marokkanen met Brainz.” Hyves, 23 Feb. 2008. 4 Oct. 2010. ‹http://marokkaansehersens.hyves.nl/›. Odin, Jaishree K. “The Edge of Difference: Negotiations between the Hypertextual and the Postcolonial.” Modern Fiction Studies 43.3 (1997): 598-630. Ponzanesi, Sandra. “Diasporic Narratives @ Home Pages: The Future as Virtually Located.” Colonies – Missions – Cultures in the English-Speaking World. Ed. Gerhard Stilz. Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 2001. 396–406. Ponzanesi, Sandra. “Diasporic Subjects and Migration.” Thinking Differently: A Reader in European Women's Studies. Ed. Gabrielle Griffin and Rosi Braidotti. London: Zed Books, 2002. 205–20. Safran, William. “Diasporas in Modern Societies: Myths of Homeland and Return.” Diaspora 1.1 (1991): 83-99. Schäfer, Mirko T. Bastard Culture! How User Participation Transforms Cultural Production. Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP, 2011. Van Doorn, Niels, and Liesbeth van Zoonen. “Theorizing Gender and the Internet: Past, Present, and Future.” Routledge Handbook of Internet Politics. Ed. Andrew Chadwick and Philip N. Howard. London: Routledge. 261-74.

In its preamble, The Western Australian Charter of Multiculturalism (WA) commits the state to becoming: “A society in which respect for mutual difference is accompanied by equality of opportunity within a framework of democratic citizenship”. One of the principles of multiculturalism, as enunciated in the Charter, is “equality of opportunity for all members of society to achieve their full potential in a free and democratic society where every individual is equal before and under the law”. An important element of this principle is the “equality of opportunity … to achieve … full potential”. The implication here is that those who start from a position of disadvantage when it comes to achieving that potential deserve more than ‘equal’ treatment. Implicitly, equality can be achieved only through the recognition of and response to differential needs and according to the likelihood of achieving full potential. This is encapsulated in Kymlicka’s argument that neutrality is “hopelessly inadequate once we look at the diversity of cultural membership which exists in contemporary liberal democracies” (903). Yet such a potential commitment to differential support might seem unequal to some, where equality is constructed as the same or equal treatment regardless of differing circumstances. Until the past half-century or more, this problematic has been a hotly-contested element of the struggle for Civil Rights for African-Americans in the United States, especially as these rights related to educational opportunity during the years of racial segregation. For some, providing resources to achieve equal outcomes (rather than be committed to equal inputs) may appear to undermine the very ethos of liberal democracy. In Australia, this perspective has been the central argument of Pauline Hanson and her supporters who denounce programs designed as measures to achieve equality for specific disadvantaged groups; including Indigenous Australians and humanitarian refugees. Nevertheless, equality for all on all grounds of legally-accepted difference: gender, race, age, family status, sexual orientation, political conviction, to name a few; is often held as the hallmark of progressive liberal societies such as Australia. In the matter of religious freedoms the situation seems much less complex. All that is required for religious equality, it seems, is to define religion as a private matter – carried out, as it were, between consenting parties away from the public sphere. This necessitates, effectively, the separation of state and religion. This separation of religious belief from the apparatus of the state is referred to as ‘secularism’ and it tends to be regarded as a cornerstone of a liberal democracy, given the general assumption that secularism is a necessary precursor to equal treatment of and respect for different religious beliefs, and the association of secularism with the Western project of the Enlightenment when liberty, equality and science replaced religion and superstition. By this token, western nations committed to equality are also committed to being liberal, democratic and secular in nature; and it is a matter of state indifference as to which religious faith a citizen embraces – Wiccan, Christian, Judaism, etc – if any. Historically, and arguably more so in the past decade, the terms ‘democratic’, ‘secular’, ‘liberal’ and ‘equal’ have all been used to inscribe characteristics of the collective ‘West’. Individuals and states whom the West ascribe as ‘other’ are therefore either or all of: not democratic; not liberal; or not secular – and failing any one of these characteristics (for any country other than Britain, with its parliamentary-established Church of England, headed by the Queen as Supreme Governor) means that that country certainly does not espouse equality. The West and the ‘Other’ in Popular Discourse The constructed polarisation between the free, secular and democratic West that values equality; and the oppressive ‘other’ that perpetuates theocracies, religious discrimination and – at the ultimate – human rights abuses, is a common theme in much of the West’s media and popular discourse on Islam. The same themes are also applied in some measure to Muslims in Australia, in particular to constructions of the rights of Muslim women in Australia. Typically, Muslim women’s dress is deemed by some secular Australians to be a symbol of religious subjugation, rather than of free choice. Arguably, this polemic has come to the fore since the terrorist attacks on the United States in September 2001. However, as Aly and Walker note, the comparisons between the West and the ‘other’ are historically constructed and inherited (Said) and have tended latterly to focus western attention on the role and status of Muslim women as evidence of the West’s progression comparative to its antithesis, Eastern oppression. An examination of studies of the United States media coverage of the September 11 attacks, and the ensuing ‘war on terror’, reveals some common media constructions around good versus evil. There is no equal status between these. Good must necessarily triumph. In the media coverage, the evil ‘other’ is Islamic terrorism, personified by Osama bin Laden. Part of the justification for the war on terror is a perception that the West, as a force for good in this world, must battle evil and protect freedom and democracy (Erjavec and Volcic): to do otherwise is to allow the terror of the ‘other’ to seep into western lives. The war on terror becomes the defence of the west, and hence the defence of equality and freedom. A commitment to equality entails a defeat of all things constructed as denying the rights of people to be equal. Hutcheson, Domke, Billeaudeaux and Garland analysed the range of discourses evident in Time and Newsweek magazines in the five weeks following September 11 and found that journalists replicated themes of national identity present in the communication strategies of US leaders and elites. The political and media response to the threat of the evil ‘other’ is to create a monolithic appeal to liberal values which are constructed as being a monopoly of the ‘free’ West. A brief look at just a few instances of public communication by US political leaders confirms Hutcheson et al.’s contention that the official construction of the 2001 attacks invoked discourses of good and evil reminiscent of the Cold War. In reference to the actions of the four teams of plane hijackers, US president George W Bush opened his Address to the Nation on the evening of September 11: “Today, our fellow citizens, our way of life, our very freedom came under attack in a series of deliberate and deadly terrorist acts” (“Statement by the President in His Address to the Nation”). After enjoining Americans to recite Psalm 23 in prayer for the victims and their families, President Bush ended his address with a clear message of national unity and a further reference to the battle between good and evil: “This is a day when all Americans from every walk of life unite in our resolve for justice and peace. America has stood down enemies before, and we will do so this time. None of us will ever forget this day. Yet, we go forward to defend freedom and all that is good and just in our world” (“Statement by the President in His Address to the Nation”). In his address to the joint houses of Congress shortly after September 11, President Bush implicated not just the United States in this fight against evil, but the entire international community stating: “This is the world’s fight. This is civilisation’s fight” (cited by Brown 295). Addressing the California Business Association a month later, in October 2001, Bush reiterated the notion of the United States as the leading nation in the moral fight against evil, and identified this as a possible reason for the attack: “This great state is known for its diversity – people of all races, all religions, and all nationalities. They’ve come here to live a better life, to find freedom, to live in peace and security, with tolerance and with justice. When the terrorists attacked America, this is what they attacked”. While the US media framed the events of September 11 as an attack on the values of democracy and liberalism as these are embodied in US democratic traditions, work by scholars analysing the Australian media’s representation of the attacks suggested that this perspective was echoed and internationalised for an Australian audience. Green asserts that global media coverage of the attacks positioned the global audience, including Australians, as ‘American’. The localisation of the discourses of patriotism and national identity for Australian audiences has mainly been attributed to the media’s use of the good versus evil frame that constructed the West as good, virtuous and moral and invited Australian audiences to subscribe to this argument as members of a shared Western democratic identity (Osuri and Banerjee). Further, where the ‘we’ are defenders of justice, equality and the rule of law; the opposing ‘others’ are necessarily barbaric. Secularism and the Muslim Diaspora Secularism is a historically laden term that has been harnessed to symbolise the emancipation of social life from the forced imposition of religious doctrine. The struggle between the essentially voluntary and private demands of religion, and the enjoyment of a public social life distinct from religious obligations, is historically entrenched in the cultural identities of many modern Western societies (Dallmayr). The concept of religious freedom in the West has evolved into a principle based on the bifurcation of life into the objective public sphere and the subjective private sphere within which individuals are free to practice their religion of choice (Yousif), or no religion at all. Secularism, then, is contingent on the maintenance of a separation between the public (religion-free) and the private or non- public (which may include religion). The debate regarding the feasibility or lack thereof of maintaining this separation has been a matter of concern for democratic theorists for some time, and has been made somewhat more complicated with the growing presence of religious diasporas in liberal democratic states (Charney). In fact, secularism is often cited as a precondition for the existence of religious pluralism. By removing religion from the public domain of the state, religious freedom, in so far as it constitutes the ability of an individual to freely choose which religion, if any, to practice, is deemed to be ensured. However, as Yousif notes, the Western conception of religious freedom is based on a narrow notion of religion as a personal matter, possibly a private emotional response to the idea of God, separate from the rational aspects of life which reside in the public domain. Arguably, religion is conceived of as recognising (or creating) a supernatural dimension to life that involves faith and belief, and the suspension of rational thought. This Western notion of religion as separate from the state, dividing the private from the public sphere, is constructed as a necessary basis for the liberal democratic commitment to secularism, and the notional equality of all religions, or none. Rawls questioned how people with conflicting political views and ideologies can freely endorse a common political regime in secular nations. The answer, he posits, lies in the conception of justice as a mechanism to regulate society independently of plural (and often opposing) religious or political conceptions. Thus, secularism can be constructed as an indicator of pluralism and justice; and political reason becomes the “common currency of debate in a pluralist society” (Charney 7). A corollary of this is that religious minorities must learn to use the language of political reason to represent and articulate their views and opinions in the public context, especially when talking with non-religious others. This imposes a need for religious minorities to support their views and opinions with political reason that appeals to the community at large as citizens, and not just to members of the minority religion concerned. The common ground becomes one of secularism, in which all speakers are deemed to be indifferent as to the (private) claims of religion upon believers. Minority religious groups, such as fundamentalist Mormons, invoke secular language of moral tolerance and civil rights to be acknowledged by the state, and to carry out their door-to-door ‘information’ evangelisation/campaigns. Right wing fundamentalist Christian groups and Catholics opposed to abortion couch their views in terms of an extension of the secular right to life, and in terms of the human rights and civil liberties of the yet-to-be-born. In doing this, these religious groups express an acceptance of the plurality of the liberal state and engage in debates in the public sphere through the language of political values and political principles of the liberal democratic state. The same principles do not apply within their own associations and communities where the language of the private religious realm prevails, and indeed is expected. This embracing of a political rhetoric for discussions of religion in the public sphere presents a dilemma for the Muslim diaspora in liberal democratic states. For many Muslims, religion is a complete way of life, incapable of compartmentalisation. The narrow Western concept of religious expression as a private matter is somewhat alien to Muslims who are either unable or unwilling to separate their religious needs from their needs as citizens of the nation state. Problems become apparent when religious needs challenge what seems to be publicly acceptable, and conflicts occur between what the state perceives to be matters of rational state interest and what Muslims perceive to be matters of religious identity. Muslim women’s groups in Western Australia for example have for some years discussed the desirability of a Sharia divorce court which would enable Muslims to obtain divorces according to Islamic law. It should be noted here that not all Muslims agree with the need for such a court and many – probably a majority – are satisfied with the existing processes that allow Muslim men and women to obtain a divorce through the Australian family court. For some Muslims however, this secular process does not satisfy their religious needs and it is perceived as having an adverse impact on their ability to adhere to their faith. A similar situation pertains to divorced Catholics who, according to a strict interpretation of their doctrine, are unable to take the Eucharist if they form a subsequent relationship (even if married according to the state), unless their prior marriage has been annulled by the Catholic Church or their previous partner has died. Whereas divorce is considered by the state as a public and legal concern, for some Muslims and others it is undeniably a religious matter. The suggestion by the Anglican Communion’s Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, that the adoption of certain aspects of Sharia law regarding marital disputes or financial matters is ultimately unavoidable, sparked controversy in Britain and in Australia. Attempts by some Australian Muslim scholars to elaborate on Dr Williams’s suggestions, such as an article by Anisa Buckley in The Herald Sun (Buckley), drew responses that, typically, called for Muslims to ‘go home’. A common theme in these responses is that proponents of Sharia law (and Islam in general) do not share a commitment to the Australian values of freedom and equality. The following excerpts from the online pages of Herald Sun Readers’ Comments (Herald Sun) demonstrate this perception: “These people come to Australia for freedoms they have never experienced before and to escape repression which is generally brought about by such ‘laws’ as Sharia! How very dare they even think that this would be an option. Go home if you want such a regime. Such an insult to want to come over to this country on our very goodwill and our humanity and want to change our systems and ways. Simply, No!” Posted 1:58am February 12, 2008 “Under our English derived common law statutes, the law is supposed to protect an individual’s rights to life, liberty and property. That is the basis of democracy in Australia and most other western nations. Sharia law does not adequately share these philosophies and principles, thus it is incompatible with our system of law.” Posted 12:55am February 11, 2008 “Incorporating religious laws in the secular legal system is just plain wrong. No fundamentalist religion (Islam in particular) is compatible with a liberal-democracy.” Posted 2:23pm February 10, 2008 “It should not be allowed in Australia the Muslims come her for a better life and we give them that opportunity but they still believe in covering them selfs why do they even come to Australia for when they don’t follow owe [our] rules but if we went to there [their] country we have to cover owe selfs [sic]” Posted 11:28am February 10, 2008 Conflicts similar to this one – over any overt or non-private religious practice in Australia – may also be observed in public debates concerning the wearing of traditional Islamic dress; the slaughter of animals for consumption; Islamic burial rites, and other religious practices which cannot be confined to the private realm. Such conflicts highlight the inability of the rational liberal approach to solve all controversies arising from religious traditions that enjoin a broader world view than merely private spirituality. In order to adhere to the liberal reduction of religion to the private sphere, Muslims in the West must negotiate some religious practices that are constructed as being at odds with the rational state and practice a form of Islam that is consistent with secularism. At the extreme, this Western-acceptable form is what the Australian government has termed ‘moderate Islam’. The implication here is that, for the state, ‘non-moderate Islam’ – Islam that pervades the public realm – is just a descriptor away from ‘extreme’. The divide between Christianity and Islam has been historically played out in European Christendom as a refusal to recognise Islam as a world religion, preferring instead to classify it according to race or ethnicity: a Moorish tendency, perhaps. The secular state prefers to engage with Muslims as an ethnic, linguistic or cultural group or groups (Yousif). Thus, in order to engage with the state as political citizens, Muslims must find ways to present their needs that meet the expectations of the state – ways that do not use their religious identity as a frame of reference. They can do this by utilizing the language of political reason in the public domain or by framing their needs, views and opinions exclusively in terms of their ethnic or cultural identity with no reference to their shared faith. Neither option is ideal, or indeed even viable. This is partly because many Muslims find it difficult if not impossible to separate their religious needs from their needs as political citizens; and also because the prevailing perception of Muslims in the media and public arena is constructed on the basis of an understanding of Islam as a religion that conflicts with the values of liberal democracy. In the media and public arena, little consideration is given to the vast differences that exist among Muslims in Australia, not only in terms of ethnicity and culture, but also in terms of practice and doctrine (Shia or Sunni). The dominant construction of Muslims in the Australian popular media is of religious purists committed to annihilating liberal, secular governments and replacing them with anti-modernist theocratic regimes (Brasted). It becomes a talking point for some, for example, to realise that there are international campaigns to recognise Gay Muslims’ rights within their faith (ABC) (in the same way that there are campaigns to recognise Gay Christians as full members of their churches and denominations and equally able to hold high office, as followers of the Anglican Communion will appreciate). Secularism, Preference and Equality Modood asserts that the extent to which a minority religious community can fully participate in the public and political life of the secular nation state is contingent on the extent to which religion is the primary marker of identity. “It may well be the case therefore that if a faith is the primary identity of any community then that community cannot fully identify with and participate in a polity to the extent that it privileges a rival faith. Or privileges secularism” (60). Modood is not saying here that Islam has to be privileged in order for Muslims to participate fully in the polity; but that no other religion, nor secularism, should be so privileged. None should be first, or last, among equals. For such a situation to occur, Islam would have to be equally acceptable both with other religions and with secularism. Following a 2006 address by the former treasurer (and self-avowed Christian) Peter Costello to the Sydney Institute, in which Costello suggested that people who feel a dual claim from both Islamic law and Australian law should be stripped of their citizenship (Costello), the former Prime Minister, John Howard, affirmed what he considers to be Australia’s primary identity when he stated that ‘Australia’s core set of values flowed from its Anglo Saxon identity’ and that any one who did not embrace those values should not be allowed into the country (Humphries). The (then) Prime Minister’s statement is an unequivocal assertion of the privileged position of the Anglo Saxon tradition in Australia, a tradition with which many Muslims and others in Australia find it difficult to identify. Conclusion Religious identity is increasingly becoming the identity of choice for Muslims in Australia, partly because it is perceived that their faith is under attack and that it needs defending (Aly). They construct the defence of their faith as a choice and an obligation; but also as a right that they have under Australian law as equal citizens in a secular state (Aly and Green). Australian Muslims who have no difficulty in reconciling their core Australianness with their deep faith take it as a responsibility to live their lives in ways that model the reconciliation of each identity – civil and religious – with the other. In this respect, the political call to Australian Muslims to embrace a ‘moderate Islam’, where this is seen as an Islam without a public or political dimension, is constructed as treating their faith as less than equal. Religious identity is generally deemed to have no place in the liberal democratic model, particularly where that religion is constructed to be at odds with the principles and values of liberal democracy, namely tolerance and adherence to the rule of law. Indeed, it is as if the national commitment to secularism rules as out-of-bounds any identity that is grounded in religion, giving precedence instead to accepting and negotiating cultural and ethnic differences. Religion becomes a taboo topic in these terms, an affront against secularism and the values of the Enlightenment that include liberty and equality. In these circumstances, it is not the case that all religions are equally ignored in a secular framework. What is the case is that the secular framework has been constructed as a way of ‘privatising’ one religion, Christianity; leaving others – including Islam – as having nowhere to go. Islam thus becomes constructed as less than equal since it appears that, unlike Christians, Muslims are not willing to play the secular game. In fact, Muslims are puzzling over how they can play the secular game, and why they should play the secular game, given that – as is the case with Christians – they see no contradiction in performing ‘good Muslim’ and ‘good Australian’, if given an equal chance to embrace both. Acknowledgements This paper is based on the findings of an Australian Research Council Discovery Project, 2005-7, involving 10 focus groups and 60 in-depth interviews. The authors wish to acknowledge the participation and contributions of WA community members. References ABC. “A Jihad for Love.” Life Matters (Radio National), 21 Feb. 2008. 11 March 2008. < http://www.abc.net.au/rn/lifematters/stories/2008/2167874.htm >.Aly, Anne. “Australian Muslim Responses to the Discourse on Terrorism in the Australian Popular Media.” Australian Journal of Social Issues 42.1 (2007): 27-40.Aly, Anne, and Lelia Green. “‘Moderate Islam’: Defining the Good Citizen.” M/C Journal 10.6/11.1 (2008). 13 April 2008 < http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0804/08aly-green.php >.Aly, Anne, and David Walker. “Veiled Threats: Recurrent Anxieties in Australia.” Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs 27.2 (2007): 203-14.Brasted, Howard.V. “Contested Representations in Historical Perspective: Images of Islam and the Australian Press 1950-2000.” Muslim Communities in Australia. Eds. Abdullah Saeed and Akbarzadeh, Shahram. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2001. 206-28.Brown, Chris. “Narratives of Religion, Civilization and Modernity.” Worlds in Collision: Terror and the Future of Global Order. Eds. Ken Booth and Tim Dunne. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. 293-324. Buckley, Anisa. “Should We Allow Sharia Law?” Sunday Herald Sun 10 Feb. 2008. 8 March 2008 < http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,231869735000117,00.html >.Bush, George. W. “President Outlines War Effort: Remarks by the President at the California Business Association Breakfast.” California Business Association 2001. 17 April 2007 < http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/10/20011017-15.html >.———. “Statement by the President in His Address to the Nation”. 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Cookbooks can be interpreted as sites of exchange and transformation. This is not only due to their practical use as written instructions that assist in turning ingredients into dishes, but also to their significance as interconnecting mediums between teacher and student, perceiver and perceived, past and present. Hinging on inescapable notions of apprenticeship, occasion, and the passing of time—and being at once familiar and unfamiliar to both the reader and the writer—the recipe “as text” renders a specific brand of culinary uncanny. In outlining the function of cookbooks as chronicles of the everyday, Janet Theophano points out that they “are one of a variety of written forms, such as diaries and journals, that [people] have adapted to recount and enrich their lives […] blending raw ingredients into a new configuration” (122). The cookbook unveils the peculiar ability of the ephemeral “text” to find permanence and materiality through the embodied framework action and repetition. In view of its propensity to be read, evaluated, and reconfigured, the cookbook can be read as a manifestation of voice, a site of interpretation and communication between writer and reader which is defined not by static assessment, but by dynamic and often incongruous exchanges of emotions, mysteries, and riddles. Taking the in-between status of the cookbook as point of departure, this paper analyses the cookbook as a “living dead” entity, a revenant text bridging the gap between the ephemerality of the word and the tangibility of the physical action. Using Joanne Harris’s fictional treatment of the trans-generational cookbook in Five Quarters of the Orange (2001) as an evocative example, the cookbook is read as a site of “memory, mourning and melancholia” which is also inevitably connected—in its aesthetic, political and intellectual contexts—to the concept of “return.” The “dead” voice in the cookbook is resurrected through practice. Re-enacting instructions brings with it a sense of transformative exchange that, in both its conceptual and factual dimensions, recalls those uncanny structural principles that are the definitive characteristic of the Gothic. These find particular resonance, at least as far as cookbooks are concerned, in “a sense of the unspeakable” and a “correspondence between dreams, language, writing” (Castricano 13). Understanding the cookbook as a “Gothic text” unveils one of the most intriguing aspects of the recipe as a vault of knowledge and memory that, in an appropriately mysterious twist, can be connected to the literary framework of the uncanny through the theme of “live burial.” As an example of the written word, a cookbook is a text that “calls” to the reader; that call is not only sited in interpretation—as it can be arguably claimed for the majority of written texts—but it is also strongly linked to a sense of lived experience on the writer’s part. This connection between “presences” is particularly evident in examples of cookbooks belonging to what is known as “autobiographical cookbooks”, a specific genre of culinary writing where “recipes play an integral part in the revelation of the personal history” (Kelly 258). Known examples from this category include Alice B. Toklas’s famous Cook Book (1954) and, more recently, Nigel Slater’s Toast (2003). In the autobiographical cookbook, the food recipes are fully intertwined with the writer’s memories and experiences, so that the two things, as Kelly suggests, “could not be separated” (258). The writer of this type of cookbook is, one might venture to argue, always present, always “alive”, indistinguishable and indivisible from the experience of any recipe that is read and re-enacted. The culinary phantom—understood here as the “voice” of the writer and how it re-lives through the re-enacted recipe—functions as a literary revenant through the culturally prescribed readability of the recipes as a “transtextual” (Rashkin 45) piece. The term, put forward by Esther Rashkin, suggests a close relationship between written and “lived” narratives that is reliant on encrypted messages of haunting, memory, and spectrality (45). This fundamental concept—essential to grasp the status of cookbooks as a haunted text—helps us to understand the writer and instructor of recipes as “being there” without necessarily being present. The writers of cookbooks are phantomised in that their presence—recalling the materiality of action and motion—is buried alive in the pages of the cookbook. It remains tacit and unheard until it is resurrected through reading and recreating the recipe. Although this idea of “coming alive” finds resonance in virtually all forms of textual exchange, the phantomatic nature of the relationship between writer and reader finds its most tangible expression in the cookbook precisely because of the practical and “lived in” nature of the text itself. While all texts, Jacques Derrida suggests, call to us to inherit their knowledge through “secrecy” and choice, cookbooks are specifically bound to a dynamic injunction of response, where the reader transforms the written word into action, and, in so doing, revives the embodied nature of the recipe as much as it resurrects the ghostly presence of its writer (Spectres of Marx 158). As a textual medium housing kitchen phantoms, cookbooks designate “a place” that, as Derrida puts it, draws attention to the culinary manuscript’s ability to communicate a legacy that, although not “natural, transparent and univocal”, still calls for an “interpretation” whose textual choices form the basis of enigma, inhabitation, and haunting (Spectres of Marx 16). It is this mystery that animates the interaction between memory, ghostly figures and recipes in Five Quarters of the Orange. Whilst evoking Derrida’s understanding of the written texts as a site of secrecy, exchange and (one may argue) haunting, Harris simultaneously illustrates Kelly’s contention that the cookbook breaks the barriers between the seemingly common everyday and personal narratives. In the story, Framboise Dartigen—a mysterious woman in her sixties—returns to the village of her childhood in the Loire region of France. Here she rescues the old family farm from fifty years of abandonment and under the acquired identity of the veuve Simone, opens a local crêperie, serving simple, traditional dishes. Harris stresses how, upon her return to the village, Framboise brings with her resentment, shameful family secrets and, most importantly, her mother Mirabelle’s “album”: a strange hybrid of recipe book and diary, written during the German occupation of the Loire region in World War II. The recipe album was left to Framboise as an inheritance after her mother’s death: “She gave me the album, valueless, then, except for the thoughts and insights jotted in the margins alongside recipes and newspaper cuttings and herbal cures. Not a diary, precisely; there are no dates in the album, no precise order” (Harris 14). It soon becomes clear that Mirabelle had an extraordinary relationship with her recipe album, keeping it as a life transcript in which food preparation figures as a main focus of attention: “My mother marked the events in her life with recipes, dishes of her own invention or interpretations of old favourites. Food was her nostalgia, her celebration, its nurture and preparation the sole outlet for her creativity” (14). The album is described by Framboise as her mother’s only confidant, its pages the sole means of expression of events, thoughts and preoccupations. In this sense, the recipes contain knowledge of the past and, at the same time, come to represent a trans-temporal coordinate from which to begin understanding Mirabelle’s life and the social situations she experienced while writing the album. As the cookery album acts as a medium of self-representation for Mirabelle, Harris also gestures towards the idea that recipes offer an insight into a person that history may have otherwise forgotten. The culinary album in Five Quarters of the Orange establishes itself as a bonding element and a trans-temporal gateway through which an exchange ensues between mother and daughter. The etymological origin of the word “recipe” offers a further insight into the nature of the exchange. The word finds its root in the Latin word reciperere, meaning simultaneously “to give and to receive” (Floyd and Forster 6). Mirabelle’s recipes are not only the textual representation of the patterns and behaviours on which her life was based but, most importantly, position themselves in a process of an uncanny exchange. Acting as the surrogate of the long-passed Mirabelle, the album’s existence as a haunted culinary document ushers in the possibility of secrets and revelations, contradictions, and concealment. On numerous occasions, Framboise confesses that the translation of the recipe book was a task with which she did not want to engage. Forcing herself, she describes the reading as a personal “struggle” (276). Fearing what the book could reveal—literally, the recipes of a lifetime—she suspects that the album will demand a deep involvement with her mother’s existence: “I had avoided looking at the album, feeling absurdly at fault, a voyeuse, as if my mother might come in at any time and see me reading her strange secrets. Truth is, I didn’t want to know her secrets” (30). On the one hand, Framboise’s fear could be interpreted as apprehension at the prospect of unveiling unpleasant truths. On the other, she is reluctant to re-live her mother’s emotions, passions and anxieties, feeling they may actually be “sublimated into her recipes” (270). Framboise’s initial resistance to the secrets of the recipe book is quickly followed by an almost obsessive quest to “translate” the text: “I read through the album little by little during those lengthening nights. I deciphered the code [and] wrote down and cross-referenced everything by means of small cards, trying to put everything in sequence” (225). As Harris exposes Framboise’s personal struggle in unravelling Mirabelle’s individual history, the daughter’s hermeneutic excavation into the past is problematised by her mother’s strange style: “The language […] in which much of the album was written was alien to me, and after a few abortive attempts to decipher it, I abandoned the idea […] the mad scrawlings, poems, drawings and accounts […] were written with no apparent logic, no order that I could discover” (31). Only after a period of careful interpretation does Framboise understand the confused organisation of her mother’s culinary thoughts. Once the daughter has decoded the recipes, she is able to use them: “I began to make cakes [...] the brioche and pain d’épices of the region, as well as some [...] Breton specialties, packets of crêpes dentelle, fruit tarts and packs de sablés, biscuits, nutbread, cinnamon snaps [...] I used my mother’s old recipes” (22). As Framboise engages with her mother’s album, Mirabelle’s memory is celebrated in the act of reading, deciphering, and recreating the recipes. As a metaphorically buried collection waiting to be interpreted, the cookbook is the catalyst through which the memory of Mirabelle can be passed to her daughter and live on. Discussing the haunted nature of texts, Derrida suggests that once one interprets a text written by another, that text “comes back” and “lives on” (‘Roundtable on Translation’ 158). In this framework of return and exchange, the replication of the Mirabelle’s recipes, by her daughter Framboise, is the tangible expression of the mother’s life. As the collective history of wartime France and the memory of Mirabelle’s life are reaffirmed in the cookbook, the recipes allow Framboise to understand what is “staring [her] in the face”, and finally see “the reason for her [mother’s] actions and the terrible repercussions on [her] own” life (268). As the process of culinary translating takes place, it becomes clear that her deceased mother’s album conceals a legacy that goes beyond material possessions. Mirabelle “returns” through the cookbook and that return, in Jodey Castricano’s words, “acts as inheritance.” In the hauntingly autobiographical context of the culinary album, the mother’s phantom and the recipes become “inseparable” (29). Within the resistant and at times contradictory framework of the Gothic text, legacy is always passed on through a process of haunting which must be accepted in order to understand and decode the writing. This exchange becomes even more significant when cookbooks are concerned, since the intended engagement with the recipes is one of acceptance and response. When the cookbook “calls”, the reader is asked “to respond to an injunction” (Castricano 17). In this framework, Mirabelle’s album in Five Quarters of the Orange becomes the haunted channel through which the reader can communicate with her “ghost” or, to be more specific, her “spectral signature.” In these terms, the cookbook is a vector for reincarnation and haunting, while recipes themselves function as the vehicle for the parallel consciousness of culinary phantoms to find a status of reincarnated identification through their connection to a series of repeated gestures. The concept of “phantom” here is particularly useful in the understanding put forward by Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok—and later developed by Derrida and Castricano—as “the buried speech of another”, the shadow of perception and experience that returns through the subject’s text (Castricano 11). In the framework of the culinary, the phantom returns in the cookbook through an interaction between the explicit or implied “I” of the recipe’s instructions, and the physical and psychological dimension of the “you” that finds lodging in the reader as re-enactor. In the cookbook, the intertextual relationship between the reader’s present and the writer’s past can be identified, as Rashkin claims, “in narratives organised by phantoms” (45). Indeed, as Framboise’s relationship with the recipe book is troubled by her mother’s spectral presence, it becomes apparent that even the writing of the text was a mysterious process. Mirabelle’s album, in places, offers “cryptic references” (14): moments that are impenetrable, indecipherable, enigmatic. This is a text written “with ghosts”: “the first page is given to my father’s death—the ribbon of his Légion d’Honneur pasted thickly to the paper beneath a blurry photograph and a neat recipe for buck-wheat pancakes—and carries a kind of gruesome humour. Under the picture my mother has pencilled 'Remember—dig up Jerusalem artichokes. Ha! Ha! Ha!'” (14). The writing of the recipe book is initiated by the death of Mirabelle’s husband, Yannick, and his passing is marked by her wish to eradicate from the garden the Jerusalem artichokes which, as it is revealed later, were his favourite food. According to culinary folklore, Jerusalem artichokes are meant to be highly “spermatogenic”, so their consumption can make men fertile (Amato 3). Their uprooting from Mirabelle’s garden, after the husband’s death, signifies the loss of male presence and reproductive function, as if Mirabelle herself were rejecting the symbol of Yannick’s control of the house. Her bittersweet, mocking comments at this disappearance—the insensitive “Ha! Ha! Ha!”—are indicative of Mirabelle’s desire to detach herself from the restraints of married life. Considering women’s traditional function as family cooks, her happiness at the lack of marital duties extends to the kitchen as much as to the bedroom. The destruction of Yannick’s artichokes is juxtaposed with a recipe for black-wheat pancakes which the family then “ate with everything” (15). It is at this point that Framboise recalls suddenly and with a sense of shock that her mother never mentioned her father after his death. It is as if a mixture of grief and trauma animate Mirabelle’s feeling towards her deceased husband. The only confirmation of Yannick’s existence persists in the pages of the cookbook through Mirabelle’s occasional use of the undecipherable “bilini-enverlini”, a language of “inverted syllables, reversed words, nonsense prefixes and suffices”: “Ini tnawini inoti plainexini [...] Minini toni nierus niohwbi inoti” (42). The cryptic language was, we are told, “invented” by Yannick, who used to “speak it all the time” (42). Yannick’s presence thus is inscribed in the album, which is thereby transformed into an evocative historical document. Although he disappears from his wife’s everyday life, Yannick’s ghost—to which the recipe book is almost dedicated on the initial page—remains and haunts the pages. The cryptic cookbook is thus also a “crypt.” In their recent, quasi-Gothic revision of classical psychoanalysis, Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok write about the trauma of loss in relation to psychic crypts. In mourning a loved one, they argue, the individual can slip into melancholia by erecting what they call an “inner crypt.” In the psychological crypt, the dead—or, more precisely, the memory of the dead—can be hidden or introjectively “devoured”, metaphorically speaking, as a way of denying its demise. This form of introjection—understood here in clear connection to the Freudian concept of literally “consuming” one’s enemy—is interpreted as the “normal” progression through which the subject accepts the death of a loved one and slowly removes its memory from consciousness. However, when this process of detachment encounters resistance, a “crypt” is formed. The crypt maps, as Abraham and Torok claim, the psychological topography of “the untold and unsayable secret, the feeling unfelt, the pain denied” (21). In its locus of mystery and concealment, the crypt is haunted by the memory of the dead which, paradoxically, inhabits it as a “living-dead.” Through the crypt, the dead can “return” to disturb consciousness. In Five Quarters of the Orange, the encoded nature of Mirabelle’s recipes—emerging as such on multiple levels of interpretation—enables the memory of Yannick to “return” within the writing itself. In his preface to Abraham and Torok’s The Wolf-Man’s Magic Word, Derrida argues that the psychological crypt houses “the ghost that comes haunting out the Unconscious of the other” (‘Fors’ xxi). Mirabelle’s cookbook might therefore be read as an encrypted reincarnation of her husband’s ghostly memory. The recipe book functions as the encrypted passageway through which the dead re-join the living in a responsive cycle of exchange and experience. Writing, in this sense, re-creates the subject through the culinary framework and transforms the cookbook into a revenant text colonised by the living-dead. Abraham and Torok suggest that “reconstituted from the memories of words, scenes and affects, the objective correlative of loss is buried alive in the crypt” (130). With this idea in mind, it is possible to suggest that, among Mirabelle’s recipes, the Gothicised Yannick inhabits a culinary crypt. It is through his associations with both the written and the practical dimension food that he remains, to borrow Derrida’s words, a haunting presence that Mirabelle is “perfectly willing to keep alive” within the bounds of the culinary vault (‘Fors’ xxi). As far as the mourning crypt is concerned, the exchange of consciousness that is embedded in the text takes place by producing a level of experiential concealment, based on the overarching effect of Gothicised interiority. Derrida remarks that “the crypt from which the ghost comes back belongs to someone else” (‘Fors’ 119). This suggestion throws into sharp relief the ability of the cookbook as a haunted text to draw the reader into a process of consciousness transmission and reception that is always and necessarily a form of “living-dead” exchange. In these terms, the recipe itself—especially in its embodiment as instructed actions—needs to be understood as a vector for establishing the uncanny barriers of signification erected by the bounds of the cookbook itself as a haunted site of death, enchantment, and revenant signs. In this way, eating, a vital and animated activity, is “disturbingly blended with death, decomposition and the corpse” (Piatti-Farnell 146). And far from simply providing nourishment for the living, Mirabelle’s encrypted recipes continue to feed the dead through cycles of mourning and melancholia. Mirabelle’s cookbook, therefore, becomes a textual example of “cryptomimeses”, a writing practice that, echoing the convention of the Gothic framework, generates its ghostly effects through embodying the structures of remembrance and the dynamics of autobiographic deconstructive writing (Castricano 8). As heimliche and unheimliche collide in practices of culinary reading and writing, the cookbook acts as quasi-mystical, haunted space through which the uncanny frameworks of language and experience can become actualised. ReferencesAbraham, Nicolas, and Maria Torok, The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1994. Amato, Joseph. The Great Jerusalem Artichoke Circus. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993. Castricano, Jodey. Cryptomimesis: The Gothic and Jacques Derrida’s Ghost Writing. London: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2003. Derrida, Jacques. “Fors: the Anglish words of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok.” Eds. Nicholas Abraham, and Maria Torok. The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonomy. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Pr, 1986. xi–xlviii ---. “Roundtable on Translation.” The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation. London: U of Nebraska P, 1985. 91–161. Floyd, Janet, and Laurel Foster. The Recipe Reader: Narratives–Contexts–Traditions. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003. Harris, Joanne. Five Quarters of the Orange. Maidenhead: Black Swan, 2002. Kelly, Traci Marie. “‘If I Were a Voodoo Priestess’: Women’s Culinary Autobiographies.” Kitchen Culture in America: Popular Representations of Food, Gender and Race. Ed. Sherrie A. Inness. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2001. 251–70. Piatti-Farnell, Lorna. Food and Culture in Contemporary American Fiction. New York: Routledge, 2011. Rashkin, Esther. Family Secrets and the Psychoanalysis of Narrative. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992. Slater, Nigel. Toast: The Story of a Boy’s Hunger. London: Harper Perennial, 2004. Theophano, Janet. Eat My Words: Reading Women’s Lives Through The Cookbooks They Wrote. New York: Palgrave, 2002. Toklas, Alice B. The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book. New York: Perennial,1984.

In one of the earliest films about a whistleblower, On the Waterfront (1954), the dock worker Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando), who also works for the union boss and mobster Johnny Friendly (Lee J. Cobb), decides to testify in court against him and uncover corruption and murder. By doing so he will not only suffer retribution from Friendly but also be seen as a “stool pigeon” by his co-workers, friends, and neighbours who will shun him, and he will be “marked” forever by his deed. Nonetheless, he decides to do the right thing. Already it is clear that in most cases the whistleblowers are not simply the ones who reveal things, but they themselves are also revealed.My aim in this article is to explore the depiction of Edward Snowden and Julian Assange in fiction film and its connection to what I would like to call, with Slavoj Žižek, “Hollywood ideology”; the heroisation of the “ordinary guy” against a big institution or a corrupt individual, as it is the case in Snowden (2016) on the one hand, and at the same time the impossibility of true systemic critique when the one who is criticising is “outside of the system”, as Assange in The Fifth Estate (2013). Both films also rely on the notion of individualism and convey conflicting messages in regard to understanding the perception of whistleblowers today. Snowden and AssangeAlthough there are many so called “whistleblower films” since On the Waterfront, like Serpico (1973), All the President’s Men (1976), or Silkwood (1983), to name but a few (for a comprehensive list see https://ew.com/movies/20-whistleblower-movies-to-watch/?), in this article I will focus on the most recent films that deal with Edward Snowden and Julian Assange. These are the most prominent cases of whistleblowing in the last decade put to film. They are relevant today also regarding their subject matter—privacy. Revealing secrets that concern privacy in this day and age is of importance and is pertinent even to the current Coronavirus crisis, where the question of privacy again arises in form of possible tracking apps, in the age of ever expanding “surveillance capitalism” (Zuboff).Even if Assange is not strictly speaking a whistleblower, an engagement with his work in this context is indispensable since his outsider status, up to a point, resembles those of Snowden or Manning. They are not only important because they can be considered as “authentic heroe[s] of our time” (Žižek, Pandemic, 7), but also because of their depiction which differs in a very crucial way: while Snowden is depicted as a “classic” whistleblower (an American patriot who did his duty, someone from the “inside”), Assange’s action are coming from the outside of the established system and are interpreted as a selfish act, as it is stated in the film: “It was always about him.”Whistleblowers In his Whistleblower’s Handbook, Kohn writes: “who are these whistleblowers? Sometimes they are people you read about with admiration in the newspaper. Other times they are your co-workers or neighbours. However, most whistleblowers are regular workers performing their jobs” (Kohn, xi). A whistleblower, as the employee or a “regular worker”, can be regarded as someone who is a “nobody” at first, an invisible “cog in the wheel” of a certain institution, a supposedly devoted and loyal worker, who, through an act of “betrayal”, becomes a “somebody”. They do something truly significant, and by doing so becomes a hero to some and a traitor to others. Their persona suddenly becomes important.The wrongdoings that are uncovered by the whistleblower are for the most part not simply isolated missteps, but of a systemic nature, like the mass surveillance by the National Security Agency (NSA) uncovered by Snowden. The problem with narratives that deal with whistleblowing is that the focus inevitably shifts from the systemic problem (surveillance, war crimes, etc.) to the whistleblower as an individual. Moretti states that the interest of the media regarding whistleblowing, if one compares the reactions to the leaking of the “Pentagon Papers” regarding the Vietnam War in the 1970s by Daniel Ellsberg and to Snowden’s discoveries, shifted from the deed itself to the individual. In the case of Ellsberg, Moretti writes:the legitimate questions were not about him and what motivated him, but rather inquiry on (among other items) the relationship between government and media; whether the U.S. would be damaged militarily or diplomatically because of the release of the papers; the extent to which the media were acting as watchdogs; and why Americans needed to know about these items. (8)This shift of public interest goes along, according to Moretti, with the corporate ownership of media (7), where profit is the primary goal and therefore sensationalism is the order of the day, which is inextricably linked to the focus on the “scandalous” individual. The selfless and almost self-effacing act of whistleblowing becomes a narrative that constructs the opposite: yet another determined individual that through their sheer willpower achieves their goal, a notion that conforms to neoliberal ideology.Hollywood IdeologyThe endings of All the President’s Men and The Harder They Fall (1956), another early whistleblower film, twenty years apart, are very similar: they show the journalist eagerly typing away on his typewriter a story that will, in the case of the former, bring down the president of the United States and in the latter, bring an end to arranged fights in the boxing sport. This depiction of the free press vanquishing the evil doers, as Žižek states it, is exactly the point where “Hollywood ideology” becomes visible, which is:the ideology of such Hollywood blockbusters as All the President’s Men and The Pelican Brief, in which a couple of ordinary guys discover a scandal which reaches up to the president, forcing him to step down. Corruption is shown to reach the very top, yet the ideology of such works resides in their upbeat final message: what a great country ours must be, when a couple of ordinary guys like you and me can bring down the president, the mightiest man on Earth! (“Good Manners”)This message is of course part of Hollywood’s happy-ending convention that can be found even in films that deal with “serious” subject matters. The point of the happy end in this case is that before it is finally reached, the film can show corruption (Serpico), wrongdoings of big companies (The Insider, 1999), or sexual harassment (North Country, 2005). It is important that in the end all is—more or less—good. The happy ending need not necessarily be even truly “happy”—this depends on the general notion the film wants to convey (see for instance the ending of Silkwood, where the whistleblower is presumed to have been killed in the end). What is important in the whistleblower film is that the truth is out, justice has been served in one way or the other, the status quo has been re-established, and most importantly, there is someone out there who cares.These films, even when they appear to be critical of “the system”, are there to actually reassure their audiences in the workings of said system, which is (liberal) democracy supported by neoliberal capitalism (Frazer). Capitalism, on the other hand, is supported by the ideology of individualism which functions as a connecting tissue between the notions of democracy, capitalism, and film industry, since we are admiring exceptional individuals in performing acts of great importance. This, in turn, is encapsulated by the neoliberal mantra—“anyone can make it, only if they try heard enough”. As Bauman puts it more concretely, the risks and contradictions in a society are produced socially but are supposed to be solved individually (46).Individualism, as a part of the neoliberal capitalist ideology, is described already by Milton Friedman, who sees the individual as the “ultimate entity in the society” and the freedom of the individual as the “ultimate goal” within this society (12). What makes this an ideology is the fact that, in reality, the individual, or in the context of the market, the entrepreneur, is always-already tethered to and supported by the state, as Varoufakis has successfully proven (“Varoufakis/Chomsky discussion”). Therefore individualism is touted as an ideal to strive for, while for neoliberalism in order to function, the state is indispensable, which is often summed up in the formula “socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor” (Polychroniou). The heroic Hollywood individual, as shown in the whistleblower film, regardless of real-life events, is the perfect embodiment of individualist ideology of neoliberal capitalism—we are not seeing a stylised version of it, a cowboy or a masked vigilante, but a “real” person. It is paradoxically precisely the realism that we see in such films that makes them ideological: the “based on a true story” preamble and all the historical details that are there in order to create a fulfilling cinematic experience. All of this supports its ideology because, as Žižek writes, “the function of ideology is not to offer us a point of escape from our reality but to offer us the social reality itself as an escape from some traumatic, real kernel” (Sublime Object 45). All the while Snowden mostly adheres to Hollywood ideology, The Fifth Estate also focuses on individualism, but goes in a different direction, and is more problematic – in the former we see the “ordinary guy” as the American hero, in the latter a disgruntled individual who reveals secrets of others for strictly personal reasons.SnowdenThere is an aspect of the whistleblower film that rings true and that is connected to Michel Foucault’s notion of power (“Truth and Power”). Snowden, through his employment at the NSA, is within a power relations network of an immensely powerful organisation. He uses “his” power, to expose the mass surveillance by the NSA. It is only through his involvement with this power network that he could get insight into and finally reveal what NSA is doing. Foucault writes that these resistances to power from the inside are “effective because they are formed right at the point where relations of power are exercised; resistance to power does not have to come from elsewhere to be real … It exists all the more by being in the same place as power” (Oushakine 206). In the case of whistleblowing, the resistance to power must come exactly from the inside in order to be effective since whistleblowers occupy the “same place as power” that they are up against and that is what in turn makes them “powerful”.Fig. 1: The Heroic Individual: Edward Snowden in SnowdenBut there is an underside to this. His “relationship” to the power structure he is confronting greatly affects his depiction as a whistleblower within the film—precisely because Snowden, unlike Assange, is someone from inside the system. He can still be seen as a patriot and a “disillusioned idealist” (Scott). In the film this is shown right at the beginning as Snowden, in his hotel room in Hong Kong, tells the documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras (Melissa Leo) and journalist Glenn Greenwald (Zachary Quinto) his name and who he is. The music swells and the film cuts to Snowden in uniform alongside other soldiers during a drill, when he was enlisted in the army before work for the NSA.Snowden resembles many of Stone’s typical characters, the all-American patriot being disillusioned by certain historical events, as in Born on the 4th of July (1989) and JFK (1991), which makes him question the government and its actions. It is generally of importance for a mainstream Hollywood film that the protagonist is relatable in order for the audiences to sympathise with them (Bordwell and Thompson 82). This is important not only regarding personal traits but, I would argue, also political views of the character. There needs to be no doubt in the mind of American audiences when it comes to films that deal with politics, that the protagonists are patriots.Stone’s film profits from this ambivalence in Snowden’s own political stance: at first he is more of a right winger who is a declared fan of Ayn Rand’s conservative-individualist manifesto Atlas Shrugged, then, after meeting his future partner Lindsey Mills, he turns slightly to the left, as he at one point states his support for President Obama. This also underlines the films ambiguity, as Oliver Stone openly stated about his Vietnam War film Platoon (1986) that “it could be embraced by … the right and the left. Essentially, most movies make their money in the middle” (Banff Centre). As Snowden takes the lie detector test as a part of the process of becoming a CIA agent, he confirms, quite sincerely it seems, that he thinks that the United States is the “greatest country in the world” and that the most important day in his life was 9/11. This again confirms his patriotic stance.Snowden is depicted as the exceptional individual, and at the same time the “ordinary guy”, who, through his act of courage, defied the all-powerful USA. During the aforementioned job interview scene, Snowden’s superior, Corbin O’Brian (Rhys Ifans), quotes Ayn Rand to him: “one man can stop the motor of the world”. Snowden states that he also believes that. The quote could serve as the film’s tagline, as a “universal truth” that seems to be at the core of American values and that also coincides with and reaffirms neoliberal ideology. Although it is undeniable that individuals can accomplish extraordinary feats, but when there is no systemic change, those can remain only solitary achievements that are only there to support the neoliberal “cult of the individual”.Snowden stands in total contrast to Assange in regard to his character and private life. There is nothing truly “problematic” about him, he seems to be an almost impeccable person, a “straight arrow”. This should make him a poster boy for American democracy and freedom of speech, and Stone tries to depict him in this way.Still, we are dealing with someone who cannot simply be redeemed as a patriot who did his duty. He cannot be unequivocally hailed as an all-American hero since betraying state secrets (and betrayal in general) is seen as a villainous act. For many Americans, and for the government, he will forever be remembered as a traitor. Greenwald writes that most of the people in the US, according to some surveys, still want to see Snowden in prison, even if they find that the surveillance by the NSA was wrong (365).Snowden remains an outcast and although the ending is not quite happy, since he must live in Russian exile, there is still a sense of an “upbeat final message” that ideologically colours the film’s ending.The Fifth EstateThe Fifth Estate is another example of the ideological view of the individual, but in this case with a twist. The film tries to be “objective” at first, showing the importance and impact of the newly established online platform WikiLeaks. However, towards the end of the film, it proceeds to dismantle Julian Assange (Benedict Cumberbatch) with the “everyone has secrets” platitude, which effectively means that none of us should ever try to reveal any secrets of those in power, since all of us must have our own secrets we do not want revealed. The film is shown from the perspective of Assange’s former disgruntled associate Daniel Domscheit-Berg (Daniel Brühl), who wrote a book about his time at WikiLeaks on which the film is partly based on (Inside WikiLeaks). We see Assange through his eyes and delve into personal moments that are supposed to reveal the “truth” about the individual behind the project. In a cynical twist, it is Daniel who is the actual whistleblower, who reveals the secrets of WikiLeaks and its founder.Assange, as it is said in the film, is denounced as a “messiah” or a “prophet”, almost a cult leader who only wants to satisfy his perverse need for other people’s secrets, except that he is literally alone and has no followers and, unlike real cult leaders, needs no followers. The point of whistleblowing is exactly in the fact that it is a radical move, it is a big step forward in ending a wrongdoing. To denounce the radical stance of WikiLeaks is to misunderstand and undermine the whole notion of whistleblowing as a part of true changes in a society.The cult aspects are often referred to in the film when Assange’s childhood is mentioned. His mother was supposed to be in a cult, called “The Family”, and we should regard this as an important (and bad) influence on his character. This notion of the “childhood trauma” seems to be a crutch that is supposed to serve as a characterisation, something the scriptwriting-guru Robert McKee criticises as a screenwriting cliché: “do not reduce characters to case studies (an episode of child abuse is the cliché in vogue at the moment), for in truth there are no definitive explanations for anyone’s behaviour” (376).Although the film does not exaggerate the childhood aspect, it is still a motive that is supposed to shed some light into the “mystery” that is Assange. And it also ties into the question of the colour of his hair as a way of dismantling his lies. In a flashback that resembles a twist ending of an M. Night Shyamalan thriller, it turns out that Assange actually dyes his hair white, witnessed in secret by Daniel, instead of it turning naturally white, as Assange explains on few occasions but stating different reasons for it. Here he seems like a true movie villain and resembles the character of the Joker from The Dark Knight (2008), who also tells different stories about the origin of his facial scars. This mystery surrounding his origin makes the villain even more dangerous and, what is most important, unpredictable.Žižek also draws a parallel between Assange and Joker of the same film, whom he sees as the “figure of truth”, as Batman and the police are using lies in order to “protect” the citizens: “the film’s take-home message is that lying is necessary to sustain public morale: only a lie can redeem us” (“Good Manners”). Rather than interpreting Assange’s role in a positive way, as Žižek does, the film truly establishes him as a villain.Fig. 2: The Problematic Individual: Julian Assange in The Fifth EstateThe Fifth Estate ends with another cheap psychologisation of Assange on Daniel’s part as he describes the “true purpose” of WikiLeaks: “only someone so obsessed with his own secrets could’ve come up with a way to reveal everyone else’s”. This faux-psychological argument paints the whole WikiLeaks endeavour as Assange’s ego-trip and makes of him an egomaniac whose secret perverted pleasure is to reveal the secrets of others.Why is this so? Why are Woodward and Bernstein in All the President’s Men depicted as heroes and Assange is not? The true underlying conflict here is between classic journalism; where journalists can publish their pieces and get the acclaim for publishing the “new Pentagon Papers”, once again ensuring the freedom of the press and “inter-systemic” critique. This way of working of the press, as the films show, always pays off. All the while, in reality, very little changes since, as Žižek writes, the “formal functioning of power” stays in place. He further states about WikiLeaks:The true targets here weren’t the dirty details and the individuals responsible for them; not those in power, in other words, so much as power itself, its structure. We shouldn’t forget that power comprises not only institutions and their rules, but also legitimate (‘normal’) ways of challenging it (an independent press, NGOs, etc.). (“Good Manners”)In the very end, the “real” journalism is being reinforced as the sole vehicle of criticism, while everything else is “extremism” and, again, can only stem from a frustrated, even “evil”, individual. If neoliberal individualism is the order of the day, then the thinking must also revolve around that notion and cannot transcend that horizon.ConclusionŽižek expresses the problem of revealing the truth in our day and age by referring to the famous fable “The Emperor’s New Clothes”, where a child is the only one who is naive and brave enough to state that the emperor is in fact naked. But for Žižek today,in our cynical era, such strategy no longer works, it has lost its disturbing power, since everyone now proclaims that the emperor is naked (that Western democracies are torturing terrorist suspects, that wars are fought for profit, etc., etc.), and yet nothing happens, nobody seems to mind, the system just goes on functioning as if the emperor were fully dressed. (Less than Nothing 92)The problem with the “Collateral Murder”, a video of the killing of Iraqi civilians by the US Army, leaked by Wikileaks and Chelsea Manning, that was presented to the public, for instance, was according to accounts in Inside Wikileaks and Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy, that it did not have the desired impact. The public seems, in the end, to be indifferent to such reveals since it effectively cannot do anything about it. The return to the status quo after these reveals supports this stance, as Greenwald writes that after Snowden’s leaks there was no substantial change within the system; during the Obama administration, there was even an increase of criminal investigations of whistleblowers with an emergence of a “climate of fear” (Greenwald 368). Many whistleblower films assure us that in the end the system works; the good guys always win, the antagonists are punished, and laws have been passed. This is not to be accepted simply as a Hollywood convention, something that we also “already know”, but as an ideological stance, since these films are taken more seriously than films with similar messages but within other mainstream genres. Snowden shows that only individualism has the power to challenge the system, while The Fifth Estate draws the line that should not be crossed when it comes to privacy as a “universal” good because, again, “everyone has secrets”. Such representations of whistleblowing and disruption only further cement the notion that in our societies no real change is possible because it seems unnecessary. Whistleblowing as an act of revelation needs therefore to be understood as only one small step made by the individual that in the end depends on how society and the government decide to act upon it.References All the President’s Men. Dir. Alan J. Pakula. 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Penguin Books, 2000. 111-33.Frazer, Nancy. “From Progressive Neoliberalism to Trump – and Beyond.” American Affairs 1.4 (2017). 19 May. 2020 <https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2017/11/progressive-neoliberalism-trump-beyond/>.Friedman, Milton. Capitalism and Freedom. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1982.“Full Transcript of the Yanis Varoufakis/Noam Chomsky NYPL Discussion.” Yanisvaroufakis.eu, 28 June 2016. 15 Mar. 2020 <https://www.yanisvaroufakis.eu/2016/06/28/full-transcript-of-the-yanis-varoufakis-noam-chomsky-nypl-discussion/>.Greenwald, Glenn. Die globale Überwachung: Der Fall Snowden, die amerikanischen Geheimdienste und die Folgen. München: Knaur, 2015.The Harder They Fall. Dir. Mark Robson. Columbia Pictures. 1956.The Insider. Dir. Michael Mann. Touchstone Pictures, Mann/Roth Productions (a.o.). 1999.JFK. Dir. Oliver Stone. Warner Bros., 1991.Kohn, Stephen Martin. The Whistleblower’s Handbook: A Step-by-Step Guide to Doing What’s Right and Protecting Yourself. Guilford, Lyons P, 2011.Leigh, David, and Luke Harding. WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy. London: Guardian Books, 2011.McKee, Robert. Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting. New York: Harper-Collins, 1997.Moretti, Anthony. “Whistleblower or Traitor: Edward Snowden, Daniel Ellsberg and the Power of Media Celebrity.” Moscow Readings Conference, 14-15 Nov. 2013, Moscow, Russia.North Country. Dir. Niki Caro. Warner Bros., Industry Entertainment (a.o.). 2005.On the Waterfront. Dir. Elia Kazan. Horizon Pictures. 1954.Oushakine, Sergei A. “The Terrifying Mimicry of Samizdat.” Public Culture 13.2 (2001): 191-214.Platoon. Dir. Oliver Stone. Hemdake, Cinema ‘84. 1986.Polychroniou, C.J. “Socialism for the Rich, Capitalism for the Poor: An Interview with Noam Chomsky.” Truthout, 11 Dec. 2016. 25 May 2020 <https://truthout.org/articles/socialism-for-the-rich-capitalism-for-the-poor-an-interview-with-noam-chomsky/>.Scott, A.O. “Review: ‘Snowden,’ Oliver Stone’s Restrained Portrait of a Whistle-Blower.” The New York Times, 15 Sep. 2016. 5 May 2020 <https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/16/movies/snowden-review-oliver-stone-joseph-gordon-levitt.html>. Serpico. Dir. Sidney Lumet. Artists Entertainment Complex, Produzioni De Laurentiis. 1973. Silkwood. Dir. Mike Nichols. ABC Motion Pictures. 1983.Snowden. Dir. Oliver Stone. Krautpack Entertainment, Wild Bunch (a.o.). 2016.Žižek, Slavoj. “Good Manners in the Age of WikiLeaks.” Los Angeles Review of Books 33.2 (2011). 15 May 2020 <https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v33/n02/slavoj-zizek/good-manners-in-the-age-of-wikileaks>.———. Less than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. Verso, 2013.———. Pandemic! COVID-19 Shakes the World. New York: Polity, 2020.———. The Sublime Object of Ideology. Verso, 2008.Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future and the New Frontier of Power. New York: Public Affairs, 2020.

This article analyses the public persona of Jeremy Gilley, a documentary filmmaker, peace campaigner, and the founder of the organisation Peace One Day (POD). It begins by outlining how Gilley’s persona is presented in a manner which resonates with established archetypes of social campaigners, and how this creates POD’s legitimacy among grassroots organisations. I then describe a distinct, but not inconsistent, facet of Gilley’s persona which speaks specifically to entrepreneurs. The article outlines how Gilley’s individuality works to simultaneously address these overlapping audiences and argues that his persona can be read as an articulation of social entrepreneurship. Gilley represents an example of a public personality working to “crystallise issues and to normativise debates” (Marshall “Personifying” 370) concerning corporate involvement with non-profit organisations and the marketisation of the non-profit sector. Peace One Day (POD) is a UK-based non-profit organisation established in 1999 by actor-turned-documentary-filmmaker Jeremy Gilley. In the 1990s, while filming a documentary about global conflict, Gilley realised there was no internationally recognised day of ceasefire and non-violence. He created POD to found such a day and began lobbying the United Nations. In 2001, the 111th plenary meeting of the General Assembly passed a resolution which marked 21 September as the annual International Day of Peace (United Nations). Since 2001, POD has worked to create global awareness of Peace Day. By 2006, other NGOs began using the day to negotiate 24-hour ceasefires in various conflict zones, allowing them to carry out work in areas normally too dangerous to enter. For example, in 2007, the inoculation of 1.3 million Afghan children against polio was possible due to an agreement from the Taliban to allow safe passage to agencies working in the country during the day. This was repeated in subsequent years and, by 2009, 4.5 million children had been immunised (POD Part Three). While neither POD nor Gilley played a direct part in the polio vaccination programmes or specific ceasefires, his organisation acted as a catalyst for such endeavours and these initiatives would not have occurred without POD’s efforts.Gilley is not only the founder of POD, he is also the majority shareholder, key decision-maker, and predominant public spokesperson in this private, non-charitable, non-profit organisation (Frances 73). While POD’s celebrity supporters participate in press conferences, it is Gilley who does most to raise awareness. His public persona is inextricably linked with POD and is created through a range of presentational media with which he is engaged. These include social media content, regular blogposts on POD’s website, as well as appearances at a series of speaking events. Most significantly, Gilley establishes his public persona through a number of documentary films (Peace One Day; Day After; POD Part Three), which are shot largely from his perspective and narrated by his voiceover, and which depict POD’s key struggles and successes.The Peace Campaigner as an Activist and Entrepreneur In common with other non-profit organisations, POD relies on celebrities from the entertainment industries. It works with them in two key ways: raising the public profile of the organisation, and shaping the public persona of its founder by inviting comparisons of their perceived exceptionalness with his ostensible ordinariness. For example, Gilley’s documentaries depict various press conferences held by POD over a number of years. Those organised prior to POD recruiting celebrity spokespeople were “completely ignored by the media” whereas those held after celebrity backing from Jude Law and Angelina Jolie had been secured attracted considerable interest (Day After). Gilley explains his early difficulties in publicising his message by suggesting that he “was a nobody” (POD Part Three). This representation as a “nobody” or, more diplomatically, as “ordinary,” is a central component of Gilley’s persona. “Ordinariness” here means situating Gilley outside the political and entertainment elites and aligning him with more everyday suburban settings. This is done through a combination of the aesthetic qualities of his public presentation and his publically narrated back-story.Aesthetically speaking, Gilley presents his ordinariness through his casual attire and long hair. His appearance is similar to the campaigners, youth groups and school children he addresses, suggesting he is a representative of that demographic but also distancing him from political elites. The diplomats Gilley meets, such as those at the UN, wear the appropriate attire for their elite political setting: suits. In one key scene in the documentary Peace One Day, Gilley makes his first trip to the UN to meet Kofi Annan, UN General Secretary at the time, and appears at their doors clean cut and suitably dressed. He declares that his new appearance was designed to aid his credibility with the UN. Yet, at the same time, he makes explicit that he borrowed the suit from a friend and the tie from his grandfather and, prior to the meeting, it was decided, “the pony tail had to go.” Thus Gilley seeks the approval of both political elites and the ordinary public, and constructs a persona that speaks to both, though he aligns himself with the latter.Gilley’s back-story permeates his films and works to present his ordinariness. For example, POD has humble beginnings as an almost grassroots, family-run organisation, and Gilley depicts a campaign run on a shoestring from his mother’s spare bedroom in an ordinary suburban home. Although British Airways provided free flights from the organisation’s outset, Gilley shows his friends volunteering their time by organising fundraising events. POD’s modest beginnings are reflected in its founder, who confides about both his lack of formal education and lack of success as an actor (Day After). This “ordinariness” is constructed in opposition to the exceptional qualities of POD’s A-list celebrity backers—such as Angelina Jolie, who does enjoy success as an actor. This contrast is emphasised by inviting Jolie into Gilley’s everyday domestic setting and highlighting the icons of success she brings with her. For example, at his first meeting with Jolie, Gilley waits patiently for her and remarks about the expensive car which eventually arrives outside his house, denoting Jolie’s arrival. He notes in the voiceover to his The Day after Peace documentary, “this was unbelievable, Angelina Jolie sat on my sofa asking me what she could do, I couldn’t stop talking. I was so nervous.”Gilley promotes his ordinariness by using aesthetics and personal narrative. Evidence of how he struggled to realise his goals and the financial burdens he carried (Peace One Day) suggest that there is something authentic about Gilley’s vision for Peace Day. This also helps Gilley to align his public persona with common understandings of the political activist as a prophetic social visionary. POD is able to tap into the idea of the power of the individual as a force for change with references to Martin Luther King and Gandhi. Although Gilley makes no direct comparison between himself and these figures, blog entries such as “ten years ago, I had an idea; I dared to dream that I could galvanise the countries of the world to recognise an official day of ceasefire and nonviolence. Mad? Ambitious? Idealistic? All of the above” (Gilley “Dream”), invite comparisons with King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. This is further augmented by references to Gilley as an outsider to political establishments, such as the UN, which he is sure have “become cynical about the opportunity” they have to unite the world (BBC Interview).Interestingly, Gilley’s presentation as a pragmatic “change-maker” whose “passion is contagious” (Ahmad Fawzi, in POD Concert) also aligns him with a second figure: the entrepreneur. Where Gilley’s performances at school and community groups present his persona as an activist, his entrepreneur persona is presented through his performances at a series of business seminars. These seminars, entitled “Unleash Your Power of Influence,” are targeted towards young entrepreneurs and business-people very much consistent with the “creative class” demographic (Florida). The speakers, including Gilley, have all been successful in business (POD is a private company) and they offer to their audiences motivational presentations, and business advice. Although a semi-regular occurrence, it is the first two events held in July 2010 (Unleash 1) and November 2010 (Unleash 2) that are discussed here. Held in a luxury five-star London hotel, the events demonstrate a starkly different aspect of POD than that presented to community groups and schools, and the amateur grassroots ethic presented in Gilley’s documentary films—for example, tickets for Unleash 2 started at £69 and offered ‘goody bags’ for £95 (author’s observation of the event)—yet consistencies remain.Aesthetically speaking, Gilley’s appearance signifies a connection with these innovative, stereotypically young, founders of start-up companies and where Gilley is an outsider to political organisations; they are outsiders to business establishments. Further, many of these companies typically started, like POD, in a spare bedroom. The speakers at the Unleash events provide insights into their background which frequently demonstrate a rise from humble beginnings to business success, in the face of adversity, and as a result of innovation and perseverance. Gilley is not out of place in this environment and the modest beginnings of POD are relayed to his audience in a manner which bears a striking similarity to his for-profit counterparts.An analysis of Gilley’s presentations at these events demonstrates clear links between the dual aspects of Gilley’s public persona, the political economy of POD, and the underlying philosophy of the organisation—social entrepreneurship. The next section sets out some of the principals of social entrepreneurship and how the aspects of Gilley’s persona, outlined above, reinforce these.Personifying Social EnterpriseGenerally speaking, the business literature greatly emphasises entrepreneurs as “resourceful, value-creating change agents” who are “never satisfied with the status quo [... and are] a forceful engine of growth in our economy” (Dees and Economy 3-4). More recently, the focus of discussion has included social entrepreneurs. These individuals work within “an organisation that attacks [social and environmental] problems through a business format, even if it is not legally structured as a profit-seeking entity” (Bornstein and Davis xv) and advocate commercially oriented non-profit organisations that establish “win-win” relationships between non-profits and business.This coming together of the for- and non-profit sectors has range of precedents, most notably in “philanthrocapitalism” (Bishop and Green) and the types of partnerships established between corporations and environmentalists, such as Greenpeace Australia (Beder). However, philanthrocapitalism often encompasses the application of business methods to social problems by those who have amassed fortunes in purely commercial ventures (such as Bill Gates), and Beder’s work describes established for- and non-profit institutions working together. While social entrepreneurship overlaps with these, social entrepreneurs seek to do well by doing good by making a profit while simultaneously realising social goals (Bornstein and Davis 25).Read as an articulation of the coming together of the activist and the entrepreneur, Gilley’s individuality encapsulates the social enterprise movement. His persona draws from the commonalities between the archetypes of the traditional grassroots activist and start-up entrepreneur, as pioneering visionary and outsider to the establishment. While his films establish his authenticity among politically attuned members of the public, his appearances at the Unleash events work to signify the legitimacy of his organisation to those who identify with social entrepreneurialism and take the position that business should play a positive role in social causes. As an activist, Gilley’s creates his persona through his aesthetic qualities and a performance that draws on historical precedents of social prophets. As an entrepreneur, Gilley draws on the same aesthetic qualities and, through his performance, mitigates the types of disjuncture evident in the 1980s between environmental activists, politicians and business leaders, when environmentalist’s narratives “were perceived as flaky and failed to transform” (Robèrt 7). To do this, Gilley reconstitutes social and environmental problems (such as conflict) within a market metric, and presents the market as a viable and efficient solution. Consequently, Gilley asserts that “we live in a culture of war because war makes money, we need to live in a culture of peace,” and this depends on “if we can make it economical, if we can make the numbers add up” (Unleash).Social enterprises often eschew formal charity and Gilley is consistent with this when he states that “for me, I think it has to be about business. [...] I think if it’s about charity it’s not going to work for me.” Gilley asserts that partnerships with corporations are essential as “our world is going to change, when the corporate sector becomes engaged.” He, therefore, “want[s] to work with large corporations” in order to “empower individuals to be involved in the process of [creating] a more peaceful and sustainable world” (Unleash). One example of POD’s success in this regard is a co-venture with Coca-Cola.To coincide with Peace Day in 2007, POD and Coca-Cola entered into a co-branding exercise which culminated in a sponsorship deal with the POD logo printed on Coca-Cola packaging. Prior to this, Gilley faced a desperate financial situation and conceded that the only alternative to a co-venture with Coca-Cola was shutting down POD (Day After). While Coca-Cola offered financial support and the potential to spread Gilley’s message through the medium of the Coke can, POD presumably offered good publicity to a corporation persistently the target of allegations of unethical practice (for example, Levenson-Estrada; Gill; Thomas). Gilley was aware of the potential image problems caused by a venture with Coke but accepted the partnership on pragmatic grounds, and with the proviso that Coke’s sponsorship not accompany any attempt to influence POD. Gilley, in effect, was using Coca-Cola, displaying the political independence of the social visionary and the pragmatism of the entrepreneur. By the same token, Coca-Cola was using POD to garner positive publicity, demonstrating the nature of this “win-win” relationship.In his film, Gilley consults Ray C. Anderson, social enterprise proponent, about his ethical concerns. Anderson explains the merits of working with Coke. In his Unleash addresses, such ethical considerations do not feature. Instead, it is relayed that Coca-Cola executives were looking to become involved with a social campaign, consistent with the famous 1970s hilltop advertisement of “teaching the world to sing in harmony.” From a meeting at Coca-Cola’s headquarters in Atlanta, Gilley reveals, a correlation emerged between Gilley’s emphasis on Peace Day as a moment of global unity—encapsulated by his belief that “the thing about corporations [...] the wonderful thing about everybody […] is that everybody’s just like us” (Unleash)—and the image of worldwide harmony that Coca-Cola wanted to portray. It is my contention that Gilley’s public persona underpinned the manner in which this co-branding campaign emerged. This is because his persona neatly tied the profit motive of the corporation to the socially spirited nature of the campaign, and spoke to Coca-Cola in a manner relatable to the market. At the same time, it promoted a social campaign premised on an inclusiveness that recast the corporation as a concerned global citizen, and the social campaigner as a free-market agent.Persona in the Competitive Non-Profit SectorThrough a series of works P. David Marshall charts the increasing centrality of individuality as “one of the ideological mainstays of consumer capitalism [...and] equally one of the ideological mainstays of how democracy is conceived” (Marshall “New Media-New Self” 635). Celebrity, accordingly, can be thought of as a powerful discourse that works “to make the cultural centrality of individuality concretely real” (Marshall “New Media-New Self” 635). Beyond celebrity, Marshall offers a wider framework that maps how “personalisation, individuality, and the move from the private to the public are now part of the wider populace rather than just at play in the representational field of celebrity” (Marshall, “Persona” 158). This framework includes fundamental changes to the global, specifically Western, labour market that, while not a fait accompli, point to a more competitive environment in which “greater portions of the culture are engaged in regular—probably frequent—selling of themselves” and where self-promotion becomes a key tool (Marshall, “Persona” 158). Therefore, while consumerism comprises a backdrop to the proliferation of celebrity culture, competition within market capitalism contributes to the wider expansion of personalisation and individualism.The non-profit sector is also a competitive environment. UK studies have found an increase in the number of International NGOs of 46.6% from 1995/6-2005/6 (Anheier, Kaldor, and Glasius. 310). At the same time, the number of large charities (with an income greater than £10 million) rose, between 1999-2013, from 307 to 1,005 and their annual income rose from approximately £10bn to £36bn (Charity Commission). These quantitative changes in the sector have occurred alongside qualitative changes in terms of the orientation of individual organisations. For example, Epstein and Gang describe a non-profit sector in which NGOs compete against each other for funds from aid donors (state and private). It is unclear whether “aid will be allocated properly, say to the poorest or to maximize the social welfare” or to the “efficient aid-seekers” (294)—that is, NGOs with the greatest competitive capabilities. A market for public awareness has also emerged and, in an increasingly crowded non-profit sector, it is clearly important for organisations to establish a public profile that can gain attention.It is in this competitive environment that the public personae of activists become assets for NGOs, and Gilley constitutes a successful example of this. His persona demonstrates an organisation’s response to the competitive nature of the non-profit sector, by appealing to both traditional activist circles and the business sector, and articulating the social enterprise movement. Gilley effectively embodies social entrepreneurship—in his appearance, his performance and his back-story—bridging a gap between the for- and non-profit sectors. His persona helps legitimate efforts to recast the activist as an entrepreneur (and conversely, entrepreneurs as activists) by incorporating activist ideals (in this instance, peace) within a market framework. This, to return to Marshall’s argument, crystallises the issue of peace within market metrics such and normativises debates about the role of corporate actors as global citizens, presenting it as pragmatism and therefore “common sense.” This is not to undermine Gilley’s achievements but, instead, to point out how reading his public persona enables an understanding of efforts to marketise the non-profit sector and align peace activism with corporate power.References Anheier, Helmut K., Mary Kaldor, and Marlies Glasius. Global Civil Society 2006/7. London: Sage, 2007.BBC Storyville. Director Interview: Jeremy Gilley. BBC. 2004. 7 Feb. 2010.Beder, Sharon. Global Spin: The Corporate Assault on Environmentalism. Totnes, UK: Green Books, 2002.Bishop, Matthew, and Michael Green. Philanthrocapitalism. London: A&C Black, 2008.Bornstein, David, and Susan Davis. Social Entrepreneurship: What Everyone Needs to Know. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.Charity Commission for England and Wales. “Sector Facts and Figures.” N.d. 5 Apr 2014.Day after Peace, The. Dir. Jeremy Gilley. Peace One Day, 2008.Dees, J. Gregory, and Peter Economy. "Social Entrepreneurship." Enterprising Nonprofits: A Toolkit for Social Entrepreneurs. Eds. J. Gregory Dees, Jed Emerson, and Peter Economy. New York: Wiley, 2001. 1-18.Epstein, Gil S., and Ira N. Gang. “Contests, NGOs, and Decentralizing Aid.” Review of Development Economics 10. 2 (2006): 285-296.Florida, Richard. The Flight of the Creative Class: The New Global Competition for Talent. New York: Harper Business, 2006.Frances, Nic. The End of Charity: Time for Social Enterprise. 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David. “Personifying Agency: The Public–Persona–Place–Issue Continuum.” Celebrity Studies 4.3 (2013): 369-371.Marshall, P. David. “Persona Studies: Mapping the Proliferation of the Public Self.” Journalism 15.2 (2014): 153-170.Newsnight. BBC 2. 20 Sep. 2010. 22.30-23.00.Peace One Day. Dir. Jeremy Gilley. Peace One Day, 2004.Peace One Day Concert: Live at the Royal Albert Hall Gilley. Dir. Jeremy Gilley. Peace One Day, 2008.Peace One Day Part Three. Dir. Jeremy Gilley. Peace One Day, 2010.Robèrt, Karl-Henrik. The Natural Step: Seeding a Quiet Revolution. Gabriola Island, British Columbia: New Society Publishers, 2002.Thomas, Mark. Belching Out the Devil: Global Adventure with Coca-Cola. London: Ebury Press, 2008.United Nations General Assembly. “International Day of Peace. A/RES/55/282" 111th Plenary Meeting. 2001. 10 June 2014 ‹http://www.un.org/en/ga/search/view_doc.asp?symbol=A/RES/55/282&Lang=E›.Unleash Your Power of Influence. Triumphant Events and Peace One Day. 2010.

The use of the family home as a setting for television sitcoms (situation comedies) has long been recognised for its ability to provide audiences with an identifiable site of ontological security (much discussed by Giddens, Scannell, Saunders and others). From the beginnings of American sitcoms with such programs as Leave it to Beaver, and through the trail of The Brady Bunch, The Cosby Show, Roseanne, The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, and on to Home Improvement, That 70s Show and How I Met Your Mother, the US has led the way with screenwriters and producers capitalising on the value of using the suburban family dwelling as a fixed setting. The most obvious advantage is the use of an easily constructed and inexpensive set, most often on a TV studio soundstage requiring only a few rooms (living room, kitchen and bedroom are usually enough to set the scene), and a studio audience. In Singapore, sitcoms have had similar successes; portraying the lives of ‘ordinary people’ in their home settings. Some programs have achieved phenomenal success, including an unprecedented ten year run for Phua Chu Kang Pte Ltd from 1996-2007, closely followed by Under One Roof (1994-2000 and an encore season in 2002), and Living with Lydia (2001-2005). This article furthers Blunt and Dowling’s exploration of the “critical geography” of home, by providing a focused analysis of home-based sitcoms in the nation-state of Singapore. The use of the home tells us a lot. Roseanne’s cluttered family home represents a lived reality for working-class families throughout the Western world. In Friends, the seemingly wealthy ‘young’ people live in a fashionable apartment building, while Seinfeld’s apartment block is much less salubrious, indicating (in line with the character) the struggle of the humble comedian. Each of these examples tells us something about not just the characters, but quite often about class, race, and contemporary societies. In the Singaporean programs, the home in Under One Roof (hereafter UOR) represents the major form of housing in Singapore, and the program as a whole demonstrates the workability of Singaporean multiculturalism in a large apartment block. Phua Chu Kang Pte Ltd (PCK) demonstrates the entrepreneurial abilities of even under-educated Singaporeans, with its lead character, a building contractor, living in a large freestanding dwelling – generally reserved for the well-heeled of Singaporean society. And in Living with Lydia (LWL) (a program which demonstrates Singapore’s capacity for global integration), Hong Kong émigré Lydia is forced to share a house (less ostentatious than PCK’s) with the family of the hapless Billy B. Ong. There is perhaps no more telling cultural event than the sitcom. In the 1970s, The Brady Bunch told us more about American values and habits than any number of news reports or cop shows. A nation’s identity is uncovered; it bares its soul to us through the daily tribulations of its TV households. In Singapore, home-based sitcoms have been one of the major success stories in local television production with each of these three programs collecting multiple prizes at the region-wide Asian Television Awards. These sitcoms have been able to reflect the ideals and values of the Singaporean nation to audiences both at ‘home’ and abroad. This article explores the worlds of UOR, PCK, and LWL, and the ways in which each of the fictional homes represents key features of the multi-ethnic, multi-cultural Singapore. Through ownership and regulation, Singaporean TV programs operate as a firm link between the state and its citizens. These sitcoms follow regular patterns where the ‘man of the house’ is more buffoon than breadwinner – in a country defined by its neo-Confucian morality, sitcoms allow a temporary subversion of patriarchal structures. In this article I argue that the central theme in Singaporean sitcoms is that while home is a personal space, it is also a valuable site for national identities to be played out. These identities are visible in the physical indicators of the exterior and interior living spaces, and the social indicators representing a benign patriarchy and a dominant English language. Structure One of the key features of sitcoms is the structure: cold open – titles – establishing shot – opening scene. Generally the cold opening (aka “the teaser”) takes place inside the home to quickly (re)establish audience familiarity with the location and the characters. The title sequence then features, in the case of LWL and PCK, the characters outside the house (in LWL this is in cartoon format), and in UOR (see Figure 1) it is the communal space of the barbeque area fronting the multi-story HDB (Housing Development Board) apartment blocks. Figure 1: Under One Roof The establishing shot at the end of each title sequence, and when returning from ad breaks, is an external view of the characters’ respective dwellings. In Seinfeld this establishing shot is the New York apartment block, in Roseanne it is the suburban house, and the Singaporean sitcoms follow the same format (see Figure 2). Figure 2: Phua Chu Kang External Visions of the Home This emphasis on exterior buildings reminds the viewer that Singaporean housing is, in many ways, unique. As a city-state (and a young one at that) its spatial constraints are particularly limiting: there simply isn’t room for suburban housing on quarter acre blocks. It rapidly transformed from an “empty rock” to a scattered Malay settlement of bay and riverside kampongs (villages) recognisable by its stilt houses. Then in the shadow of colonialism and the rise of modernity, the kampongs were replaced in many cases by European-inspired terrace houses. Finally, in the post-colonial era high-rise housing began to swell through the territory, creating what came to be known as the “HDB new town”, with some 90% of the population now said to reside in HDB units, and many others living in private high-rises (Chang 102, 104). Exterior shots used in UOR (see Figure 3) consistently emphasise the distinctive HDB blocks. As with the kampong housing, high-rise apartments continue notions of communal living in that “Living below, above and side by side other people requires tolerance of neighbours and a respect towards the environment of the housing estate for the good of all” (104). The provision of readily accessible public housing was part of the “covenant between the newly enfranchised electorate and the elected government” (Chua 47). Figure 3: Establishing shot from UOR In UOR, we see the constant interruption of the lives of the Tan family by their multi-ethnic neighbours. This occurs to such an extent as to be a part of the normal daily flow of life in Singaporean society. Chang argues that despite the normally interventionist activities of the state, it is the “self-enforcing norms” of behaviour that have worked in maintaining a “peaceable society in high-rise housing” (104). This communitarian attitude even extends to the large gated residence of PCK, home to an almost endless stream of relatives and friends. The gate itself seems to perform no restrictive function. But such a “peaceable society” can also be said to be a result of state planning which extends to the “racial majoritarianism” imposed on HDB units in the form of quotas determining “the actual number of households of each of the three major races [Chinese, Malay and Indian] … to be accommodated in a block of flats” (Chua 55). Issues of race are important in Singapore where “the inscription of media imagery bears the cultural discourse and materiality of the social milieu” (Wong 120) perhaps nowhere more graphically illustrated than in the segregation of TV channels along linguistic / cultural lines. These 3 programs all featured on MediaCorp TV’s predominantly English-language Channel 5 and are, in the words of Roland Barthes, “anchored” by dint of their use of English. Home Will Eat Itself The consumption of home-based sitcoms by audiences in their own living-rooms creates a somewhat self-parodying environment. As John Ellis once noted, it is difficult to escape from the notion that “TV is a profoundly domestic phenomenon” (113) in that it constantly attempts to “include the audiences own conception of themselves into the texture of its programmes” (115). In each of the three Singaporean programs living-rooms are designed to seat characters in front of a centrally located TV set – at most all the audience sees is the back of the TV, and generally only when the TV is incorporated into a storyline, as in the case of PCK in Figure 4 (note the TV set in the foreground). Figure 4: PCK Even in this episode of PCK when the lead characters stumble across a pornographic video starring one of the other lead characters, the viewer only hears the program. Perhaps the most realistic (and acerbic) view of how TV reorganises our lives – both spatially in the physical layout of our homes, and temporally in the way we construct our viewing habits (eating dinner or doing the housework while watching the screen) – is the British “black comedy”, The Royle Family. David Morley (443) notes that “TV and other media have adapted themselves to the circumstances of domestic consumption while the domestic arena itself has been simultaneously redefined to accommodate their requirements”. Morley refers to The Royle Family’s narrative that rests on the idea that “for many people, family life and watching TV have become indistinguishable to the extent that, in this fictional household, it is almost entirely conducted from the sitting positions of the viewers clustered around the set” (436). While TV is a central fixture in most sitcoms, its use is mostly as a peripheral thematic device with characters having their viewing interrupted by the arrival of another character, or by a major (within the realms of the plot) event. There is little to suggest that “television schedules have instigated a significant restructuring of family routines” as shown in Livingstone’s audience-based study of UK viewers (104). In the world of the sitcom, the temporalities of characters’ lives do not need to accurately reflect that of “real life” – or if they do, things quickly descend to the bleakness exemplified by the sedentary Royles. As Scannell notes, “broadcast output, like daily life, is largely uneventful, and both are punctuated (predictably and unpredictably) by eventful occasions” (4). To show sitcom characters in this static, passive environment would be anathema to the “real” viewer, who would quickly lose interest. This is not to suggest that sitcoms are totally benign though as with all genres they are “the outcome of social practices, received procedures that become objectified in the narratives of television, then modified in the interpretive act of viewing” (Taylor 14). In other words, they feature a contextualisation that is readily identifiable to members of an established society. However, within episodes themselves, it as though time stands still – character development is almost non-existent, or extremely slow at best and we see each episode has “flattened past and future into an eternal present in which parents love and respect one another, and their children forever” (Taylor 16). It takes some six seasons before the character of PCK becomes a father, although in previous seasons he acts as a mentor to his nephew, Aloysius. Contained in each episode, in true sitcom style, are particular “narrative lines” in which “one-liners and little comic situations [are] strung on a minimal plot line” containing a minor problem “the solution to which will take 22 minutes and pull us gently through the sequence of events toward a conclusion” (Budd et al. 111). It is important to note that the sitcom genre does not work in every culture, as each locale renders the sitcom with “different cultural meanings” (Nielsen 95). Writing of the failure of the Danish series Three Whores and a Pickpocket (with a premise like that, how could it fail?), Nielsen (112) attributes its failure to the mixing of “kitchen sink realism” with “moments of absurdity” and “psychological drama with expressionistic camera work”, moving it well beyond the strict mode of address required by the genre. In Australia, soap operas Home and Away and Neighbours have been infinitely more popular than our attempts at sitcoms – which had a brief heyday in the 1980s with Hey Dad..!, Kingswood Country and Mother and Son – although Kath and Kim (not studio-based) could almost be counted. Lichter et al. (11) state that “television entertainment can be ‘political’ even when it does not deal with the stuff of daily headlines or partisan controversy. Its latent politics lie in the unavoidable portrayal of individuals, groups, and institutions as a backdrop to any story that occupies the foreground”. They state that US television of the 1960s was dominated by the “idiot sitcom” and that “To appreciate these comedies you had to believe that social conventions were so ironclad they could not tolerate variations. The scripts assumed that any minute violation of social conventions would lead to a crisis that could be played for comic results” (15). Series like Happy Days “harked back to earlier days when problems were trivial and personal, isolated from the concerns of a larger world” (17). By the late 1980s, Roseanne and Married…With Children had “spawned an antifamily-sitcom format that used sarcasm, cynicism, and real life problems to create a type of in-your-face comedy heretofore unseen on prime time” (20). This is markedly different from the type of values presented in Singaporean sitcoms – where filial piety and an unrelenting faith in the family unit is sacrosanct. In this way, Singaporean sitcoms mirror the ideals of earlier US sitcoms which idealise the “egalitarian family in which parental wisdom lies in appeals to reason and fairness rather than demands for obedience” (Lichter et al. 406). Dahlgren notes that we are the products of “an ongoing process of the shaping and reshaping of identity, in response to the pluralised sets of social forces, cultural currents and personal contexts encountered by individuals” where we end up with “composite identities” (318). Such composite identities make the presentation (or re-presentation) of race problematic for producers of mainstream television. Wong argues that “Within the context of PAP hegemony, media presentation of racial differences are manufactured by invoking and resorting to traditional values, customs and practices serving as symbols and content” (118). All of this is bound within a classificatory system in which each citizen’s identity card is inscribed as Chinese, Malay, Indian or Other (often referred to as CMIO), and a broader social discourse in which “the Chinese are linked to familial values of filial piety and the practice of extended family, the Malays to Islam and rural agricultural activities, and the Indians to the caste system” (Wong 118). However, these sitcoms avoid directly addressing the issue of race, preferring to accentuate cultural differences instead. In UOR the tables are turned when a none-too-subtle dig at the crude nature of mainland Chinese (with gags about the state of public toilets), is soon turned into a more reverential view of Chinese culture and business acumen. Internal Visions of the Home This reverence for Chinese culture is also enacted visually. The loungeroom settings of these three sitcoms all provide examples of the fashioning of the nation through a “ubiquitous semi-visibility” (Noble 59). Not only are the central characters in each of these sitcoms constructed as ethnically Chinese, but the furnishings provide a visible nod to Chinese design in the lacquered screens, chairs and settees of LWL (see Figure 5.1), in the highly visible pair of black inlaid mother-of-pearl wall hangings of UOR (see Figure 5.2) and in the Chinese statuettes and wall-hangings found in the PCK home. Each of these items appears in the central view of the shows most used setting, the lounge/family room. There is often symmetry involved as well; the balanced pearl hangings of UOR are mirrored in a set of silk prints in LWL and the pair of ceramic Chinese lions in PCK. Figure 5.1: LWL Figure 5.2: UOR Thus, all three sitcoms feature design elements that reflect visible links to Chinese culture and sentiments, firmly locating the sitcoms “in Asia”, and providing a sense of the nation. The sets form an important role in constructing a realist environment, one in which “identification with realist narration involves a temporary merger of at least some of the viewer’s identity with the position offered by the text” (Budd et al. 110). These constant silent reminders of the Chinese-based hegemon – the cultural “majoritarianism” – anchors the sitcoms to a determined concept of the nation-state, and reinforces the “imaginative geographies of home” (Blunt and Dowling 247). The Foolish “Father” Figure in a Patriarchal Society But notions of a dominant Chinese culture are dealt with in a variety of ways in these sitcoms – not the least in a playful attitude toward patriarchal figures. In UOR, the Tan family “patriarch” is played by Moses Lim, in PCK, Gurmit Singh plays Phua and in LWL Samuel Chong plays Billy B. Ong (or, as Lydia mistakenly refers to him Billy Bong). Erica Sharrer makes the claim that class is a factor in presenting the father figure as buffoon, and that US sitcoms feature working class families in which “the father is made to look inept, silly, or incompetent have become more frequent” partly in response to changing societal structures where “women are shouldering increasing amounts of financial responsibility in the home” (27). Certainly in the three series looked at here, PCK (the tradesman) is presented as the most derided character in his role as head of the household. Moses Lim’s avuncular Tan Ah Teck is presented mostly as lovably foolish, even when reciting his long-winded moral tales at the conclusion of each episode, and Billy B. Ong, as a middle-class businessman, is presented more as a victim of circumstance than as a fool. Sharrer ponders whether “sharing the burden of bread-winning may be associated with fathers perceiving they are losing advantages to which they were traditionally entitled” (35). But is this really a case of males losing the upper hand? Hanke argues that men are commonly portrayed as the target of humour in sitcoms, but only when they “are represented as absurdly incongruous” to the point that “this discursive strategy recuperates patriarchal notions” (90). The other side of the coin is that while the “dominant discursive code of patriarchy might be undone” (but isn’t), “the sitcom’s strategy for containing women as ‘wives’ and ‘mothers’ is always contradictory and open to alternative readings” (Hanke 77). In Singapore’s case though, we often return to images of the women in the kitchen, folding the washing or agonising over the work/family dilemma, part of what Blunt and Dowling refer to as the “reproduction of patriarchal and heterosexist relations” often found in representations of “the ideal’ suburban home” (29). Eradicating Singlish One final aspect of these sitcoms is the use of language. PM Lee Hsien Loong once said that he had no interest in “micromanaging” the lives of Singaporeans (2004). Yet his two predecessors (PM Goh and PM Lee Senior) both reflected desires to do so by openly criticising the influence of Phua Chu Kang’s liberal use of colloquial phrases and phrasing. While the use of Singlish (or Singapore Colloquial English / SCE) in these sitcoms is partly a reflection of everyday life in Singapore, by taking steps to eradicate it through the Speak Good English movement, the government offers an intrusion into the private home-space of Singaporeans (Ho 17). Authorities fear that increased use of Singlish will damage the nation’s ability to communicate on a global basis, withdrawing to a locally circumscribed “pidgin English” (Rubdy 345). Indeed, the use of Singlish in UOR is deliberately underplayed in order to capitalise on overseas sales of the show (which aired, for example, on Australia’s SBS television) (Srilal). While many others have debated the Singlish issue, my concern is with its use in the home environment as representative of Singaporean lifestyles. As novelist Hwee Hwee Tan (2000) notes: Singlish is crude precisely because it’s rooted in Singapore’s unglamorous past. This is a nation built from the sweat of uncultured immigrants who arrived 100 years ago to bust their asses in the boisterous port. Our language grew out of the hardships of these ancestors. Singlish thus offers users the opportunity to “show solidarity, comradeship and intimacy (despite differences in background)” and against the state’s determined efforts to adopt the language of its colonizer (Ho 19-20). For this reason, PCK’s use of Singlish iterates a “common man” theme in much the same way as Paul Hogan’s “Ocker” image of previous decades was seen as a unifying feature of mainstream Australian values. That the fictional PCK character was eventually “forced” to take “English” lessons (a storyline rapidly written into the program after the direct criticisms from the various Prime Ministers), is a sign that the state has other ideas about the development of Singaporean society, and what is broadcast en masse into Singaporean homes. Conclusion So what do these home-based sitcoms tell us about Singaporean nationalism? Firstly, within the realms of a multiethnic society, mainstream representations reflect the hegemony present in the social and economic structures of Singapore. Chinese culture is dominant (albeit in an English-speaking environment) and Indian, Malay and Other cultures are secondary. Secondly, the home is a place of ontological security, and partial adornment with cultural ornaments signifying Chinese culture are ever-present as a reminder of the Asianness of the sitcom home, ostensibly reflecting the everyday home of the audience. The concept of home extends beyond the plywood-prop walls of the soundstage though. As Noble points out, “homes articulate domestic spaces to national experience” (54) through the banal nationalism exhibited in “the furniture of everyday life” (55). In a Singaporean context, Velayutham (extending the work of Morley) explores the comforting notion of Singapore as “home” to its citizens and concludes that the “experience of home and belonging amongst Singaporeans is largely framed in the materiality and social modernity of everyday life” (4). Through the use of sitcoms, the state is complicit in creating and recreating the family home as a site for national identities, adhering to dominant modes of culture and language. References Blunt, Alison, and Robyn Dowling. Home. London: Routledge, 2006. Budd, Mike, Steve Craig, and Clay Steinman. Consuming Environments: Television and Commercial Culture. New Jersey: Rutgers UP, 1999. Chang, Sishir. “A High-Rise Vernacular in Singapore’s Housing Development Board Housing.” Berkeley Planning Journal 14 (2000): 97-116. Chua, Beng Huat. “Public Housing Residents as Clients of the State.” Housing Studies 15.1 (2000). Dahlgren, Peter. “Media, Citizenship and Civic Culture”. Mass Media and Society. 3rd ed. Eds. James Curran and Michael Gurevitch. London: Arnold, 2000. 310-328. Ellis, John. Visible Fictions: Cinema, Television, Video. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982. Hanke, Robert. “The ‘Mock-Macho’ Situation Comedy: Hegemonic Masculinity and its Reiteration.” Western Journal of Communication 62.1 (1998). Ho, Debbie G.E. “‘I’m Not West. I’m Not East. So How Leh?’” English Today 87 22.3 (2006). Lee, Hsien Loong. “Our Future of Opportunity and Promise.” National Day Rally 2004 Speech. 29 Apr. 2007 http://www.gov.sg/nd/ND04.htm>. Lichter, S. Robert, Linda S. Lichter, and Stanley Rothman. Prime Time: How TV Portrays American Culture. Washington D.C.: Regnery Publishing, 1994. Livingstone, Sonia. Young People and New Media: Childhood and the Changing Media Environment. London: Sage, 2002 Morley, David. “What’s ‘Home’ Got to Do with It? Contradictory Dynamics in the Domestication of Technology and the Dislocation of Domesticity.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 6 (2003). Noble, Greg. “Comfortable and Relaxed: Furnishing the Home and Nation.” Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 16.1 (2002). Rubdy, Rani. “Creative Destruction: Singapore’s Speak Good English Movement.” World Englishes 20.3 (2001). Scannell, Paddy. “For a Phenomenology of Radio and Television.” Journal of Communication 45.3 (1995). Scharrer, Erica. “From Wise to Foolish: The Portrayal of the Sitcom Father, 1950s-1990s.” Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media 45.1 (2001). Srilal, Mohan. “Quick Quick: ‘Singlish’ Is Out in Re-education Campaign.” Asia Times Online (28 Aug. 1999). Tan, Hwee Hwee. “A War of Words over ‘Singlish’: Singapore’s Government Wants Its Citizens to Speak Good English, But They Would Rather Be ‘Talking Cock’.” Time International 160.3 (29 July 2002). Taylor, Ella. “From the Nelsons to the Huxtables: Genre and Family Imagery in American Network Television.” Qualitative Sociology 12.1 (1989). Velayutham, Selvaraj. “Affect, Materiality, and the Gift of Social Life in Singapore.” SOJOURN 19.1 (2004). Wong, Kokkeong. Media and Culture in Singapore: A Theory of Controlled Commodification. New Jersey: Hampton Press, 2001. Images Under One Roof: The Special Appearances. Singapore: Television Corporation of Singapore. VCD. 2000. Living with Lydia (Season 1, Volume 1). Singapore: MediaCorp Studios, Blue Max Enterprise. VCD. 2001. Phua Chu Kang Pte Ltd (Season 5, Episode 10). Kuala Lumpur: MediaCorp Studios, Speedy Video Distributors. VCD. 2003. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Pugsley, Peter. "At Home in Singaporean Sitcoms: Under One Roof, Living with Lydia and Phua Chu Kang." M/C Journal 10.4 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/09-pugsley.php>. APA Style Pugsley, P. (Aug. 2007) "At Home in Singaporean Sitcoms: Under One Roof, Living with Lydia and Phua Chu Kang," M/C Journal, 10(4). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/09-pugsley.php>.

“Language is inseparable from the world that provokes it”-- Don DeLillo, “In the Ruins of the Future”The attacks of 9/11 generated a public discourse of suspicion, with Osama bin Laden occupying the role of the quintessential “most wanted” for nearly a decade, before being captured and killed in May 2011. In the novel, Falling Man (DeLillo), set shortly after the attacks of September 11, Justin, the protagonist’s son, and his friends, the two Siblings, spend much of their time at the window of the Siblings’ New York apartment, “searching the skies for Bill Lawton” (74). Mishearing bin Laden’s name on the news, Robert, the younger of the Siblings, has “never adjusted his original sense of what he was hearing” (73), and so the “myth of Bill Lawton” (74) is created. In this paper, I draw on postclassical, cognitive narratology to “defamiliarise” processes undertaken by both narrator and reader (Palmer 28) in order to explore how narrative elements impact on readers’ and characters’ perceptions of the terrorist. My focus on select episodes within the novel “pursue[s] the author’s means of controlling his reader” (Booth i), and I refer to a generic reader to identify a certain intuitive reaction to the text. Assuming that “the written text imposes certain limits on its unwritten implications” (Iser 281), I trace a path from the uttered or printed word, through the reading act, to the process of meaning-making. I demonstrate how renaming the terrorist, and other language games, challenge the notion that terror can be synonymous with a locatable, destructible source by activating a suspicion towards the text in particular, and towards language in general.Falling Man tells the story of Keith who, after surviving the attacks on the World Trade Centre, shows up injured and disoriented at the apartment of his estranged wife, Lianne, and their son, Justin. The narrative, set at different periods between the day of the attacks and three years later, focuses on Keith’s and Lianne’s lives as they attempt to deal, in their own ways, with the trauma of the attacks and with the unexpected reunion of their small family. Keith disappears into games of poker and has a brief relationship with another survivor, while Lianne searches for answers in the writings of Alzheimer sufferers, in places of worship, and in conversations with her mother, Nina, and her mother’s partner, Martin, a German art-dealer with a questionable past. Each of the novel’s three parts also contains a short narrative from the perspective of Hammad, a fictional terrorist, starting with his early days in a European cell under the leadership of the real terrorist, Mohamed Atta, through the group’s activities in Florida, to his final moments aboard the plane that crashes into the World Trade Centre. DeLillo’s work is noted for treating language as central to society and culture (Weinstein). In this personalised narrative of post-9/11, DeLillo’s choices reflect his “refusal to reproduce the mass media’s representations of 9/11 the reader is used to” (Grossinger 85). This refusal is manifest not so much in an absence of well-known, mediated images or concepts, but in the reshaping and re-presenting of these images so that they appear unexpected, new, and personal (Apitzch). A notable example of such re-presentation is the Falling Man of the title, who is introduced, surprisingly, not as the man depicted in the famous photograph by Richard Drew (Leps), but a performance artist who uses the name Falling Man when staging his falls from various New York buildings. Not until the final two sentences of the novel does DeLillo fully admit the image into the narrative, and even then only as Keith’s private vision from the Tower: “Then he saw a shirt come down out of the sky. He walked and saw it fall, arms waving like nothing in this life” (246). The bin Laden/Bill Lawton substitution shows a similar rejection of recycled concepts and enables a renewed perspective towards the idea of bin Laden. Bill Lawton is first introduced as an anonymous “man” (17), later to be named Bill Lawton (73), and later still to be revealed as bin Laden mispronounced (73). The reader first learns of Bill Lawton in a conversation between Lianne and the Siblings’ mother, Isabel, who is worried about the children’s preoccupation at the window:“It has something to do with this man.”“What man?”“This name. You’ve heard it.”“This name,” Lianne said.“Isn’t this the name they sort of mumble back and forth? My kids totally don’t want to discuss the matter. Katie enforces the thing. She basically inspires fear in her brother. I thought maybe you would know something.”“I don’t think so.”“Like Justin says nothing about any of this?”“No. What man?”“What man? Exactly,” Isabel said. (17)If “the piling up of data [...] fulfils a function in the construction of an image” (Bal 85), a delayed unravelling of the bin Laden identity distorts this data-piling so that by the time the reader learns of the Bill Lawton/bin Laden link, an image of a man is already established as separate from, and potentially exclusive of, his historical identity. The segment beginning immediately after Isabel’s comment, “What man? Exactly” (17), refers to another, unidentified man with the pronoun “he” (18), as if to further sway the reader’s attention from the subject of that man’s identity. Fludernik notes that “language games” are a key feature of the postmodern text (Towards 221), adding that “techniques of linguistic emasculation serve implicitly to question a simple and naive view of the representational potential of language” (225). I propose that, in Falling Man, bin Laden is emasculated by the Bill Lawton misnomer, and is thereby conceptualised as two entities, one historical and one fictional. The name-switch activates what psychologists refer to as a “dual-process,” conscious and unconscious, that forms the reader’s experience of the narrative (Gerrig 37), creating a cognitive dissonance between the two. Much like Wittgenstein’s duck-rabbit drawing, bin Laden and Bill Lawton exist as two separate entities, occupying the same space of the idea of bin Laden, but demanding to be viewed singularly for the process of recognition to take place. Such distortion of a well-known figure conveys the sense that, in this novel, “all identities are either confused [...] or double [...] or merging [...] or failing” (Kauffman 371), or, occasionally, doing all these things simultaneously.A similar cognitive process is triggered by the introduction of aliases for all three characters that head each of the novel’s three parts. Ernst Hechinger is revealed as Martin Ridnour’s former, ‘terrorist’ identity (DeLillo, Falling 86), and performance artist David Janiak (180) as the Falling Man’s everyday name. But the bin Laden/Bill Lawton switch offers an overt juxtaposition of the historical with the fictional or, as Žižek would have it, “the Raw real” with the “virtual” (387), and allows the mutated bin Laden/Bill Lawton figure to shift, in the mind of the reader, between the two worlds, as well as form a new, blended entity.At this point, it is important to notice that two, interconnected, forms of suspicion exist in the novel. The first is invoked in the story-level towards various terrorist-characters such as Bill Lawton, Hammad, and Martin. The second form is activated when various elements within the narrative prompt the reader to treat the text itself as suspicious, triggering in the reader a cognitive reaction that mirrors that of the narrated character. One example is the “halting process” (Leps) that is forced on the reader when attempting to manoeuvre through the narrative’s anachronical arrangement that mirrors Keith’s mental perception of time and memory. Another such narrative device is the use of “unheralded pronouns” (Gerrig 50), when ‘he’ or ‘she’ is used ambiguously, often at the beginning of a chapter or segment. The use of pronouns in narrative must adhere to strict grammatical rules (Fludernik, Introduction) and when these rules are ignored, the reading pattern is affected. First, the reader of Falling Man is immersed within an element in the story, then becomes puzzled about the identity of a character, and finally re-reads the passage to gain clarity. The reader, after a while, distances somewhat from the text, scanning for alternative possibilities and approaching interpretation with a tentative sense of doubt.The conversation between the two mothers, the Bill Lawton/bin Laden split, and the use of unheralded pronouns also destabilises the relationship between person and name, and appears to create a world in which “personality has disintegrated into a mere semiotic mark” (Versluys 21). Keith’s obsession with correcting the spelling of his surname, Neudecker, “because it wasn’t him, with the name misspelled” (DeLillo, Falling 31), Lianne’s fondness of the philosopher Kierkegaard, “right down to the spelling of his name. The hard Scandian k’s and lovely doubled a” (118), her consideration of “Marko [...] with a k, whatever that might signify” (119), and Rumsey, who is told that “everything in his life would be different [...] if one letter in his name was different” (149), are a few examples of the text’s semiotic emphasis. But, while Versluys sees this tendency as emblematic of the novel’s portrayal of a decline in humanity, I suggest that the text’s preoccupation with the shape and constitution of words may work to “de-automatise” (Margolin 66) the relationship between sign and perception, rather than to denigrate the signified human. With the renamed terrorist, the reader comes to doubt not only the printed text, but also his or her automatic response to “bin Laden” as a “brand, a sort of logo which identifies and personalises the evil” (Chomsky, September 36). Bill Lawton, according to Justin, speaks in monosyllables (102), a language Justin chooses, for a time, for his own speech (66), and this also contributes to the de-automatisation of the text. The language game, in which a speaker must only use words with one syllable, began as a classroom activity “designed to teach the children something about the structure of words and the discipline required to frame clear thoughts” (66). The game also gives players, and readers, an embodied understanding of what Genette calls the gap between “being and saying” (93) that is inevitable in the production of language and narrative. Justin, who continues to play the game outside the classroom, because “it helps [him] go slow when [he] thinks” (66), finds comfort in the silent pauses that are afforded by widening the gap between thought and utterance. History in Falling Man is a collection of the private narratives of survivors, families, terrorists, artists, and the host of people that are affected by the attacks of 9/11. Justin’s character, with the linguistic and psychic code of a child, represents the way in which all participants, to some extent, choose their own antagonist, language, plot, and sequence to personalise this mega-public event. He insists that the towers did not collapse (72), but that they will, “this time coming” (102); Bill Lawton, for Justin, “has a long beard [...] speaks thirteen languages but not English except to his wives [and] has the power to poison what we eat” (74). Despite being confronted with the factual inaccuracies of his narrative, Justin resists editing his version precisely because these inaccuracies form his own, non-mediated, authentic account. They are, in a sense, a work of fiction and, paradoxically, more ‘real’ because of that. “We want to pass beyond the limits of safe understandings”, thinks Lianne, “and what better way to do it than through make-believe” (63). I have so far shown how narrative elements create a suspicion in the way characters operate within their surrounding universe, in the reader’s attitude towards the text, and, more implicitly, in the power of language to accurately represent a personal reality. Within the context of the novel’s historical setting—the period following the 9/11 attacks—the narration of the terrorist figure, as represented in Bill Lawton, Hammad, Martin, and others, may function as a response to the “binarism” of Bush’s proposal (Butler 2), epitomised in his “either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists” (Silberstein 14) approach. Within the novel’s universe, its narration of terrorist-characters works to free discourse from superficial categorisations and to provide “a counterdiscourse to the prevailing nationalistic interpretations” (Versluys 23) of the events of 9/11 by de-automatising a response to “us” and “them.” In his essay published shortly after the attacks, DeLillo notes that “the sense of disarticulation we hear in the term ‘Us and Them’ has never been so striking, at either end” (“Ruins”), and while he draws distinctions, in the same essay, with technology on ‘our’ side and religious fanaticism on ‘their’ side, I believe that the novel is less settled on the subject. The Anglicisation of bin Laden’s name, for example, suggests that Bush’s either-or-ism is, at least partially, an arbitrary linguistic construct. At a time when some social commentators have highlighted the similarity in the definitions of “terror” and “counter terror” (Chomsky, “Commentary” 610), the Bill Lawton ‘error’ works to illustrate how easily language can destabilise our perception of what is familiar/strange, us/them, terror/counter-terror, victim/perpetrator. In the renaming of the notorious terrorist, “the familiar name is transposed on the mass murderer, but in return the attributes of the mass murderer are transposed on one very like us” (Conte 570), and this reciprocal relationship forms an imagined evil that is no longer so easily locatable within the prevailing political discourse. As the novel contextualises 9/11 within a greater historical narrative (Leps), in which characters like Martin represent “our” form of militant activism (Duvall), we are invited to perceive a possibility that the terrorist could be, like Martin, “one of ours […] godless, Western, white” (DeLillo, Falling 195).Further, the idea that the suspect exists, almost literally, within ‘us’, the victims, is reflected in the structure of the narrative itself. This suggests a more fluid relationship between terrorist and victim than is offered by common categorisations that, for some, “mislead and confuse the mind, which is trying to make sense of a disorderly reality” (Said 12). Hammad is visited in three short separate sections; “on Marienstrasse” (77-83), “in Nokomis” (171-178), and “the Hudson corridor” (237-239), at the end of each of the novel’s three parts. Hammad’s narrative is segmented within Keith’s and Lianne’s tale like an invisible yet pervasive reminder that the terrorist is inseparable from the lives of the victims, habituating the same terrains, and crafted by the same omniscient powers that compose the victims’ narrative. The penetration of the terrorist into ‘our’ narrative is also perceptible in the physical osmosis between terrorist and victim, as the body of the injured victim hosts fragments of the dead terrorist’s flesh. The portrayal of the body, in some post 9/11 novels, as “a vulnerable site of trauma” (Bird, 561), is evident in the following passage, where a physician explains to Keith the post-bombing condition termed “organic shrapnel”:The bomber is blown to bits, literally bits and pieces, and fragments of flesh and bone come flying outwards with such force and velocity that they get wedged, they get trapped in the body of anyone who’s in striking range...A student is sitting in a cafe. She survives the attack. Then, months later, they find these little, like, pellets of flesh, human flesh that got driven into the skin. (16)For Keith, the dead terrorist’s flesh, lodged under living human skin, confirms the malignancy of his emotional and physical injury, and suggests a “consciousness occupied by terror” (Apitzch 95), not unlike Justin’s consciousness, occupied from within by the “secret” (DeLillo, Falling 101) of Bill Lawton.The macabre bond between terrorist and victim is fully realised in the novel’s final pages, when Hammad’s death intersects, temporally, with the beginning of Keith’s story, and the two bodies almost literally collide as Hammad’s jet crashes into Keith’s office building. Unlike Hammad’s earlier and clearly framed narratives, his final interruption dissolves into Keith’s story with such cinematic seamlessness as to make the two narratives almost indistinguishable from one another. Hammad’s perspective concludes on board the jet, as “something fell off the counter in the galley. He fastened his seatbelt” (239), followed immediately by “a bottle fell off the counter in the galley, on the other side of the aisle, and he watched it roll this way and that” (239). The ambiguous use of the pronoun “he,” once again, and the twin bottles in the galleys create a moment of confusion and force a re-reading to establish that, in fact, there are two different bottles, in two galleys; one on board the plane and the other inside the World Trade Centre. Victim and terrorist, then, share a common fate as acting agents in a single governing narrative that implicates both lives.Finally, Žižek warns that “whenever we encounter such a purely evil on the Outside, [...] we should recognise the distilled version of our own self” (387). DeLillo assimilates this proposition into the fabric of Falling Man by crafting a language that renegotiates the division between ‘out’ and ‘in,’ creating a fictional antagonist in Bill Lawton that continues to lurk outside the symbolic window long after the demise of his historical double. Some have read this novel as offering a more relative perspective on terrorism (Duvall). However, like Leps, I find that DeLillo here tries to “provoke thoughtful stillness rather than secure truths” (185), and this stillness is conveyed in a language that meditates, with the reader, on its own role in constructing precarious concepts such as ‘us’ and ‘them.’ When proposing that terror, in Falling Man, can be found within ‘us,’ linguistically, historically, and even physically, I must also add that DeLillo’s ‘us’ is an imagined sphere that stands in opposition to a ‘them’ world in which “things [are] clearly defined” (DeLillo, Falling 83). Within this sphere, where “total silence” is seen as a form of spiritual progress (101), one is reminded to approach narrative and, by implication, life, with a sense of mindful attention; “to hear”, like Keith, “what is always there” (225), and to look, as Nina does, for “something deeper than things or shapes of things” (111).ReferencesApitzch, Julia. "The Art of Terror – the Terror of Art: Delillo's Still Life of 9/11, Giorgio Morandi, Gerhard Richter, and Performance Art." Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction: Transatlantic Perspectives on Don DeLillo. Eds. Peter Schneck and Philipp Schweighauser. London: Continuum [EBL access record], 2010. 93–110.Bal, Mieke. Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narratology. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1985.Bird, Benjamin. "History, Emotion, and the Body: Mourning in Post-9/11 Fiction." Literature Compass 4.3 (2007): 561–75.Booth, Wayne C. The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1961.Butler, Judith. 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