Journal articles on the topic 'Immigrants – Europe – Fiction'

William Randolph Hearst became editor and proprietor of the San Francisco Examiner in 1887, and by 1935, he had assembled a media empire consisting of nearly 30 major newspapers, 13 magazines, 8 radio stations, 3 news wires, and 2 motion picture companies. Most scholarship about Hearst has focused on his newspapers; less studied have been the magazines he acquired early in the 20th century. This monograph examines immigrant representations in Hearst magazines published between 1905 and 1945, focusing on how magazine fiction, nonfiction, and “fact-fiction” articles presented immigrants and immigration as social and political issues. Like Hearst himself, the publications favored immigrants from Germany and the Scandinavian countries of northern Europe and tended to disfavor those from China and Japan and, to a lesser extent, Mexico. According to the magazines, immigrants from the Far East and Mexico were “undesirables” who threatened society by, allegedly, importing, selling, and using hazardous drugs. Newspaper advertisements, news articles, and editorials extended these portrayals to wider audiences. Hearst also applied cross-media promotion to motion pictures, with writers converting fiction from his magazines into screenplays for Cosmopolitan Productions and MGM. The monograph contains examples of how magazine content and iconic covers have informed contemporary films and television series. In recent years, stylized representations have glamorized lifestyles but have also perpetuated cultural stereotypes that may contribute to anti-immigrant attitudes.

the social conditions of Indians as Native Americans for the treatment of white people who are immigrants from Europe in America. This research explores aspects of the reality of Indian relations with European immigrants in America that have an impact on discriminatory actions against Indians in John Steinbeck's novel The Pearl. Social facts are traced through fiction as part of the genetics of literary works. The research method used is genetic structuralism, a literary research method that traces the origin of the author's imagination in his fiction. The imagination is considered a social reality that reflects events in people's lives. The research data consist of primary data in the form of literary works, and secondary data are some references that document the background of the author's life and social reality. The results of this research indicate that racist acts as part of American social facts are documented in literary works. The situation of poor Indians and displaced people in slums is a social fact witnessed by John Steinbeck as the author of the novel The Pearl through an Indian fictional character named Kino. Racism is an act of white sentiment that discriminates against Native Americans, namely the Indian community.

In her public life, Clarice Lispector fought to be recognized as a native Brazilian; however, in her private life, she tended to associate with people with origins like hers. Many of her interviews are with artists who were either children of immigrants or emigrants from Eastern Europe. Scholars have probed Clarice’s fiction and the interviews she gave for a view of her approach to Jewish identity, but the interviews she conducted have not yet been examined. This article discusses Clarice’s dalliance with identity politics when interviewing notable members of the cultural Brazilian Jewish community, analyzes the questions she asked, and examines how she guided the conversation.

The article analyzes how the modern science fiction (the genres of anti-utopia and post-apocalypse) interprets the image of Siberia and predicts the fate of Siberia. In studied works of literature an attention is paid to such real features of this region as geographical distance from the center, low population, low development of the territory, the relativity of civilizational penetration into remote areas of Siberia, poor climate. The geographical proximity to China and the presence of a significant amount of Chinese immigrants in current Siberia are the basis of assumptions of writers about the Chinese expansion. Geographical remoteness from the center encourages to fantasize about the separation of Siberia into a special state. Positive predictions of Siberia development in the case of global cataclysms prevail: the writers suggest that the climate of Siberia will improve, that the geographical remoteness from Europe will save Siberia from negative technological and political exposures. Belief in the power of Siberia prevails in the fantastic assumptions of modern Russian writers.

Abstract Most recent studies on multilingual writing deal with literature by first- or second-generation immigrants. This article responds to debates about multilingual literature by examining the asymmetrical, historically-rooted multilingualism of minority groups in East-Central Europe. It does so by exploring linguistic diversity and its effects in the novels of the bilingual Serbian-Hungarian author Petar Milošević, novels that put the Serbian minority in Hungary centre stage. It is argued that Milošević’s prose fiction not only invites the reader to rethink the nature of script, standard language and cultural identity as historically contingent and multiply entangled, but also effectively refashions the cultural memory of the Serbian minority in Hungary. The novels’ broader relevance lies in their foregrounding of the minority’s cultural and linguistic doubleness, both in relation to the nation-state in which they live and to the external homeland. As such, they also potentially illuminate the position of other linguistic minorities in former Habsburg borderlands.

AT THE END of the Victorian era and in the first decades of the twentieth century, Israel Zangwill was a well-known name in Europe, America, and even the Middle East. The enormous success of his 1892 novel Children of the Ghetto had made Zangwill the spokesperson for English Jewry throughout the world, as he revealed and explained an alien community to its non-Jewish neighbors and made the universe of the Jewish immigrants more intelligible to their acculturated coreligionists. An early Zionist, Zangwill met with Theodore Herzl in London and attended the first Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897; he continued to participate in the movement until 1905, when he formed his own nationalist group, the Jewish Territorial Organization (ITO). He became active in the pacifist and feminist movements of the early 1900s, and his literary output of that period for the most part reflects those interests, although he still explored issues of Jewish identity in numerous short stories and the highly popular play The Melting Pot (1908). In all, Zangwill published eight novels, nine collections of short fiction, eleven plays, and a volume of poetry, writing on both Jewish and more general themes; and (with the exception of some of his later thesis drama) his work was for the most part both popular and acclaimed. During the later 1880s and 1890s Zangwill was a prolific journalist, publishing columns on literature and current topics not only in the Jewish Standard, but also in the comic paper Puck (later Ariel, which he also edited), the Critic, and the Pall Mall Magazine. In short, he was very much a turn-of-the-century literary personality, esteemed as one of their own by his Jewish readers, but also prominent in the more general transatlantic literary milieu.

Abstract Over the last few decades, the field of law and literature studies has increasingly focused on the importance of literary texts in the interpretation of legal doctrines developing wider perspectives on society and on the law’s effect on the community itself. By considering the dynamic relationship between narrative works and legal documents, the present analysis proposes a reading of Joseph Conrad’s short story “Amy Foster” (1901), which focusses on the investigation of the social and political aspects of migration in late nineteenth-century Britain. Echoes of the migrant figure as represented in Conrad’s story can be found in the Aliens Act, the law passed by the British government in 1905 to regulate the flux of migrants from Eastern Europe. Taking into account the legal value of the Aliens Act and the social consequences of its application, the article will first examine general views on migration at the beginning of the twentieth century, and will later explore the language used in the statute and its relevance in the short story. To this end, the notion of “undesirable immigrant,” first introduced to describe migrants with well-defined characteristics, is anticipated by Joseph Conrad in “Amy Foster” whose protagonist, Yanko Goorall, is an emigrant from Eastern Europe. Conrad’s fictional representation of Goorall as an “undesirable immigrant” allows us to reflect on how his writing deals with (and anticipates) events and socio-cultural trends.

In Un Franco, 14 Pesetas (2004), Carlos Iglesias tells the story of Spanish migration to Central Europe during the 1960s through a fictional remembering of his family’s years as immigrants to Uzwil, in the Swiss eastern province of Toggenburg. His memories of the Swiss landscape, luminous, green, and open contrast with a grim, grey and enclosed Madrid, both origin and end of the six-year journey. This essay explores the interrelation between memory, space, and human mobility in Un Franco, 14 Pesetas. Through a journey of migration to Switzerland, Iglesias tells a story of return to Madrid, and unveils the contradictions of Spain’s so-called ‘economic miracle’ of the 1960s. Merging experiences of arrival and departure, presents and pasts, Iglesias’s film shows how immigration is rooted in space, and inseparable from economic, political and social processes that are historically specific.

AbstractThis essay-review discusses four books that link refugee migration and border politics to ideas of time. It reads Asfa-Wossen Asserate’s African Exodus (2018), Stephanie Li’s Pan-African American Literature (2018), Aimee Bahng’s Migrant Futures (2018), and Long T. Bui’s Returns of War (2018) as books with distinct objects of analysis, from refugee memory of the US war in Vietnam, to US literary and cultural speculative fictions, to African immigrant writers in the US, to the current so-called African migrant crisis as it affects Europe. It also considers the multiple disciplinary and methodological commitments of these books, as they participate in discussions on migration in such areas as ethnic studies, postcolonial studies, Asian American studies, critical refugee studies, scholarship on literature of African diasporas, economics, history, memory, and human rights. This essay-review considers the gains or limitations of such approaches to the study of migration in contemporary literature and/or culture.

-Jay B. Haviser, Jerald T. Milanich ,First encounters: Spanish explorations in the Caribbean and the United States, 1492-1570. Gainesville FL: Florida Museum of Natural History & University Presses of Florida, 1989. 221 pp., Susan Milbrath (eds)-Marvin Lunenfeld, The Libro de las profecías of Christopher Columbus: an en face edition. Delano C. West & August Kling, translation and commentary. Gainesville FL: University of Florida Press, 1991. x + 274 pp.-Suzannah England, Charles R. Ewen, From Spaniard to Creole: the archaeology of cultural formation at Puerto Real, Haiti. Tuscaloosa AL; University of Alabama Press, 1991. xvi + 155 pp.-Piero Gleijeses, Bruce Palmer Jr., Intervention in the Caribbean: the Dominican crisis of 1965. Lexington KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1989.-Piero Gleijeses, Herbert G. Schoonmaker, Military crisis management: U.S. intervention in the Dominican Republic, 1965. Westport CT: Greenwood Press, 1990. 152 pp.-Jacqueline A. Braveboy-Wagner, Fitzroy André Baptiste, War, cooperation, and conflict: the European possessions in the Caribbean, 1939-1945. Westport CT: Greenwood Press, 1988. xiv + 351 pp.-Peter Meel, Paul Sutton, Europe and the Caribbean. London: Macmillan Caribbean, 1991. xii + 260 pp.-Peter Meel, Betty Secoc-Dahlberg, The Dutch Caribbean: prospects for democracy. New York: Gordon and Breach, 1990. xix + 333 pp.-Michiel Baud, Rosario Espinal, Autoritarismo y democracía en la política dominicana. San José, Costa Rica: Ediciones CAPEL, 1987. 208 pp.-A.J.G. Reinders, J.M.R. Schrils, Een democratie in gevaar: een verslag van de situatie op Curacao tot 1987. Assen, Maastricht: Van Gorcum, 1990. xii + 292 pp.-Andrés Serbin, David W. Dent, Handbook of political science research on Latin America: trends from the 1960s to the 1990s. Westport CT: Greenwood, 1990.-D. Gail Saunders, Dean W. Collinwood, The Bahamas between worlds. Decatur IL: White Sound Press, 1989. vii + 119 pp.-D. Gail Saunders, Dean W. Collinwood ,Modern Bahamian society. Parkersburg IA: Caribbean Books, 1989. 278 pp., Steve Dodge (eds)-Peter Hulme, Pierrette Frickey, Critical perspectives on Jean Rhys. Washington DC: Three Continents Press, 1990. 235 pp.-Alvina Ruprecht, Lloyd W. Brown, El Dorado and Paradise: Canada and the Caribbean in Austin Clarke's fiction. Parkersburg IA: Caribbean Books, 1989. xv + 207 pp.-Ineke Phaf, Michiel van Kempen, De Surinaamse literatuur 1970-1985: een documentatie. Paramaribo: Uitgeverij de Volksboekwinkel, 1987. 406 pp.-Genevieve Escure, Barbara Lalla ,Language in exile: three hundred years of Jamaican Creole. Tuscaloosa AL: University of Alabama Press, 1990. xvii + 253 pp., Jean D'Costa (eds)-Charles V. Carnegie, G. Llewellyn Watson, Jamaican sayings: with notes on folklore, aesthetics, and social control.Tallahassee FL: Florida A & M University Press, 1991. xvi + 292 pp.-Donald R. Hill, Kaiso, calypso music. David Rudder in conversation with John La Rose. London: New Beacon Books, 1990. 33 pp.-Mark Sebba, John Victor Singler, Pidgin and creole tense-mood-aspect systems. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1990. xvi + 240 pp.-Dale Tomich, Pedro San Miguel, El mundo que creó el azúcar: las haciendas en Vega Baja, 1800-873. Río Piedras, Puerto Rico: Ediciones Huracán, 1989. 224 pp.-César J. Ayala, Juan José Baldrich, Sembraron la no siembra: los cosecheros de tabaco puertorriqueños frente a las corporaciones tabacaleras, 1920-1934. Río Piedras, Puerto Rico: Ediciones Huracán, 1988.-Robert Forster, Jean-Michel Deveau, La traite rochelaise. Paris: Kathala, 1990. 334 pp.-Ernst van den Boogaart, Johannes Menne Postma, The Dutch in the Atlantic slave trade, 1600-1815. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. xiv + 428 pp.-W.E. Renkema, T. van der Lee, Plantages op Curacao en hun eigenaren (1708-1845): namen en data voornamelijk ontleend aan transportakten. Leiden, the Netherlands: Grafaria, 1989. xii + 87 pp.-Mavis C. Campbell, Wim Hoogbergen, The Boni Maroon wars in Suriname. Leiden, the Netherlands: E.J. Brill, 1990. xvii + 254 pp.-Rafael Duharte Jiménez, Carlos Esteban Dieve, Los guerrilleros negros: esclavos fugitivos y cimarrones en Santo Domingo. Santo Domingo: Fundación Cultural Dominicana, 1989. 307 pp.-Rosemarijn Hoefte, Hans Ramsoedh, Suriname 1933-1944: koloniale politiek en beleid onder Gouverneur Kielstra. Delft, the Netherlands: Eburon, 1990. 255 pp.-Gert Oostindie, Kees Lagerberg, Onvoltooid verleden: de dekolonisatie van Suriname en de Nederlandse Antillen. Tilburg, the Netherlands: Instituut voor Ontwikkelingsvraagstukken, Katholieke Universiteit Brabant, 1989. ii + 265 pp.-Aisha Khan, Anthony de Verteuil, Eight East Indian immigrants. Port of Spain: Paria, 1989. xiv + 318 pp.-John Stiles, Willie L. Baber, The economizing strategy: an application and critique. New York: Peter Lang, 1988. xiii + 232 pp.-Faye V. Harrison, M.G. Smith, Poverty in Jamaica. Kingston: Institute of social and economic research, 1989. xxii + 167 pp.-Sidney W. Mintz, Dorian Powell ,Street foods of Kingston. Mona, Jamaica: Institute of social and economic research, 1990. xii + 125 pp., Erna Brodber, Eleanor Wint (eds)-Yona Jérome, Michel S. Laguerre, Urban poverty in the Caribbean: French Martinique as a social laboratory. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1990. xiv + 181 pp.

This paper preoccupies itself with a close analysis of the concept of migration, diasporic realities and the quest for home in Unigwe’s On Black Sisters’ Street and Gyasi’s Transcendent Kingdom. Migration is a recurrent issue in the world today. Due to one reason or the other, people leave from one geographical location for the other—usually to Europe and America for greener pastures. The study investigates the socio-economic experiences of these African characters in the diaspora and the despair encountered resulting from dreams deferred. In this regard, this paper examines the disillusionment and frustration that characterize Unigwe and Gyasi’s fictional characters in the selected works as they grapple with their expectations and the actual realities in the New World. The work operates on the premise that characters in the texts are induced and motivated by dreams of a better life to immigrate to Europe and America where they end up being trapped in hardship, culture shock and identity crisis. Guided by the Postcolonial theory, this study revealed that, one’s perception of place in which he/she finds himself or herself is determined by the socio-cultural background of place/local; and that success is linked to mentality and personality. The study also found out that characters end up in disillusionment when their expectations are not realized, and this puts them in a melancholic state, hence, their decision to return home.

The best-selling Austrian novelist Vicki Baum took ship alone for America in 1932 but emigration soon became exile for the Jewish author. The feeling of ‘Heimatlosigkeit’, or rootlessness, which oppressed Baum at that time was emotional and spiritual rather than physical. Child of a Jewish immigrant family in the anti Semitic society of nineteenth-century Vienna, Vicki Baum had long questioned the loci and the politics of Heimat, a German term whose significance far exceeds the simple definition of home or homeland. Cut loose from Heimat, she began her travels to far-away destinations, seeking to identify a common humanity and the universal moralities which could guide Europe to a better future. She wrote her travel experiences into novels which allowed her to narrate the landscapes and customs but also the inner lives of the peoples she encountered. A long-standing belief in the inauthenticity of verbal communication encouraged her to transcend linguistic barriers with confidence but it was her gender, she believed, which enabled her to share and interpret other cultures. Commonality rather than difference is the focus of her travel-letters and their fictional transpositions. Focusing on Baum’s experiences on Bali seen in a postcolonial perspective, the article argues that the island was for the novelist a space of transcendence, where the inhabitants held on to values already lost in Western societies.

Flowers of Galilee breaks new ground in modern political discourse. Thisbook recommends a democratic one-state solution in all of historicalPalestine and the return of the Palestinians to rebuild their villages. Thebeautiful front cover painting by Suleiman Mansour of Jerusalem lovinglydepicts a Palestinian family, children seated on a donkey, walking past a hillcovered with olive trees. Similarly, Israel Shamir’s essays portray the peaceful,pastoral landscape of the Holy Land and the humanity of its inhabitants,juxtaposed against the ugliness and inhumanity of Jewish racism.These thought-provoking essays, written in Jaffa during the al-AqsaIntifada in 2001-02, call for Jews to leave their sense of exclusivity andplead for human equality. The author, a Russian immigrant to Israel in 1969,followed his meditations to their inevitable conclusion, renounced Judaism,and was baptized in the Palestinian Orthodox Christian Church ofJerusalem. A brilliant storyteller with a vast knowledge of history, he discussescurrent events and their global implications with brutal honesty andtenderness. His clear insights and lyrical use of language to illustrate social,religious, and political complexities make him the Khalil Gibran of our time.An important chapter, “The Last Action Heroes,” memorializes theSpring 2002 siege of Bethlehem. The Israeli army surrounded 40 monksand priests and 200 Palestinians seeking refuge in the Church of Nativity.For a month, “people starved ... Stench of corpses and of infected woundsfilled the old church” (p. 63). The UN did nothing, but a few InternationalSolidarity Movement activists from America and Europe, including theauthor’s son, broke the siege. One group distracted the soldiers while theothers rushed into the church’s gates, brought food and water, and helpednegotiate a surrender.Shamir deconstructs the legal fictions of the state of Israel and the elusivePalestinian state: “Israelis who would like to live in peace with theirPalestinian neighbors ... cannot counteract the raw muscle of the AmericanJewish leadership” (p.179). He further dissects the Jewish Holocaust cultand other Zionist public relations tactics. He exposes the two-state solutionas a political bluff, calls on the world to cut off aid to Israel, and admonishesthe Muslim world for indulging in usury ...

Metamodernism is a Eurocentric theoretical fiction, with no adherence to the social and cultural realities of post-communist Romania. This article provides a critique of the theory of metamodernism proposed by Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker and used by Alex Ciorogar to describe the post-2010 Romanian poetry system. Even if the concept is inoperative for Romanian literature, it is a symptom of the overcoming of the postmodernist framework, felt by writers as anti-essentialist, light-hearted, and unconcerned with the problems of today’s society (climate crisis, immigrants, marginalized communities, economic inequalities between classes, etc.). What I notice in the footsteps of Jeffrey Nealon & Galin Tihanov is that the focus shifts from an autonomist “regime of relevance” to one that is socially, politically, and identity-building oriented. My analysis will propose a number of criticisms of the internal contradictions generated by the two Dutchmen’s theory: firstly, that the “Yo-yo effect” of metamodernism – a metaphor I coined to better understand the basic concept – does not fully explain the cultural landscape of the Romanian literary system. In addition, it is built on a sum of generalizations of modernism and postmodernism, which have not been unanimously accepted by the theorists. A second criticism of Vermeulen and van den Akker’s study is its Western-centric stance, which ignores the (semi-)peripheral specificity of cultures. If we absurdly accept the existence of metamodernism, it is only a combination of ideologies and styles of historical currents subsumable to modernity. Therefore, I will propose, following in the footsteps of Fredric Jameson and the Warwick Research Collective, the concept of singular modernity, and I argue why there cannot yet be a postmodernity in Eastern Europe. Discussing post-communist Romanian literature in terms of unfinished, combined, and unevenly developed modernity is much more productive because it takes into account both the material-social conditions of Romania and the cultural-artistic acquisitions thanks to the transfer of symbolic capital between central and (semi)peripheral systems.

“The Lion Refugee in Europe” is a critical race/anti-Blackness fictional counterstory that offers a perspective on the European refugee/immigrant situation. The story follows Asad, a young Somali refugee who ventures to Italy in hopes of gaining political asylum. By centering Asad as the main character, this fictional counterstory is meant to expose the realities experienced by refugees on their passages, specifically those leaving Africa. The lead author conducted the research for the counterstory during the summer of 2019. Much of the story reflects real events involving the state of refugee affairs related to the anti-immigration policy implemented under Italy’s previous right-wing government. Asad’s story is meant to reflect the experiences of refugees and the anti-immigrant sentiment that is prevalent throughout Europe. An immigration/refugee fictional critical race theory (CRT) counterstory told from this point of view is meant to confront a European nationalist stance on immigration and promote a more critical race/anti-Blackness/Afrophobia awareness and response toward the experiences of Black immigrant/refugee populations in Europe.

Abstract Background The aim of gamification is to provide an experiential exercise that invokes emotions to deepen learning. MyHealth project is interested in developing tools that facilitate healthcare access to newly arrived immigrants in Europe. One important barrier is the low levels of intercultural competency among healthcare professionals and the pervasiveness of negative health-related stereotypes. Methods We aim to demonstrate the educational value and social impact of the Refugee Escape Room©, to 1) raise awareness about the social and health challenges faced by vulnerable migrants and 2) provide an effective intercultural competence and self-efficacy training for hosting community. The game was created in 2017 by healthcare professionals and university students with personal migratory experience. It is divided in two parts. The first part addresses knowledge gaps about relevant aspects of Migration and Health. The second part is a fictional border control exercise with multiple bureaucratic challenges that participants, organized as “families”, must overcome to succeed. A pre-post pilot was executed to test for tool effectiveness. The piloting phase involved carrying out multiple instances of the activity for separate target groups. A questionnaire was developed with items related to knowledge, self-efficacy and intercultural competence. The questionnaire was filled by participants at baseline and post intervention to assess for statistically significant changes in all outcomes. Results while the piloting phase is still ongoing preliminary results show a high level of acceptability and engagement with the tool. Conclusions Refugee Escape Room© is a newly created tool that posits as a promising awareness-raising, competency-building gamification tool that is easily adaptable to multiple settings and participants. Key messages Gamification provides an experiential exercise that invokes emotions to deepen learning. Refugee Escape Room© is a promising tool for raising awareness about challenges faced by vulnerable migrants.

Jarrow, Gail. Bubonic Panic: When Plague Invaded America. Calkins Creek, 2015.If public health seems like it would be one of those topics that would send you to sleep, then Bubonic Plague: When Plague Invaded America by Gail Jarrow will change your mind. This is the final book in her trilogy about Deadly Diseases for middle grades and higher.Jarrow is fairly succinct in presenting the history, transmission, and trajectory of various waves of plague around the world. She briefly charts its first appearance in 541 in Turkey, then vividly describes the second wave that started in 1346 and at its most virulent was named the Black Death, killing millions in Europe and parts of Asia and North Africa. The majority of the book focuses on the third wave, when it reached North America.The third pandemic began in the mid-1800s when China became ground zero for this next wave, which spread to Hong Kong by 1894. Hong Kong was a busy port town and trade and travel on steamships allowed for rapid dispersion of the disease. Researchers from a number of countries sought feverishly to identify the source of the epidemic and learn how it was spread. By the late 1890s two of them had proven it was rat fleas. Unfortunately almost nobody believed them, which became problematic when in 1900 San Francisco saw its first deaths in Chinatown.Jarrow provides a fascinating look at the political and social climate of this period in relation to the attitudes of Americans towards Chinese immigrants and the impact quarantining San Francisco’s Chinatown would have on businesses reliant on trade and tourism. It became a complicated and fraught tug-o-war between politicians, businessmen, doctors and public health officials, fighting about whether to recognize and publicize the deaths and quarantine when the evidence seemed inconclusive as to their cause. Even after proof was offered action was surprisingly slow to follow and the disease was able to spread, although the number of deaths was comparatively low, being in the low hundreds.This well researched book also includes information about contemporary cases in the United States, ongoing research and treatments for all three strains of plague. There are extensive source notes and bibliography, a glossary, timeline, index and an author’s note explaining her keen interest in public health and the importance it had in the past,and will have when the next global pandemic hits. Also included are numerous photographs (some a little gruesome), newspaper clippings, cartoons, posters and illustrations to engage readers’ interest.This will pair perfectly with a middle grade novel, Chasing Secrets by Gennifer Choldenko, 2015 that gives a fictional account of the outbreak in San Francisco.This is a strong finish to a fascinating series that combines history, social issues, scientific research, technological developments and culture in America, showing long term implications for today’s government policies towards health.Highly Recommended: 4 out of 4 starsReviewer: Tammy FlandersTammy is the Reference Coordinator in the Doucette Library of Teaching Resources at the University of Calgary. She also reviews juvenile resources with an eye to classroom use in her blog, Apples with Many Seeds.

IntroductionNordic mythology, also known as Norse mythology, is a term used to describe Medieval creation myths and tales of Gods and otherworldly realms, told and retold by Northern Germanic and Scandinavian tribes of the ninth century AD (see for example Gaiman).I discuss a new type of Nordic mythology that is being created through popular culture, social media, books, and television shows. I am interested in how contemporary portrayals of the Nordic countries has created a kind of mythological place called Scandinavia, where things, people, and ideas are better than in other places.Whereas the old myths portray a fierce warrior race, the new myths create a utopian Scandinavia as a place that is inherently good; a place that is progressive and harmonious. In the creation of these new myths the underbelly of the North is often neglected, producing a homogenised representation of a group of countries that are in actuality diverse and inevitably imperfect.ScandimaniaGenerally the term Scandinavia always refers to Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. When including Finland and Iceland, it is more accurate to refer to the five as the Nordic countries. I was born and grew up in Denmark. My observations are skewed towards a focus on Denmark, rather than Scandinavia as a whole. Though I will use the term Nordic and Scandinavia throughout the article, it is worth noting that these definitions describe a group of countries that despite some commonalities are also quite different in geography, and culture.Whether we are speaking strictly of Scandinavia or of the Nordic countries as a whole, one thing is certain: in recent years there has been a surge of popularity in all things Nordic. Scandinavian design has been popular since the 1950s, known for its functionality and simplistic beauty, and globalised through the Swedish furniture chain IKEA. Consequently, Nordic interior design has become a style widely praised and emulated, as has Nordic fashion, architecture, and innovation.The fact that Scandinavian people are often represented as being intelligent and beautiful adds to the notion of stylish and aesthetically pleasing ideals. This is partly why sperm from Danish sperm donors is the most sought after and widely distributed in the world: perhaps prospective parents find the idea of having a baby of Viking stock appealing (Kale). Nordic countries are also known for their egalitarian societies, which are described as “the holy grail of a healthy economy and society” (Cleary). These are countries where the collective good is cherished. Tax rates are high (in Denmark between 55 per cent and 60 per cent of income), which leads to excellent welfare systems.In recent years other terms have entered the collective Western vocabulary. New Nordic Cuisine describes a trend that has taken the culinary world by storm. This term refers to food that is created with seasonal, local, and foraged ingredients. The emphasis being a renewed connection to nature and old ways. In 2016 the Danish word hygge was shortlisted by the Oxford Dictionary as word of the year. A word, which has no direct English translation, it means “a quality of cosiness and comfortable conviviality that engenders a feeling of contentment or well-being (regarded as a defining characteristic of Danish culture)”. Countless books were published in the United Kingdom, and elsewhere, explaining the art of hygge. Other Scandinavian words are now becoming popular, such as the Swedish lagom, meaning “just enough”.In the past two years, the United Nations’ World Happiness Report listed Denmark and Norway as the happiest places on earth. Other surveys similarly put the Nordic countries on top as the most prosperous places on earth (Anderson).Mythologies and Discursive FormationsThe standard definition of myth is a “traditional story, especially one concerning the early history of a people or explaining a natural or social phenomenon, and typically involving supernatural beings or events.” Or “A widely held but false belief or idea” (Oxford Dictionaries, Myth).During what became known as the “discursive turn”, both Barthes and Foucault expanded the conception of myth by placing it within a wider socio-political and historical contexts of power and truth. “Discursive formations” became a commonly accepted way of describing a cluster of ideas, images, and practices that define particular “truths” within a given cultural context (Hall 6). In other words, myths serve specific purposes within given socio-cultural constructions.I argue that the current idolisation of Scandinavia is creating a common global narrative of a superior society. A mythical place that has “figured it out”, and found the key to happiness. The mythologised North is based on an array of media stories, statistics, reports, articles, advertising, political rhetoric, books, films, TV series, exhibitions, and social media activity. These perpetuate a “truth” of the Nordic countries as being especially benign, cultured, and distinguished. The Smiling PolicemanIn his well-known essay Myth Today, Barthes analyses an image of a North African boy in uniform saluting the French flag on the front cover of a magazine. Barthes argues that by analysing the semiotic meaning of the image in two stages, one can identify the “myth”.The first level is the signifiers (what we see), a dark skinned boy, a uniform, a raised arm, a flag. The signified is our recognition of these as a North African boy raising his arm to the French flag. The second level of interpretation is the wider context in which we understand what we see: the greatness of France is signified in the depiction of one of her colonial subjects submitting to and glorifying the flag. That is to say, the myth generated by the image is the story of France as a great colonial and military nation.Now take a look at this image, which was distributed the world over in newspapers, online media, and in turn social media (Warren; Kolff). This image is interesting because it epitomises much of what is believed about Scandinavia (the new myths). If we approach the image through the semiotic lens of Barthes, we firstly describe what is seen in the picture (signifiers): a blonde policeman, a girl of dark complexion, a road in the countryside, a van in the distance, and some other people with backpacks on the side of the road. When we put these elements together in context, we understand that the image to be depicting a Danish policeman, blonde, smiling and handsome, playing with a Syrian refugee girl on an empty Danish highway, with her fellow refugees behind her.The second level of interpretation (the myth) is created by combining the elements into a story: A friendly police officer is playing with a refugee girl, which is unusual because policemen are commonly seen as authoritarian and unfriendly to illegal immigrants. This policeman is smiling. He is happy in his job. He is healthy, good-looking, and compassionate.This fits the image of Scandinavian men as good fathers (they have paternity leave, and often help equally with child rearing). The image confirms that the happiest people on earth would of course also have happy, friendly policemen. The belief that the Scandinavian social model is one to admire would appear to be endorsed.The fact that this is in a rural setting with green landscapes adds further to the notion of Nordic freshness, naturalness, environmentalism, and food that comes from the wild. The fact that the policeman is well-groomed, stylish, well-built, and handsome reinforces the notion that Scandinavia is a place of style and taste, where the good Viking gene pool produces fit and beautiful people.It makes sense that in a place with a focus on togetherness and the common good, refugees are also treated well. Just as the French image of a dark-skinned boy saluting the French flag sent out messages of French superiority, this image sends out messages of inherent Nordic goodness in a time where positive images of the European refugee crisis are few and far between.In a discursive discussion, one asks not only what meanings does this image convey, but why is this image chosen, distributed, shared, tweeted, and promoted over other images? What purpose does its proliferation serve? What is the historical context in which it is popularised? What is the cultural imagination/narrative that is served? In the current often depressing socio-political situation in Europe, people like to know that there is a place where compassion and play exists.Among other news stories of death, despair, and border protection, depictions of an idealised North can help calm anxieties by implying the existence of a place that is free of conflict. Jakob Stougaard-Nielsen writes:The flood of journalistic and popular ethnographic explorations of the Nordic region in the UK is an expression, perhaps, of a search for a lost sense of identity, a nostalgic longing for an imagined past society more in tune with pre-Thatcherite welfarist values, by way of consuming, appropriating and exoticising proximate cultural identities such as the now much hyped Danish or Nordic utopias. (Nordic Noir, 6)In The Almost Nearly Perfect People, British writer Michael Booth wonders: “one thing in particular about this new-found love of all things Scandinavian … which struck me as particularly odd: considering all this positive PR, and with awareness of the so-called Nordic miracle at an all-time high, why wasn’t everyone flocking to live here [in Denmark]?” (7).In actuality not many people in the West are interested in living in the Nordic countries. Rather, as Barbara Goodwin writes: “utopias hold up a mirror to the fears and aspirations of the time in which they were written” (2). In other words, in an age of anxiety, where traditional norms and stabilities are shifting, to believe that there is a place where contemporary societies have found a way of living in happiness and togetherness provides a sense of hope. People are not flocking to live in Scandinavia because it is not in their interests to have their utopian ideals shattered by the reality that, though the North has a lot to offer, it is inevitably not a utopia (Sougaard-Nielsen, The Truth Is).UnderbellyParadoxically, in recent years, Scandinavia has become well known for its “Nordic Noir” crime fiction and television. In the documentary TV series Scandimania, British TV personality Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall travels through Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, exploring the culture, scenery, and food. He finds it curious that Denmark has become so famous for its sombre crime series, such as The Killing and The Bridge, because it seems so far removed from the Denmark he experiences riding around the streets of Copenhagen on his bike.Fearnley-Whittingstall ponders that one has to look hard to find the dark side of Denmark, and that perhaps it does not actually exist at all. This observation points to something essential. Even though millions of viewers worldwide have seen shows such as The Killing, which are known for their dark story lines, bleak urban settings, complex but realistic characters, progressive gender equality, and social commentary, the positive mythologising of Scandinavia remains so strong that it engenders a belief that the underbelly shown in Nordic Noir is perhaps entirely fictional.Stougaard-Nielsen (see also Pitcher, Consuming Race) argues that perhaps the British obsession with Nordic Noir (and this could be applied to other western countries) can be attributed to “a more appropriate white cosmopolitan desire to imagine rooted identities in an age of globalisation steeped in complex identity politics” (Nordic Noir, 8). That is to say that, for a segment of society which feels overwhelmed by contemporary multiculturalism, there may be a pleasure in watching a show that is predominantly populated by white Nordic protagonists, where the homes and people are stylish, and where the Nordic model of welfare and progressive thinking provides a rich identity source for white people as a symbolic point of origin.The watching/reading of Nordic Noir, as well as other preoccupations with all things Nordic, help build upon a mythological sense of whiteness that sets itself apart from our usual notions of race politics, by being an accepted form of longing for the North of bygone ages: a place that is progressive, moral, stylish, and imbued with aspirational ways of living, thinking, and being (Pitcher, Racial Politics).The image of the Danish police officer and the refugee girl fits this ideal of a progressive society where race relations are uncomplicated. The policeman who epitomises the Nordic ideal is in a position of power, but this is an authority which is benevolent. The girl is non-threatening in her otherness, because she is a child and female, and therefore does not fit the culturally dreaded Muslim/terrorist stereotype. In this constellation the two can meet beautifully.The reality, of course, is that the race relations and issues surrounding immigration in Denmark, and in other Nordic countries, are as complicated and often messy and hateful as they are in other countries. In Sweden, as Fearnley-Whittingstall touches upon in Scandimania, there are escalating problems with integration of the many new Swedes and growing inequalities in wealth. In Norway, the underlying race tensions became acutely topical in the aftermath of the 2011 massacre, where right-wing extremist Anders Breivik killed 77 people. Denmark has one of the harshest anti-immigration laws in Europe, laws that are continuously being tightened (Boserup); and whenever visiting Denmark I have been surprised to see how much space and time discussions about immigration and integration take up in the news and current affairs.If we contrast the previous image with the image above, taken within a similar timeframe on the same Danish highway, we can see the reality of Danish immigration policies. Here we are exposed to a different story. The scene and the location is the same, but the power dynamics have shifted from benign, peaceful, and playful to aggressive, authoritarian, and conflict ridden. A desperate father carries his daughter, determined to march on towards their destination of Sweden. The policeman is pulling his arm, attempting to detain the refugees so that they cannot go further, the goal being to deport the Syrians back to their previous place of detention, just over the border in Germany (Harticollis). While the previous image reflects the humanity of the refugee crisis, this image reflects the politics, policies, and to a large extent public opinion in Denmark, which is not refugee-friendly. This image, however, was not widely distributed, partly because it feeds into the same depressing narrative of an unsolvable refugee crisis seen so often elsewhere, and partly because it does not fit into the narrative of the infallible North. It could not be tweeted with the hashtag #Humanity, nor shared on Facebook with a smiley face and liked with an emoji heart.Another image from Denmark, in the form of a politically funded billboard, shows that there are deep-seated tendencies within Danish society that want to promote and retain a Denmark which adheres to its traditional values and ethnic whiteness. The image was displayed all over the country, at train stations, bus stops, and other public spaces when I visited in 2016. It was issued by Dansk Folkeparti (the Danish People’s Party); a party which is anti-immigration and which was until recently the country’s second largest party. The title says “Our Denmark”, while the byline cleverly plays with the double meaning of passe på: it can mean “there is so much we need to take care of”, but also “there is so much we need to beware of.” In other words, the white working-class family needs to take care of their Denmark, and beware of anyone who does not fit into this norm. Though hugely contested and criticised (Cremer; see a counter-reaction designed by opponents below), the fact that thinly veiled anti-immigration propaganda can be so readily distributed speaks of an underbelly in Danish society that is not made of the dark murder mysteries in The Killing, but rather of a quietly brewing distain for the foreigner that reigns within stylishly designed living rooms. ConclusionMyths are stories cultures tell and retell until they form a belief system that becomes a natural part of our collective narrative. For Barthes, these stories were intrinsically connected to our understanding of language and our ability to read images, films, artifacts, and popular culture more generally. To later cultural theorists, the notion of discursive formations expands this understanding, to see myth within a broader network of socio-political discourses placed within a certain place and time in history. When connected, small narratives (images, advertising, film, music, news stories, social media sharing, scientific evidence, etc.) come together to form a common narrative (the myth) about how things are and should be in relation to a particular topic. The culminating popularity of numerous Nordic themes (Nordic television/film, interior design, fashion, cuisine, architecture, lifestyle, sustainability, welfare system, school system, gender equality, etc.) has created a grand narrative of the Nordic countries as a type of utopia: one that shows the rest of the world that an egalitarian society of togetherness and progressive innovation is possible. This mythologisation serves to quell anxieties about the flux and uncertainty of contemporary times, and may also serve to legitimise a yearning for a simple, benign, and progressive whiteness, where we imagine Nordic families sitting peacefully at their beechwood dining tables, candles lit, playing board games. This is a projected yearning which is otherwise largely disallowed in today’s multicultural societies.ReferencesAnderson, Elizabeth. “The Most Prosperous Countries in the World, Based on Happiness and Financial Health.” The Telegraph, 2 Nov. 2015. <http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/11966461/The-most-prosperous-countries-in-the-world-based-on-happiness-and-financial-health.html>.Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. London: Vintage, 2000 [1957].———. “Myth Today.” Mythologies. London: Vintage, 2000 [1957].Booth, Michael. The Almost Nearly Perfect People. London: Jonathan Cape, 2014.Boserup, Rasmus Alenius. “Denmark’s Harsh New Immigration Law Will End Badly for Everyone.” Huffington Post. <https://www.huffingtonpost.com/rasmus-alenius-boserup/denmark-immigration-law_b_9112148.html>.Bridge, The. (Danish: Broen.) Created by Hans Rosenfeldt. Sveriges Television and DR, 2013-present.Cleary, Paul. “Norway Is Proof That You Can Have It All.” The Australian, 15 July 2013. <http://www.theaustralian.com.au/life/norway-is-proof-that-you-can-have-it-all/news-story/3d2895adbace87431410e7b033ec84bf>.Colson, Thomas. “7 Reasons Denmark Is the Happiest Country in the World.” The Independent, 26 Sep. 2016. <http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/7-reasons-denmark-is-the-happiest-country-in-the-world-a7331146.html>.Cremer, Justin. “The Strangest Political Story in Denmark Just Got Stranger.” The Local, 19 May 2016. <https://www.thelocal.dk/20160519/strangest-political-story-in-denmark-just-got-stranger>.Dregni, Eric. “Why Is Norway the Happiest Place on Earth?” Star Tribune, 11 June 2017. <http://www.startribune.com/the-height-of-happy/427321393/#1>.Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality: The Will to Knowledge. London: Penguin Books, 1998 [1976]. Gaiman, Neil. “Neil Gaiman Retells Classic Norse Mythology.” Conversations. Radio National 30 Mar. 2017.Goodwin, Barbara, ed. The Philosophy of Utopia. London: Frank Cass, 2001.Hall, Stuart, ed. Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. London: Sage, 1997.Hartocollis, Anemona. “Traveling in Europe’s River of Migrants.” New York Times, 9 Sep. 2015. <https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/cp/reporters-notebook/migrants/denmark-refugees-migrants>.Helliwell, J., R. Layard, and J. Sachs. World Happiness Report 2017. New York: Sustainable Development Solutions Network, 2017.Kale, Sirin. “Women Are Now Pillaging Sperm Banks for Viking Babies.” Vice, 2 Oct. 2015. <https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/3dx9nj/women-are-now-pillaging-sperm-banks-for-viking-babies>.Killing, The. (Danish: Forbrydelsen.) Created by Søren Sveistrup. DR, 2007-2012.Kolff, Louise. “Part III: The Hunk & the Refugee.” Perspectra, 3 Dec. 2015. <https://perspectra.org/2015/12/03/danish-police-and-refugee-girl/>.Oxford Dictionaries. “Hygge.” <https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/hygge>.Oxford Dictionaries. “Myth.” <https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/myth>.Pitcher, Ben. Consuming Race. London: Routledge, 2014.———. “The Racial Politics of Nordic Noir.” Mecetes, 9 April 2014. <http://mecetes.co.uk/racial-politics-nordic-noir/>.Scandimania. Featuring H. Fearnley-Whittingstall. Channel 4, 2014.Sougaard-Nielsen, Jacob. “Nordic Noir in the UK: The Allure of Accessible Difference.” Journal of Aesthetics & Culture 8.1 (2016). 1 Oct. 2017 <http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.3402/jac.v8.32704>.———. “The Truth Is, Scandinavia Is Neither Heaven nor Hell.” The Conversation, 19 Aug. 2014. <https://theconversation.com/the-truth-is-scandinavia-is-neither-heaven-nor-hell-30641>.Warren, Rossalyn. “The Touching Moment a Policeman Sat Down to Play with a Syrian Refugee.” BuzzFeed News, 15 Sep. 2015. <https://www.buzzfeed.com/rossalynwarren/the-adorable-moment-a-policeman-sat-down-to-play-with-a-syri?utm_term=.qjzl2WEk7#.kgZXOp76M>.

In 1988, historian Nadia Wheatley and indigenous artist Donna Rawlins published their award-winning picture book, My Place, a reinterpretation of Australian national identity and sovereignty prompted by the bicentennial of white settlement. Twenty years later, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) commissioned Penny Chapman’s multi-platform project based on this book. The 13 episodes of the television series begin in 2008, each telling the story of a child at a different point in history, and are accompanied by substantial interactive online content. Issues as diverse as religious difference and immigration, wartime conscription and trauma, and the experiences of Aboriginal Australians are canvassed. The program itself, which has a second series currently in production, introduces child audiences to—and implicates them in—a rich ideological fabric of deeply politicised issues that directly engage with vexed questions of Australian nationhood. The series offers a subversive view of Australian history and society, and it is the child—whether protagonist on the screen or the viewer/user of the content—who is left to discover, negotiate and move beyond often problematic societal norms. As one of the public broadcaster’s keystone projects, My Place signifies important developments in ABC’s construction of multicultural child citizenship. The digitisation of Australian television has facilitated a wave of multi-channel and new media innovation. Though the development of a multi-channel ecology has occurred significantly later in Australia than in the US or Europe, in part due to genre restrictions on broadcasters, all major Australian networks now have at least one additional free-to-air channel, make some of their content available online, and utilise various forms of social media to engage their audiences. The ABC has been in the vanguard of new media innovation, leveraging the industry dominance of ABC Online and its cross-platform radio networks for the repurposing of news, together with the additional funding for digital renewal, new Australian content, and a digital children’s channel in the 2006 and 2009 federal budgets. In line with “market failure” models of broadcasting (Born, Debrett), the ABC was once the most important producer-broadcaster for child viewers. With the recent allocation for the establishment of ABC3, it is now the catalyst for a significant revitalisation of the Australian children’s television industry. The ABC Charter requires it to broadcast programs that “contribute to a sense of national identity” and that “reflect the cultural diversity of the Australian community” (ABC Documents). Through its digital children’s channel (ABC3) and its multi-platform content, child viewers are not only exposed to a much more diverse range of local content, but also politicised by an intricate network of online texts connected to the TV programs. The representation of diasporic communities through and within multi-platformed spaces forms a crucial part of the way(s) in which collective identities are now being negotiated in children’s texts. An analysis of one of the ABC’s My Place “projects” and its associated multi-platformed content reveals an intricate relationship between postcolonial concerns and the construction of child citizenship. Multicultural Places, Multi-Platformed Spaces: New Media Innovation at the ABC The 2007 restructure at the ABC has transformed commissioning practices along the lines noted by James Bennett and Niki Strange of the BBC—a shift of focus from “programs” to multi-platform “projects,” with the latter consisting of a complex network of textual production. These “second shift media practices” (Caldwell) involve the tactical management of “user flows structured into and across the textual terrain that serve to promote a multifaceted and prolonged experience of the project” (Bennett and Strange 115). ABC Managing Director Mark Scott’s polemic deployment of the “digital commons” trope (Murdock, From) differs from that of his opposite number at the BBC, Mark Thompson, in its emphasis on the glocalised openness of the Australian “town square”—at once distinct from, and an integral part of, larger conversations. As announced at the beginning of the ABC’s 2009 annual report, the ABC is redefining the town square as a world of greater opportunities: a world where Australians can engage with one another and explore the ideas and events that are shaping our communities, our nation and beyond … where people can come to speak and be heard, to listen and learn from each other. (ABC ii)The broad emphasis on engagement characterises ABC3’s positioning of children in multi-platformed projects. As the Executive Producer of the ABC’s Children’s Television Multi-platform division comments, “participation is very much the mantra of the new channel” (Glen). The concept of “participation” is integral to what has been described elsewhere as “rehearsals in citizenship” (Northam). Writing of contemporary youth, David Buckingham notes that “‘political thinking’ is not merely an intellectual or developmental achievement, but an interpersonal process which is part of the construction of a collective, social identity” (179). Recent domestically produced children’s programs and their associated multimedia applications have significant potential to contribute to this interpersonal, “participatory” process. Through multi-platform experiences, children are (apparently) invited to construct narratives of their own. Dan Harries coined the term “viewser” to highlight the tension between watching and interacting, and the increased sense of agency on the part of audiences (171–82). Various online texts hosted by the ABC offer engagement with extra content relating to programs, with themed websites serving as “branches” of the overarching ABC3 metasite. The main site—strongly branded as the place for its targeted demographic—combines conventional television guide/program details with “Watch Now!,” a customised iView application within ABC3’s own themed interface; youth-oriented news; online gaming; and avenues for viewsers to create digital art and video, or interact with the community of “Club3” and associated message boards. The profiles created by members of Club3 are moderated and proscribe any personal information, resulting in an (understandably) restricted form of “networked publics” (boyd 124–5). Viewser profiles comprise only a username (which, the website stresses, should not be one’s real name) and an “avatar” (a customisable animated face). As in other social media sites, comments posted are accompanied by the viewser’s “name” and “face,” reinforcing the notion of individuality within the common group. The tool allows users to choose from various skin colours, emphasising the multicultural nature of the ABC3 community. Other customisable elements, including the ability to choose between dozens of pre-designed ABC3 assets and feeds, stress the audience’s “ownership” of the site. The Help instructions for the Club3 site stress the notion of “participation” directly: “Here at ABC3, we don’t want to tell you what your site should look like! We think that you should be able to choose for yourself.” Multi-platformed texts also provide viewsers with opportunities to interact with many of the characters (human actors and animated) from the television texts and share further aspects of their lives and fictional worlds. One example, linked to the representation of diasporic communities, is the Abatti Pizza Game, in which the player must “save the day” by battling obstacles to fulfil a pizza order. The game’s prefacing directions makes clear the ethnicity of the Abatti family, who are also visually distinctive. The dialogue also registers cultural markers: “Poor Nona, whatsa she gonna do? Now it’s up to you to help Johnny and his friends make four pizzas.” The game was acquired from the Canadian-animated franchise, Angela Anaconda; nonetheless, the Abatti family, the pizza store they operate and the dilemma they face translates easily to the Australian context. Dramatisations of diasporic contributions to national youth identities in postcolonial or settler societies—the UK (My Life as a Popat, CITV) and Canada (How to Be Indie)—also contribute to the diversity of ABC3’s television offerings and the positioning of its multi-platform community. The negotiation of diasporic and postcolonial politics is even clearer in the public broadcaster’s commitment to My Place. The project’s multifaceted construction of “places,” the ethical positioning of the child both as an individual and a member of (multicultural) communities, and the significant acknowledgement of ongoing conflict and discrimination, articulate a cultural commons that is more open-ended and challenging than the Eurocentric metaphor, the “town square,” suggests. Diversity, Discrimination and Diasporas: Positioning the Viewser of My Place Throughout the first series of My Place, the experiences of children within different diasporic communities are the focal point of five of the initial six episodes, the plots of which revolve around children with Lebanese, Vietnamese, Greek, and Irish backgrounds. This article focuses on an early episode of the series, “1988,” which explicitly confronts the cultural frictions between dominant Anglocentric Australian and diasporic communities. “1988” centres on the reaction of young Lily to the arrival of her cousin, Phuong, from Vietnam. Lily is a member of a diasporic community, but one who strongly identifies as “an Australian,” allowing a nuanced exploration of the ideological conflicts surrounding the issue of so-called “boat people.” The protagonist’s voice-over narration at the beginning of the episode foregrounds her desire to win Australia’s first Olympic gold medal in gymnastics, thus mobilising nationally identified hierarchies of value. Tensions between diasporic and settler cultures are frequently depicted. One potentially reactionary sequence portrays the recurring character of Michaelis complaining about having to use chopsticks in the Vietnamese restaurant; however, this comment is contextualised several episodes later, when a much younger Michaelis, as protagonist of the episode “1958,” is himself discriminated against, due to his Greek background. The political irony of “1988” pivots on Lily’s assumption that her cousin “won’t know Australian.” There is a patronising tone in her warning to Phuong not to speak Vietnamese for fear of schoolyard bullying: “The kids at school give you heaps if you talk funny. But it’s okay, I can talk for you!” This encourages child viewers to distance themselves from this fictional parallel to the frequent absence of representation of asylum seekers in contemporary debates. Lily’s assumptions and attitudes are treated with a degree of scepticism, particularly when she assures her friends that the silent Phuong will “get normal soon,” before objectifying her cousin for classroom “show and tell.” A close-up camera shot settles on Phuong’s unease while the children around her gossip about her status as a “boat person,” further encouraging the audience to empathise with the bullied character. However, Phuong turns the tables on those around her when she reveals she can competently speak English, is able to perform gymnastics and other feats beyond Lily’s ability, and even invents a story of being attacked by “pirates” in order to silence her gossiping peers. By the end of the narrative, Lily has redeemed herself and shares a close friendship with Phuong. My Place’s structured child “participation” plays a key role in developing the postcolonial perspective required by this episode and the project more broadly. Indeed, despite the record project budget, a second series was commissioned, at least partly on the basis of the overwhelmingly positive reception of viewsers on the ABC website forums (Buckland). The intricate My Place website, accessible through the ABC3 metasite, generates transmedia intertextuality interlocking with, and extending the diegesis of, the televised texts. A hyperlinked timeline leads to collections of personal artefacts “owned” by each protagonist, such as journals, toys, and clothing. Clicking on a gold medal marked “History” in Lily’s collection activates scrolling text describing the political acceptance of the phrase “multiculturalism” and the “Family Reunion” policy, which assisted the arrival of 100,000 Vietnamese immigrants. The viewser is reminded that some people were “not very welcoming” of diasporic groups via an explicit reference to Mrs Benson’s discriminatory attitudes in the series. Viewsers can “visit” virtual representations of the program’s sets. In the bedroom, kitchen, living room and/or backyard of each protagonist can be discovered familiar and additional details of the characters’ lives. The artefacts that can be “played” with in the multimedia applications often imply the enthusiastic (and apparently desirable) adoption of “Australianness” by immigrant children. Lily’s toys (her doll, hair accessories, roller skates, and glass marbles) invoke various aspects of western children’s culture, while her “journal entry” about Phuong states that she is “new to Australia but with her sense of humour she has fitted in really well.” At the same time, the interactive elements within Lily’s kitchen, including a bowl of rice and other Asian food ingredients, emphasise cultural continuity. The description of incense in another room of Lily’s house as a “common link” that is “used in many different cultures and religions for similar purposes” clearly normalises a glocalised world-view. Artefacts inside the restaurant operated by Lily’s mother link to information ranging from the ingredients and (flexible) instructions for how to make rice paper rolls (“Lily and Phuong used these fillings but you can use whatever you like!”) to a brief interactive puzzle game requiring the arrangement of several peppers in order from least hot to most hot. A selectable picture frame downloads a text box labelled “Images of Home.” Combined with a slideshow of static, hand-drawn images of traditional Vietnamese life, the text can be read as symbolic of the multiplicity of My Place’s target audience(s): “These images would have reminded the family of their homeland and also given restaurant customers a sense of Vietnamese culture.” The social-developmental, postcolonial agenda of My Place is registered in both “conventional” ancillary texts, such as the series’ “making of” publication (Wheatley), and the elaborate pedagogical website for teachers developed by the ACTF and Educational Services Australia (http://www.myplace.edu.au/). The politicising function of the latter is encoded in the various summaries of each decade’s historical, political, social, cultural, and technological highlights, often associated with the plot of the relevant episode. The page titled “Multiculturalism” reports on the positive amendments to the Commonwealth’s Migration Act 1958 and provides links to photographs of Vietnamese migrants in 1982, exemplifying the values of equality and cultural diversity through Lily and Phuong’s story. The detailed “Teaching Activities” documents available for each episode serve a similar purpose, providing, for example, the suggestion that teachers “ask students to discuss the importance to a new immigrant of retaining links to family, culture and tradition.” The empathetic positioning of Phuong’s situation is further mirrored in the interactive map available for teacher use that enables children to navigate a boat from Vietnam to the Australian coast, encouraging a perspective that is rarely put forward in Australia’s mass media. This is not to suggest that the My Place project is entirely unproblematic. In her postcolonial analysis of Aboriginal children’s literature, Clare Bradford argues that “it’s all too possible for ‘similarities’ to erase difference and the political significances of [a] text” (188). Lily’s schoolteacher’s lesson in the episode “reminds us that boat people have been coming to Australia for a very long time.” However, the implied connection between convicts and asylum seekers triggered by Phuong’s (mis)understanding awkwardly appropriates a mythologised Australian history. Similarly in the “1998” episode, the Muslim character Mohammad’s use of Ramadan for personal strength in order to emulate the iconic Australian cricketer Shane Warne threatens to subsume the “difference” of the diasporic community. Nonetheless, alongside the similarities between individuals and the various ethnic groups that make up the My Place community, important distinctions remain. Each episode begins and/or ends with the child protagonist(s) playing on or around the central motif of the series—a large fig tree—with the characters declaring that the tree is “my place.” While emphasising the importance of individuality in the project’s construction of child citizens, the cumulative effect of these “my place” sentiments, felt over time by characters from different socio-economic, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds, builds a multifaceted conception of Australian identity that consists of numerous (and complementary) “branches.” The project’s multi-platformed content further emphasises this, with the website containing an image of the prominent (literal and figurative) “Community Tree,” through which the viewser can interact with the generations of characters and families from the series (http://www.abc.net.au/abc3/myplace/). The significant role of the ABC’s My Place project showcases the ABC’s remit as a public broadcaster in the digital era. As Tim Brooke-Hunt, the Executive Head of Children’s Content, explains, if the ABC didn’t do it, no other broadcaster was going to come near it. ... I don’t expect My Place to be a humungous commercial or ratings success, but I firmly believe ... that it will be something that will exist for many years and will have a very special place. Conclusion The reversion to iconic aspects of mainstream Anglo-Australian culture is perhaps unsurprising—and certainly telling—when reflecting on the network of local, national, and global forces impacting on the development of a cultural commons. However, this does not detract from the value of the public broadcaster’s construction of child citizens within a clearly self-conscious discourse of “multiculturalism.” The transmedia intertextuality at work across ABC3 projects and platforms serves an important politicising function, offering positive representations of diasporic communities to counter the negative depictions children are exposed to elsewhere, and positioning child viewsers to “participate” in “working through” fraught issues of Australia’s past that still remain starkly relevant today.References ABC. Redefining the Town Square. ABC Annual Report. Sydney: ABC, 2009. Bennett, James, and Niki Strange. “The BBC’s Second-Shift Aesthetics: Interactive Television, Multi-Platform Projects and Public Service Content for a Digital Era.” Media International Australia: Incorporating Culture and Policy 126 (2008): 106-19. Born, Georgina. Uncertain Vision: Birt, Dyke and the Reinvention of the BBC. London: Vintage, 2004. boyd, danah. “Why Youth ♥ Social Network Sites: The Role of Networked Publics in Teenage Social Life.” Youth, Identity, and Digital Media. Ed. David Buckingham. Cambridge: MIT, 2008. 119-42. Bradford, Clare. Reading Race: Aboriginality in Australian Children’s Literature. Carlton: Melbourne UP, 2001. Brooke-Hunt, Tim. Executive Head of Children’s Content, ABC TV. Interviewed by Dr Leonie Rutherford, ABC Ultimo Center, 16 Mar. 2010. Buckingham, David. After the Death of Childhood: Growing Up in the Age of Electronic Media. Cambridge: Polity, 2000. Buckland, Jenny. Chief Executive Officer, Australian Children’s Television Foundation. Interviewed by Dr Leonie Rutherford and Dr Nina Weerakkody, ACTF, 2 June 2010. Caldwell, John T. “Second Shift Media Aesthetics: Programming, Interactivity and User Flows.” New Media: Theories and Practices of Digitextuality. Eds. John T. Caldwell and Anna Everett. London: Routledge, 2003. 127-44. Debrett, Mary. “Riding the Wave: Public Service Television in the Multiplatform Era.” Media, Culture & Society 31.5 (2009): 807-27. From, Unni. “Domestically Produced TV-Drama and Cultural Commons.” Cultural Dilemmas in Public Service Broadcasting. Eds. Gregory Ferrell Lowe and Per Jauert. Göteborg: Nordicom, 2005. 163-77. Glen, David. Executive Producer, ABC Multiplatform. Interviewed by Dr Leonie Rutherford, ABC Elsternwick, 6 July 2010. Harries, Dan. “Watching the Internet.” The New Media Book. Ed. Dan Harries. London: BFI, 2002. 171-82. Murdock, Graham. “Building the Digital Commons: Public Broadcasting in the Age of the Internet.” Cultural Dilemmas in Public Service Broadcasting. Ed. Gregory Ferrell Lowe and Per Jauert. Göteborg: Nordicom, 2005. 213–30. My Place, Volumes 1 & 2: 2008–1888. DVD. ABC, 2009. Northam, Jean A. “Rehearsals in Citizenship: BBC Stop-Motion Animation Programmes for Young Children.” Journal for Cultural Research 9.3 (2005): 245-63. Wheatley, Nadia. Making My Place. Sydney and Auckland: HarperCollins, 2010. ———, and Donna Rawlins. My Place, South Melbourne: Longman, 1988.

Introduction Most developed countries, including Australia, have a strong focus on national, state and local strategies for emergency management and response in the face of disasters and crises. This framework can include coping with catastrophic dislocation, service disruption, injury or loss of life in the face of natural disasters such as major fires, floods, earthquakes or other large-impact natural events, as well as dealing with similar catastrophes resulting from human actions such as bombs, biological agents, cyber-attacks targeting essential services such as communications networks, or other crises affecting large populations. Emergency management frameworks for crisis and disaster response are distinguished by their focus on the domestic context for such events; that is, how to manage and assist the ways in which civilian populations, who are for the most part inexperienced and untrained in dealing with crises and disasters, are able to respond and behave in such situations so as to minimise the impacts of a catastrophic event. Even in countries like Australia that demonstrate a strong public commitment to cultural pluralism and social cohesion, ethno-cultural diversity can be seen as a risk or threat to national security and values at times of political, natural, economic and/or social tensions and crises. Australian government policymakers have recently focused, with increasing intensity, on “community resilience” as a key element in countering extremism and enhancing emergency preparedness and response. In some sense, this is the result of a tacit acknowledgement by government agencies that there are limits to what they can do for domestic communities should such a catastrophic event occur, and accordingly, the focus in recent times has shifted to how governments can best help people to help themselves in such situations, a key element of the contemporary “resilience” approach. Yet despite the robustly multicultural nature of Australian society, explicit engagement with Australia’s cultural diversity flickers only fleetingly on this agenda, which continues to pursue approaches to community resilience in the absence of understandings about how these terms and formations may themselves need to be diversified to maximise engagement by all citizens in a multicultural polity. There have been some recent efforts in Australia to move in this direction, for example the Australian Emergency Management Institute (AEMI)’s recent suite of projects with culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) communities (2006-2010) and the current Australia-New Zealand Counter-Terrorism Committee-supported project on “Harnessing Resilience Capital in Culturally Diverse Communities to Counter Violent Extremism” (Grossman and Tahiri), which I discuss in a longer forthcoming version of this essay (Grossman). Yet the understanding of ethno-cultural identity and difference that underlies much policy thinking on resilience remains problematic for the way in which it invests in a view of the cultural dimensions of community resilience as relic rather than resource – valorising the preservation of and respect for cultural norms and traditions, but silent on what different ethno-cultural communities might contribute toward expanded definitions of both “community” and “resilience” by virtue of the transformative potential and existing cultural capital they bring with them into new national and also translocal settings. For example, a primary conclusion of the joint program between AEMI and the Australian Multicultural Commission is that CALD communities are largely “vulnerable” in the context of disasters and emergency management and need to be better integrated into majority-culture models of theorising and embedding community resilience. This focus on stronger national integration and the “vulnerability” of culturally diverse ethno-cultural communities in the Australian context echoes the work of scholars beyond Australia such as McGhee, Mouritsen (Reflections, Citizenship) and Joppke. They argue that the “civic turn” in debates around resurgent contemporary nationalism and multicultural immigration policies privileges civic integration over genuine two-way multiculturalism. This approach sidesteps the transculturational (Ortiz; Welsch; Mignolo; Bennesaieh; Robins; Stein) aspects of contemporary social identities and exchange by paying lip-service to cultural diversity while affirming a neo-liberal construct of civic values and principles as a universalising goal of Western democratic states within a global market economy. It also suggests a superficial tribute to cultural diversity that does not embed diversity comprehensively at the levels of either conceptualising or resourcing different elements of Australian transcultural communities within the generalised framework of “community resilience.” And by emphasising cultural difference as vulnerability rather than as resource or asset, it fails to acknowledge the varieties of resilience capital that many culturally diverse individuals and communities may bring with them when they resettle in new environments, by ignoring the question of what “resilience” actually means to those from culturally diverse communities. In so doing, it also avoids the critical task of incorporating intercultural definitional diversity around the concepts of both “community” and “resilience” used to promote social cohesion and the capacity to recover from disasters and crises. How we might do differently in thinking about the broader challenges for multiculturalism itself as a resilient transnational concept and practice? The Concept of Resilience The meanings of resilience vary by disciplinary perspective. While there is no universally accepted definition of the concept, it is widely acknowledged that resilience refers to the capacity of an individual to do well in spite of exposure to acute trauma or sustained adversity (Liebenberg 219). Originating in the Latin word resilio, meaning ‘to jump back’, there is general consensus that resilience pertains to an individual’s, community’s or system’s ability to adapt to and ‘bounce back’ from a disruptive event (Mohaupt 63, Longstaff et al. 3). Over the past decade there has been a dramatic rise in interest in the clinical, community and family sciences concerning resilience to a broad range of adversities (Weine 62). While debate continues over which discipline can be credited with first employing resilience as a concept, Mohaupt argues that most of the literature on resilience cites social psychology and psychiatry as the origin for the concept beginning in the mid-20th century. The pioneer researchers of what became known as resilience research studied the impact on children living in dysfunctional families. For example, the findings of work by Garmezy, Werner and Smith and Rutter showed that about one third of children in these studies were coping very well despite considerable adversities and traumas. In asking what it was that prevented the children in their research from being negatively influenced by their home environments, such research provided the basis for future research on resilience. Such work was also ground-breaking for identifying the so-called ‘protective factors’ or resources that individuals can operationalise when dealing with adversity. In essence, protective factors are those conditions in the individual that protect them from the risk of dysfunction and enable recovery from trauma. They mitigate the effects of stressors or risk factors, that is, those conditions that predispose one to harm (Hajek 15). Protective factors include the inborn traits or qualities within an individual, those defining an individual’s environment, and also the interaction between the two. Together, these factors give people the strength, skills and motivation to cope in difficult situations and re-establish (a version of) ‘normal’ life (Gunnestad). Identifying protective factors is important in terms of understanding the particular resources a given sociocultural group has at its disposal, but it is also vital to consider the interconnections between various protective mechanisms, how they might influence each other, and to what degree. An individual, for instance, might display resilience or adaptive functioning in a particular domain (e.g. emotional functioning) but experience significant deficits in another (e.g. academic achievement) (Hunter 2). It is also essential to scrutinise how the interaction between protective factors and risk factors creates patterns of resilience. Finally, a comprehensive understanding of the interrelated nature of protective mechanisms and risk factors is imperative for designing effective interventions and tailored preventive strategies (Weine 65). In short, contemporary thinking about resilience suggests it is neither entirely personal nor strictly social, but an interactive and iterative combination of the two. It is a quality of the environment as much as the individual. For Ungar, resilience is the complex entanglements between “individuals and their social ecologies [that] will determine the degree of positive outcomes experienced” (3). Thinking about resilience as context-dependent is important because research that is too trait-based or actor-centred risks ignoring any structural or institutional forces. A more ecological interpretation of resilience, one that takes into a person’s context and environment into account, is vital in order to avoid blaming the victim for any hardships they face, or relieving state and institutional structures from their responsibilities in addressing social adversity, which can “emphasise self-help in line with a neo-conservative agenda instead of stimulating state responsibility” (Mohaupt 67). Nevertheless, Ungar posits that a coherent definition of resilience has yet to be developed that adequately ‘captures the dual focus of the individual and the individual’s social ecology and how the two must both be accounted for when determining the criteria for judging outcomes and discerning processes associated with resilience’ (7). Recent resilience research has consequently prompted a shift away from vulnerability towards protective processes — a shift that highlights the sustained capabilities of individuals and communities under threat or at risk. Locating ‘Culture’ in the Literature on Resilience However, an understanding of the role of culture has remained elusive or marginalised within this trend; there has been comparatively little sustained investigation into the applicability of resilience constructs to non-western cultures, or how the resources available for survival might differ from those accessible to western populations (Ungar 4). As such, a growing body of researchers is calling for more rigorous inquiry into culturally determined outcomes that might be associated with resilience in non-western or multicultural cultures and contexts, for example where Indigenous and minority immigrant communities live side by side with their ‘mainstream’ neighbours in western settings (Ungar 2). ‘Cultural resilience’ considers the role that cultural background plays in determining the ability of individuals and communities to be resilient in the face of adversity. For Clauss-Ehlers, the term describes the degree to which the strengths of one’s culture promote the development of coping (198). Culturally-focused resilience suggests that people can manage and overcome stress and trauma based not on individual characteristics alone, but also from the support of broader sociocultural factors (culture, cultural values, language, customs, norms) (Clauss-Ehlers 324). The innate cultural strengths of a culture may or may not differ from the strengths of other cultures; the emphasis here is not so much comparatively inter-cultural as intensively intra-cultural (VanBreda 215). A culturally focused resilience model thus involves “a dynamic, interactive process in which the individual negotiates stress through a combination of character traits, cultural background, cultural values, and facilitating factors in the sociocultural environment” (Clauss-Ehlers 199). In understanding ways of ‘coping and hoping, surviving and thriving’, it is thus crucial to consider how culturally and linguistically diverse minorities navigate the cultural understandings and assumptions of both their countries of origin and those of their current domicile (Ungar 12). Gunnestad claims that people who master the rules and norms of their new culture without abandoning their own language, values and social support are more resilient than those who tenaciously maintain their own culture at the expense of adjusting to their new environment. They are also more resilient than those who forego their own culture and assimilate with the host society (14). Accordingly, if the combination of both valuing one’s culture as well as learning about the culture of the new system produces greater resilience and adaptive capacities, serious problems can arise when a majority tries to acculturate a minority to the mainstream by taking away or not recognising important parts of the minority culture. In terms of resilience, if cultural factors are denied or diminished in accounting for and strengthening resilience – in other words, if people are stripped of what they possess by way of resilience built through cultural knowledge, disposition and networks – they do in fact become vulnerable, because ‘they do not automatically gain those cultural strengths that the majority has acquired over generations’ (Gunnestad 14). Mobilising ‘Culture’ in Australian Approaches to Community Resilience The realpolitik of how concepts of resilience and culture are mobilised is highly relevant here. As noted above, when ethnocultural difference is positioned as a risk or a threat to national identity, security and values, this is precisely the moment when vigorously, even aggressively, nationalised definitions of ‘community’ and ‘identity’ that minoritise or disavow cultural diversities come to the fore in public discourse. The Australian evocation of nationalism and national identity, particularly in the way it has framed policy discussion on managing national responses to disasters and threats, has arguably been more muted than some of the European hysteria witnessed recently around cultural diversity and national life. Yet we still struggle with the idea that newcomers to Australia might fall on the surplus rather than the deficit side of the ledger when it comes to identifying and harnessing resilience capital. A brief example of this trend is explored here. From 2006 to 2010, the Australian Emergency Management Institute embarked on an ambitious government-funded four-year program devoted to strengthening community resilience in relation to disasters with specific reference to engaging CALD communities across Australia. The program, Inclusive Emergency Management with CALD Communities, was part of a wider Australian National Action Plan to Build Social Cohesion, Harmony and Security in the wake of the London terrorist bombings in July 2005. Involving CALD community organisations as well as various emergency and disaster management agencies, the program ran various workshops and agency-community partnership pilots, developed national school education resources, and commissioned an evaluation of the program’s effectiveness (Farrow et al.). While my critique here is certainly not aimed at emergency management or disaster response agencies and personnel themselves – dedicated professionals who often achieve remarkable results in emergency and disaster response under extraordinarily difficult circumstances – it is nevertheless important to highlight how the assumptions underlying elements of AEMI’s experience and outcomes reflect the persistent ways in which ethnocultural diversity is rendered as a problem to be surmounted or a liability to be redressed, rather than as an asset to be built upon or a resource to be valued and mobilised. AEMI’s explicit effort to engage with CALD communities in building overall community resilience was important in its tacit acknowledgement that emergency and disaster services were (and often remain) under-resourced and under-prepared in dealing with the complexities of cultural diversity in emergency situations. Despite these good intentions, however, while the program produced some positive outcomes and contributed to crucial relationship building between CALD communities and emergency services within various jurisdictions, it also continued to frame the challenge of working with cultural diversity as a problem of increased vulnerability during disasters for recently arrived and refugee background CALD individuals and communities. This highlights a common feature in community resilience-building initiatives, which is to focus on those who are already ‘robust’ versus those who are ‘vulnerable’ in relation to resilience indicators, and whose needs may require different or additional resources in order to be met. At one level, this is a pragmatic resourcing issue: national agencies understandably want to put their people, energy and dollars where they are most needed in pursuit of a steady-state unified national response at times of crisis. Nor should it be argued that at least some CALD groups, particularly those from new arrival and refugee communities, are not vulnerable in at least some of the ways and for some of the reasons suggested in the program evaluation. However, the consistent focus on CALD communities as ‘vulnerable’ and ‘in need’ is problematic, as well as partial. It casts members of these communities as structurally and inherently less able and less resilient in the context of disasters and emergencies: in some sense, as those who, already ‘victims’ of chronic social deficits such as low English proficiency, social isolation and a mysterious unidentified set of ‘cultural factors’, can become doubly victimised in acute crisis and disaster scenarios. In what is by now a familiar trope, the description of CALD communities as ‘vulnerable’ precludes asking questions about what they do have, what they do know, and what they do or can contribute to how we respond to disaster and emergency events in our communities. A more profound problem in this sphere revolves around working out how best to engage CALD communities and individuals within existing approaches to disaster and emergency preparedness and response. This reflects a fundamental but unavoidable limitation of disaster preparedness models: they are innately spatially and geographically bounded, and consequently understand ‘communities’ in these terms, rather than expanding definitions of ‘community’ to include the dimensions of community-as-social-relations. While some good engagement outcomes were achieved locally around cross-cultural knowledge for emergency services workers, the AEMI program fell short of asking some of the harder questions about how emergency and disaster service scaffolding and resilience-building approaches might themselves need to change or transform, using a cross-cutting model of ‘communities’ as both geographic places and multicultural spaces (Bartowiak-Théron and Crehan) in order to be more effective in national scenarios in which cultural diversity should be taken for granted. Toward Acknowledgement of Resilience Capital Most significantly, the AEMI program did not produce any recognition of the ways in which CALD communities already possess resilience capital, or consider how this might be drawn on in formulating stronger community initiatives around disaster and threats preparedness for the future. Of course, not all individuals within such communities, nor all communities across varying circumstances, will demonstrate resilience, and we need to be careful of either overgeneralising or romanticising the kinds and degrees of ‘resilience capital’ that may exist within them. Nevertheless, at least some have developed ways of withstanding crises and adapting to new conditions of living. This is particularly so in connection with individual and group behaviours around resource sharing, care-giving and social responsibility under adverse circumstances (Grossman and Tahiri) – all of which are directly relevant to emergency and disaster response. While some of these resilient behaviours may have been nurtured or enhanced by particular experiences and environments, they can, as the discussion of recent literature above suggests, also be rooted more deeply in cultural norms, habits and beliefs. Whatever their origins, for culturally diverse societies to achieve genuine resilience in the face of both natural and human-made disasters, it is critical to call on the ‘social memory’ (Folke et al.) of communities faced with responding to emergencies and crises. Such wellsprings of social memory ‘come from the diversity of individuals and institutions that draw on reservoirs of practices, knowledge, values, and worldviews and is crucial for preparing the system for change, building resilience, and for coping with surprise’ (Adger et al.). Consequently, if we accept the challenge of mapping an approach to cultural diversity as resource rather than relic into our thinking around strengthening community resilience, there are significant gains to be made. For a whole range of reasons, no diversity-sensitive model or measure of resilience should invest in static understandings of ethnicities and cultures; all around the world, ethnocultural identities and communities are in a constant and sometimes accelerated state of dynamism, reconfiguration and flux. But to ignore the resilience capital and potential protective factors that ethnocultural diversity can offer to the strengthening of community resilience more broadly is to miss important opportunities that can help suture the existing disconnects between proactive approaches to intercultural connectedness and social inclusion on the one hand, and reactive approaches to threats, national security and disaster response on the other, undermining the effort to advance effectively on either front. This means that dominant social institutions and structures must be willing to contemplate their own transformation as the result of transcultural engagement, rather than merely insisting, as is often the case, that ‘other’ cultures and communities conform to existing hegemonic paradigms of being and of living. In many ways, this is the most critical step of all. A resilience model and strategy that questions its own culturally informed yet taken-for-granted assumptions and premises, goes out into communities to test and refine these, and returns to redesign its approach based on the new knowledge it acquires, would reflect genuine progress toward an effective transculturational approach to community resilience in culturally diverse contexts.References Adger, W. Neil, Terry P. Hughes, Carl Folke, Stephen R. Carpenter and Johan Rockström. “Social-Ecological Resilience to Coastal Disasters.” Science 309.5737 (2005): 1036-1039. ‹http://www.sciencemag.org/content/309/5737/1036.full> Bartowiak-Théron, Isabelle, and Anna Corbo Crehan. “The Changing Nature of Communities: Implications for Police and Community Policing.” Community Policing in Australia: Australian Institute of Criminology (AIC) Reports, Research and Policy Series 111 (2010): 8-15. Benessaieh, Afef. “Multiculturalism, Interculturality, Transculturality.” Ed. A. Benessaieh. Transcultural Americas/Ameriques Transculturelles. Ottawa: U of Ottawa Press/Les Presses de l’Unversite d’Ottawa, 2010. 11-38. Clauss-Ehlers, Caroline S. “Sociocultural Factors, Resilience and Coping: Support for a Culturally Sensitive Measure of Resilience.” Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology 29 (2008): 197-212. Clauss-Ehlers, Caroline S. “Cultural Resilience.” Encyclopedia of Cross-Cultural School Psychology. Ed. C. S. Clauss-Ehlers. New York: Springer, 2010. 324-326. Farrow, David, Anthea Rutter and Rosalind Hurworth. Evaluation of the Inclusive Emergency Management with Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CALD) Communities Program. Parkville, Vic.: Centre for Program Evaluation, U of Melbourne, July 2009. ‹http://www.ag.gov.au/www/emaweb/rwpattach.nsf/VAP/(9A5D88DBA63D32A661E6369859739356)~Final+Evaluation+Report+-+July+2009.pdf/$file/Final+Evaluation+Report+-+July+2009.pdf>.Folke, Carl, Thomas Hahn, Per Olsson, and Jon Norberg. “Adaptive Governance of Social-Ecological Systems.” Annual Review of Environment and Resources 30 (2005): 441-73. ‹http://arjournals.annualreviews.org/doi/pdf/10.1146/annurev.energy.30.050504.144511>. Garmezy, Norman. “The Study of Competence in Children at Risk for Severe Psychopathology.” The Child in His Family: Children at Psychiatric Risk. Vol. 3. Eds. E. J. Anthony and C. Koupernick. New York: Wiley, 1974. 77-97. Grossman, Michele. “Resilient Multiculturalism? Diversifying Australian Approaches to Community Resilience and Cultural Difference”. Global Perspectives on Multiculturalism in the 21st Century. Eds. B. E. de B’beri and F. Mansouri. London: Routledge, 2014. Grossman, Michele, and Hussein Tahiri. Harnessing Resilience Capital in Culturally Diverse Communities to Counter Violent Extremism. Canberra: Australia-New Zealand Counter-Terrorism Committee, forthcoming 2014. Grossman, Michele. “Cultural Resilience and Strengthening Communities”. Safeguarding Australia Summit, Canberra. 23 Sep. 2010. ‹http://www.safeguardingaustraliasummit.org.au/uploader/resources/Michele_Grossman.pdf>. Gunnestad, Arve. “Resilience in a Cross-Cultural Perspective: How Resilience Is Generated in Different Cultures.” Journal of Intercultural Communication 11 (2006). ‹http://www.immi.se/intercultural/nr11/gunnestad.htm>. Hajek, Lisa J. “Belonging and Resilience: A Phenomenological Study.” Unpublished Master of Science thesis, U of Wisconsin-Stout. Menomonie, Wisconsin, 2003. Hunter, Cathryn. “Is Resilience Still a Useful Concept When Working with Children and Young People?” Child Family Community Australia (CFA) Paper 2. Melbourne: Australian Institute of Family Studies, 2012.Joppke, Christian. "Beyond National Models: Civic Integration Policies for Immigrants in Western Europe". West European Politics 30.1 (2007): 1-22. Liebenberg, Linda, Michael Ungar, and Fons van de Vijver. “Validation of the Child and Youth Resilience Measure-28 (CYRM-28) among Canadian Youth.” Research on Social Work Practice 22.2 (2012): 219-226. Longstaff, Patricia H., Nicholas J. Armstrong, Keli Perrin, Whitney May Parker, and Matthew A. Hidek. “Building Resilient Communities: A Preliminary Framework for Assessment.” Homeland Security Affairs 6.3 (2010): 1-23. ‹http://www.hsaj.org/?fullarticle=6.3.6>. McGhee, Derek. The End of Multiculturalism? Terrorism, Integration and Human Rights. Maidenhead: Open U P, 2008.Mignolo, Walter. Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking. Princeton: Princeton U P, 2000. Mohaupt, Sarah. “Review Article: Resilience and Social Exclusion.” Social Policy and Society 8 (2009): 63-71.Mouritsen, Per. "The Culture of Citizenship: A Reflection on Civic Integration in Europe." Ed. R. Zapata-Barrero. Citizenship Policies in the Age of Diversity: Europe at the Crossroad." Barcelona: CIDOB Foundation, 2009: 23-35. Mouritsen, Per. “Political Responses to Cultural Conflict: Reflections on the Ambiguities of the Civic Turn.” Ed. P. Mouritsen and K.E. Jørgensen. Constituting Communities. Political Solutions to Cultural Conflict, London: Palgrave, 2008. 1-30. Ortiz, Fernando. Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar. Trans. Harriet de Onís. Intr. Fernando Coronil and Bronislaw Malinowski. Durham, NC: Duke U P, 1995 [1940]. Robins, Kevin. The Challenge of Transcultural Diversities: Final Report on the Transversal Study on Cultural Policy and Cultural Diversity. Culture and Cultural Heritage Department. Strasbourg: Council of European Publishing, 2006. Rutter, Michael. “Protective Factors in Children’s Responses to Stress and Disadvantage.” Annals of the Academy of Medicine, Singapore 8 (1979): 324-38. Stein, Mark. “The Location of Transculture.” Transcultural English Studies: Fictions, Theories, Realities. Eds. F. Schulze-Engler and S. Helff. Cross/Cultures 102/ANSEL Papers 12. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2009. 251-266. Ungar, Michael. “Resilience across Cultures.” British Journal of Social Work 38.2 (2008): 218-235. First published online 2006: 1-18. In-text references refer to the online Advance Access edition ‹http://bjsw.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2006/10/18/bjsw.bcl343.full.pdf>. VanBreda, Adrian DuPlessis. Resilience Theory: A Literature Review. Erasmuskloof: South African Military Health Service, Military Psychological Institute, Social Work Research & Development, 2001. Weine, Stevan. “Building Resilience to Violent Extremism in Muslim Diaspora Communities in the United States.” Dynamics of Asymmetric Conflict 5.1 (2012): 60-73. Welsch, Wolfgang. “Transculturality: The Puzzling Form of Cultures Today.” Spaces of Culture: City, Nation World. Eds. M. Featherstone and S. Lash. London: Sage, 1999. 194-213. Werner, Emmy E., and Ruth S. Smith. Vulnerable But Invincible: A Longitudinal Study of\ Resilience and Youth. New York: McGraw Hill, 1982. NotesThe concept of ‘resilience capital’ I offer here is in line with one strand of contemporary theorising around resilience – that of resilience as social or socio-ecological capital – but moves beyond the idea of enhancing general social connectedness and community cohesion by emphasising the ways in which culturally diverse communities may already be robustly networked and resourceful within micro-communal settings, with new resources and knowledge both to draw on and to offer other communities or the ‘national community’ at large. In effect, ‘resilience capital’ speaks to the importance of finding ‘the communities within the community’ (Bartowiak-Théron and Crehan 11) and recognising their capacity to contribute to broad-scale resilience and recovery.I am indebted for the discussion of the literature on resilience here to Dr Peta Stephenson, Centre for Cultural Diversity and Wellbeing, Victoria University, who is working on a related project (M. Grossman and H. Tahiri, Harnessing Resilience Capital in Culturally Diverse Communities to Counter Violent Extremism, forthcoming 2014).

To analyse critically contemporary communications and network technologies, and to understand how they become more (or less!) political, we need to learn about the forms of attachment, the kinds of 'stickiness', and the 'velcro effects' which block or negate as well as enable contemporary infrastructural politics. In the following tableau, the heuristic fiction comes from psychotherapy (Orbach, 2000). Imagine the cultural/new media/critical researcher as the analyst. The forms of attachment to be analysed include the analyst's own as she/he comes into relation with changing infrastructural regimes. Her or his reflections are italicised. Articulation The clients are a male couple, a community-minded activist artist-hacker, Pete, and a corporate IT strategist, Roger. They come to the consultation. It starts off badly. Pete shouts at Roger, who sits quietly beside him. Pete's clothes are loose and dark, he wears funky fluorescent trainers and his laptop backpack is geek-cool. Roger is in suit and tie, neat haircut, closely shaven, a slim aluminium briefcase leans against his pinstriped trouser leg. A few minutes into the session, it looks like Pete might come to blows with Roger. Interceding, the therapist asks them to say what brought them there. Pete and Roger begin to talk about the dilemma that had precipitated the anger and distress. Pete appeals for affirmation of how he has been wronged. But as Roger talks, the dominant feeling shifts to confusion. They are certainly in trouble as a couple, but clearly neither is about to relinquish this relationship. When cultural researchers of technology open the door to a new problem, they do not occupy a separate critical space in which knowledge about objects, practices, relations, processes, or figures come to be represented. Rather, only through 'articulation,' as Donna Haraway suggests, can they add another link, another twist in the knotted linkages which constitute the domain in question (Haraway, 1997, 63). What link(s) would we want to add to the contemporary contests over network infrastructure, where the central issue is figured as access to bandwidth and ubiquitous connectivity? Revolution and convolution Before the dotcom crash, Pete and Roger's relationship had been blissful and imaginative. Together, through the years of virtual reality and the browser wars, they had agreed on and implemented protocols, cut code, designed new applications and increased connectivity. Imagining full-blown virtuality had been a shared project; they were making a world together. The arrival of online shopping, email spamming, music swapping, massive on-line gaming and even open source software had not damaged it. Although they had come from different backgrounds and upbringings, they needed each other. For Roger, Pete had represented an urban sub-cultural well-spring of invention in contemporary technological cultures. Despite his corporate confidence and affluence, Roger knew that kudos on the street underpinned commercial success. From Roger, Pete trusted he would gain access to infrastructure and technical capacity that was the basis of a shared domain of communication. Their relationship before the dotcom crash had worked well because there had been no question about their desirability to each other. There had been conflicts, but both loved their work and found it meaningful. Already we see attachment to infrastructure becoming convoluted. The infrastructural-political lies neither outside or inside technology itself. What appears as a technological revolution – the arrival of the Internet – can be a convolution in relation to collective life. The affective energy attached to communication infrastructure can be seen as the 'historical and political reality of the mass and of crowds in movement' (Balibar, 1998, 16). We could say, as Gatens & Lloyd (1999) put it, that '[r]elations of communication of affect between human individuals are ... subsidiary to the relations of communication between the affects themselves' (66). From this standpoint, the relation between the couple refracts different affects meshing with each other. Hence, we need to understand the fears and hopes, desires and mourning associated with technological media differently. Attachment to technology After the dotcom crash of early 2001, things became more difficult. Their relationship met an extremely simple dilemma: low or high network bandwidth (Lovink, 2003, 370). Pete loved technical limitations like narrow bandwidth. They stimulated artistic, political, economic and collective creativity. He was fond of the Unix command line, shell scripts, cutting code in Python or Perl, ascii art, and hand-coded html. Roger, by contrast, saw technical limitations, especially those of bandwidth, ruining the Internet. Slow or unreliable access to the net thwarted its development into a truly mass popular entertainment medium. Only high bandwidth and mobility could rescue it. He thought Pete was part of the problem. Pete represented over-attachment to the platform. Pete's love of the intricacies of code, his insistence on tinkering, making-do, recycling, sharing and re-appropriating was all very well but it was an obstacle to popularity. In his more idealistic moments, Roger even thought that Pete's truculent defiance of the popular Internet and his attempts to save the masses from being duped only 'obscured the real social significance of their pleasures' (Walkerdine, 1999, 192-3). Strong technological attachments are no accident for two reasons. Firstly, the political is underpinned by collective affects or an awareness of bodies in relation (Gatens & Lloyd, 1999, 77). Secondly, 'human affairs (praxis) and the management-production of things (technç),' (Stengers, 2000, 163) are integrated in our politics. When politics integrates human affairs and technical things, collective affects concerning infrastructure arise. In contemporary politics, utopian and dystopian fantasies and visions of 'the good life' figure through communication infrastructure. Infrastructures are integral to how cultural forms of life render and inhabit their worlds. Thus, politics increasingly concerns technoscapes (Appadurai, 1996). Dilemmas of technical capacity By the end of 2002, contact between them was perfunctory. Pete was active in community networking projects in East London and 'Pico Peering' (http://picopeer.net/wiki/). In conjunction with a local housing association, he installing a wireless backbone for community access. The projects of the late 1990s - virtual spaces for artists, on-line communities, direct action hacktivism, collaborating on open source projects - seemed less important, although he did still work on them. Connection to a vibrant, ethnically complicated and crowded inner city seemed more interesting than either the relative abstraction of code or the predictability of commercial Internet. 'Carving out mobile space is good', Pete often said, 'but reclaiming public space is better' (Gerritzen & Lovink, 2002, 93). Roger, meanwhile, had embraced broadband connectivity, not caring that it mostly seemed to be used for pornography and music downloads. It was fast, popular, and becoming the norm in Europe and USA (Warwick, 2003). Like others, he thought 'never enough Internet capacity can be provided to the velocity-hungry on-line masses' (Lovink, 2003, 370). The dilemma of bandwidth forks from a deeper ambivalence about technical capacities and their role in futurity. On the one hand, technical capacity promises to overcome existing limitations. On the other hand, limitations only become relevant when they function as sites of differentiation or problematic zones open to diverse technical and non-technical solutions. All kinds of contestation, production, representation, identification and regulation cluster around these sites. The problem for cultural analysts of technology is articulating how certain sites of differentiation attract significations, technical innovations, objects/gadgets, infrastructures, regulatory apparatus, commercial-legal conflicts, feelings and concerns. The work of articulation involves disembedding these sites and extracting the relations of communication between affects that flow through them. Connectivity and collectivity Roger is having an affair. He met Erica at a wireless LAN trade exhibition held in the Olympia Exhibition Hall during late May 2003 (http://www.wlanevent.com/home/default.asp). Hewlett Packard-Compaq, Toshiba and Fujitsui had stands, some of the telcos and network operators were there too. Lining the back alleys, generic hardware and software manufacturers displayed their gadgets and ran their software demos on laptops. 'Directors' and 'sales executives' eagerly explained their products and handed out their sometimes less-than-glossy information sheets. At the centre, Intel occupied a large glass-walled stand lavishly kitted out with plasma screens on the walls, free laptops and wi-fi hotspots, pseudo-Japanese rock garden, comfortable seating in 'breakout cubicles' and well-groomed product managers and sales managers. Their Centrino™ wireless ready processors and corporate wifi solutions were featured in TV advertisements playing on large plasma screens. These advertisements dazzled Roger. They showed a broadband world without cables, without complicated configuration tasks, and without the clutter and hassle of wire infrastructures. They meant freedom from points of attachment, network connections, dongles and plugs. Like many others, he thought to himself 'wireless networking is the best thing to happen to the Internet since the browser' (Boutin, 2003). He met Erica when he went to ask if he could have an Intel showbag full of promotional material. With Erica, a telecommunications marketing director responsible for a wireless broadband roll-out in hotels, airports, pubs, cafés and train stations throughout the UK, he ended up going to the exhibition café to talk about wireless security issues. That afternoon, together they managed to squeeze into the most popular seminar at the exhibition, 'The Typical Wireless Hacker and W-LAN Security.' Andrew Barry writes, 'rapid technical change may sometimes have to occur in order to anticipate and stifle invention by others' (Barry, 2001, 213). Sometimes, we could add, rapid technical change may occur in order to anticipate and stifle the very presence of others. Remarkably many images of wireless connectivity involve empty spaces (e.g. Toshiba ads, Intel Centrino™ ads), just as so many car ads show empty roads. What is affectively at stake in these figurations of network infrastructure? What encounter or unwanted intimacy needs to be controlled here? Conversely, what space is there to imagine other connectivities, ones that do not rest on the promise of unobstructed private access to everything everywhere? Can we treat connectivity as something that opens relations between people, that lifts the ban on others being present? What sustains relationships: what does not yet exist The affair has brought Pete and Roger's relationship to a crisis point. Pete complains that the trust and intimacy between them is defunct. He argues that in Roger’s affair with Erica, he firewalls public culture in favour of a narrow understanding of the public as consumers of bandwidth. Even though Roger is increasing connectivity through wireless networking, it is not with the purpose of augmenting public space. Indeed, Roger is working with Erica to filter public spaces through a corporate, proprietary platform. If wired infrastructure has been successfully transformed into an interlocking matrix of proprietary relations, the task is now 'full spectrum' coverage of the spaces available to wireless infrastructures. For his part, Roger no longer regards technology itself as the basis of their mutual attachment. He now sees the technology as a given, and as something on which new kinds of freedom and mobility could rely. Wireless infrastructures promise to unleash people from the wires and cables that trap them at their screens. It will bring connectivity to other places - departure lounge, hotel lobby, Starbucks, beside the pool or in the garden, throughout the campus, etc. It allows them to work and be entertained in places they've never tried before. They leave the consultation in conflict. There is no obvious solution to their problem. Pete sees techno-utopian visions of freedom dying front of his eyes (Lessing, 2003), and is dealing with that by trying to move lower into the infrastructure. From his perspective, the technology is not a given but something whose conjunctions with other objects, activities, groups, figures and spaces cannot be left to chance. Roger too regrets the death of techno-utopian visions, but rejects the expectation that he should bail out the activist communities by giving public access to infrastructure. We can fall in love with a technology imagining that we create a relationship on a blank canvas. None of us have a clean attachment to technological media or infrastructures. Earlier relationships, other media, other practices and politics indelibly stain and sustain present ones. They often repeat older imaginings of connectivity and collectivity. The problem of the infrastructural-political centres on how to identify the object of attachment or identification. ''Incorporation into collectivities which determines our individuality involves affective imitation - dynamic movements of emotional identification and appropriation.” (Gatens & Lloyd, 1999, 77). Not so long ago, it may have been possible to imagine infrastructure as part of the fabric of collective reciprocity (along with housing, health, justice and education). Individuality as a citizen, spectator, commuter, traveller, resident, consumer, worker, student, child or immigrant was underpinned by infrastructural access. In many places, infrastructure no longer looks like a space of reciprocity, a space without negativity. Hence, attachment to infrastructure, the indispensable condition for a politics of infrastructure becomes contested. The link we might want to add to infrastructural imaginings concerns the very possibility of the infrastructural-political. Contestation of the collective mode of existence of infrastructure, this tenuous and still fragile fibre, is a promising development. Works Cited Appadurai, Arjun, Modernity at large: cultural dimensions of globalization, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1996 Balibar, Etienne Spinoza and politics London, Verso, 1998. Barry, Andrew Political Machines. Governing Technological Society, Continuum Press, London & New York, 2001 Boutin, Paul 'Wi-Fi for Dummies. You want a home wireless network, but you're afraid it won't work. Here's how to do it right', <http://slate.msn.com/id/2084046/>, accessed June 9, 2003 Gatens, Moira & Lloyd, Genevieve Collective Imaginings. Spinoza, past and present Routledge, London & New York 1999 Gerritzen, Mieke & Lovink, Geert, Mobile Minded, BIS Publishers, Amsterdam, 2002 Haraway, Donna J. 1997 Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium. FemaleMan©_Meets_OncoMouse™ Feminism and Technoscience, (Routledge, New York & London). Lovink, Geert, 'Hi-Low: The Bandwidth Dilemma, Or Internet Stagnation after Dotcom Mania' Dark Fiber. Tracking Critical Internet Culture, MIT Press, 2003 Orbach, Susie, The Impossibility of Sex, Penguin Books, 2000 Links http://picopeer.net/wiki/ http://slate.msn.com/id/2084046/ http://www.wlanevent.com/home/default.asp Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Mackenzie, Adrian. "The Infrastructural-Political" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0308/05-infrastructural.php>. APA Style Mackenzie, A. (2003, Aug 26). The Infrastructural-Political. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 6,< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0308/05-infrastructural.php>

Home is the place where one knows oneself best; it is where one belongs, a space one longs to be. Indeed, the longing for home seems to be grounded in an anthropological need for anchorage. Although in English the German loanword ‘Heimat’ is often used synonymously with ‘home’, many would have claimed up till now that it has been a word particularly ill equipped for use outside the German speaking community, owing to its specific cultural baggage. However, I would like to argue that – not least due to the political dimension of home (such as in homeland security and homeland affairs) – the yearning for a home has experienced a semantic shift, which aligns it more closely with Heimat, a term imbued with the ambivalence of home and homeland intertwined (Morley 32). I will outline the German specificities below and invite an Australian analogy. A resoundingly positive understanding of the German term ‘Heimat’ likens it to “an intoxicant, a medium of transport; it makes people feel giddy and spirits them to pleasant places. To contemplate Heimat means to imagine an uncontaminated space, a realm of innocence and immediacy.“ (Rentschler 37) While this description of Heimat may raise expectations of an all-encompassing idyll, for most German speakers “…there is hardly a more ambivalent feeling, hardly a more painful mixture of happiness and bitterness than the experience vested in the word ‘Heimat’.” (Reitz 139) The emotional charge of the idiom is of quite recent origin. Traditionally, Heimat stimulates connotations of ‘origin’, ‘birth place, of oneself and one’s ancestors’ and even of ‘original area of settlement and homeland’. This corresponds most neatly with such English terms as ‘native land’, ‘land of my birth’, ‘land of my forefathers’ or ‘native shores’. Added to the German conception of Heimat are its sensitive associations relating, on the one hand, to Romanticism and its idolisation of the fatherland, and on the other, to the Nazi blood-and-soil propaganda, which brought Heimat into disrepute for many and added to the difficulties of translating the German word. A comparison with similar terms in Romance languages makes this clear. Speakers of those tongues have an understanding of home and homeland, which is strongly associated with the father-figure: the Greek “patra”, Latin and Italian “patria” and the French “patrie”, as well as patriarch, patrimony, patriot, and patricide. The French come closest to sharing the concept to which Heimat’s Germanic root of “heima” refers. For the Teutons “heima” denoted the traditional space and place of a clan, society or individual. However, centuries of migration, often following expulsion, have imbued Heimat with ambivalent notions; feelings of belonging and feelings of loss find expression in the term. Despite its semantic opaqueness, Heimat expresses a “longing for a wholeness and unity” (Strzelczyk 109) which for many seems lost, especially following experiences of alienation, exile, diaspora or ‘simply’ migration. Yet, it is in those circumstances, when Heimat becomes a thing of the past, that it seems to manifest itself most clearly. In the German context, the need for Heimat arose particularly after World War Two, when experiences of loss and scenes of devastation, as well as displacement and expulsion found compensation of sorts in the popular media. Going to the cinema was the top pastime in Germany in the 1950s, and escapist Heimat films, which showed idyllic country scenery, instead of rubble-strewn cityscapes, were the most well-liked of all. The industry pumped out kitsch films in quick succession to service this demand and created sugar-coated, colour-rich Heimat experiences on celluloid that captured the audience’s imagination. Most recently, the genre experienced something of a renaissance in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent accession of the German Democratic Republic (GDR, also referred to as East Germany) to the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG or West Germany) in 1990. Described as one of the most seminal moments in modern history, the events led to large-scale change; in world politics, strategic alliances, but were most closely felt at the personal and societal level, reshaping community and belonging. Feelings of disbelief and euphoria occupied the hearts and minds of people all around the world in the days following the night of the 9 November 1989. However, the fall of the Wall created within weeks what the Soviet Union had been unable to manage in the previous 40 years; the sense of a distinctly Eastern identity (cf. Heneghan 148). Most of the initial positive perceptions slowly gave way to a hangover when the consequences of the drastic societal changes became apparent in their effects on populace. Feelings of disenchantment and disillusionment followed the jubilation and dominated the second phase of socio-cultural unification, when individuals were faced with economic and emotional hardship or were forced to relocate, as companies folded, politically tainted degrees and professions were abolished and entire industry sectors disappeared. This reassessment of almost every aspect of people’s lifestyles led many to feel that their familiar world had dissipated and their Heimat had been lost, resulting in a rhetoric of “us” versus “them”. This conceptual divide persisted and was cemented by the perceived difficulties in integration that had emerged, manifesting a consciousness of difference that expressed itself metaphorically in the references to the ‘Wall in the mind’. Partly as a reaction to these feelings and partly also as a concession to the new citizens from the East, Western backed and produced unification films utilised the soothing cosmos of the Heimat genre – so well rehearsed in the 1950s – as a framework for tales about unification. Peter Timm’s Go, Trabi, Go (1991) and Wolfgang Büld’s sequel Go, Trabi, Go 2. Das war der Wilde Osten [That Was the Wild East, 1992] are two such films which revive “Heimat as a central cultural construct through which aspects of life in the new Germany could be sketched and grasped.” (Naughton 125) The films’ references to Eastern and Western identity served as a powerful guarantor of feelings of belonging, re-assuring audiences on both sides of the mental divide of their idiosyncrasies, while also showing a way to overcome separation. These Heimat films thus united in spirit, emotion and consumer behaviour that which had otherwise not yet “grown together” (cf. Brandt). The renaissance of the Heimat genre in the 1990s gained further momentum in the media with new Heimat film releases as well as TV screenings of 1950s classics. Indeed Heimat films of old and new were generally well received, as they responded to a fragile psychological predisposition at a time of change and general uncertainty. Similar feelings were shared by many in the post-war society of the 1950s and the post-Wall Europe of the 1990s. After the Second World War and following the restructure after Nazism it was necessary to integrate large expellee groups into the young nation of the FRG. In the 1990s the integration of similarly displaced people was required, though this time they were having to cope less with territorial loss than with ideological implosions. Then and now, Heimat films sought to aid integration and “transcend those differences” (Naughton 125) – whilst not disputing their existence – particularly in view of the fact that Germany had 16 million new citizens, who clearly had a different cultural background, many of whom were struggling with perceptions of otherness as popularly expressed in the stereotypical ethnographies of “Easterners” and “Westerners”. The rediscovery of the concept of Heimat in the years following unification therefore not only mirrored the status quo but further to that allowed “for the delineation of a common heritage, shared priorities, and values with which Germans in the old and new states could identify.” (Naughton 125) Closely copying the optimism of the 1950s which promised audiences prosperity and pride, as well as a sense of belonging and homecoming into a larger community, the films produced in the early 1990s anticipated prosperity for a mobile and flexible people. Like their 1950s counterparts, “unification films ‘made in West Germany’ imagined a German Heimat as a place of social cohesion, opportunity, and prosperity” (Naughton 126). Following the unification comedies of the early 1990s, which were set in the period following the fall of the Wall, another wave of German film production shifted the focus onto the past, sacrificing the future dimension of the unification films. Leander Haußmann’s Sonnenallee (1999) is set in the 1970s and subscribes to a re-invention of one’s childhood, while Wolfgang Becker’s Goodbye Lenin (2003) in which the GDR is preserved on 79 square metres in a private parallel world, advocates a revival of aspects of the socialist past. Referred to as “Ostalgia”; a nostalgia for the old East, “a ‘GDR revival’ or the ‘renaissance of a GDR Heimatgefühl’” (Berdahl 197), the films achieved popular success. Ostalgia films utilised the formula of ‘walking down memory lane’ in varying degrees; thematising pleasing aspects of an imagined collective past and tempting audiences to revel in a sense of unity and homogeneous identity (cf. Walsh 6). Ostalgia was soon transformed from emotional and imaginary reflection into an entire industry, manifesting itself in the “recuperation, (re)production, marketing, and merchandising of GDR products as well as the ‘museumification’ of GDR everyday life” (Berdahl 192). This trend found further expression in a culture of exhibitions, books, films and cabaret acts, in fashion and theme parties, as well as in Trabi-rallies which celebrated or sent up the German Democratic Republic in response to the perceived public humiliation at the hands of West German media outlets, historians and economists. The dismissal of anything associated with the communist East in mainstream Germany and the realisation that their consumer products – like their national history – were disappearing in the face of the ‘Helmut Kohl-onisation’ sparked this retro-Heimat cult. Indeed, the reaction to the disappearance of GDR culture and the ensuing nostalgia bear all the hallmarks of Heimat appreciation, a sense of bereavement that only manifests itself once the Heimat has been lost. Ironically, however, the revival of the past led to the emergence of a “new” GDR (Rutschky 851), an “imaginary country put together from the remnants of a country in ruins and from the hopes and anxieties of a new world” (Hell et al. 86), a fictional construct rather than a historical reality. In contrast to the fundamental social and psychological changes affecting former GDR citizens from the end of 1989, their Western counterparts were initially able to look on without a sense of deep personal involvement. Their perspective has been likened to that of an impartial observer following the events of a historical play (cf. Gaschke 22). Many saw German unification as an enlargement of the West; as soon as they had exported their currency, democracy, capitalism and freedom to the East, “blossoming landscapes” were sure to follow (Kohl). At first political events did not seem to cause a major disruption to the lives of most people in the old FRG, except perhaps the need to pay higher tax. This understanding proved a major underestimation of the transformation process that had gripped all of Germany, not just the Eastern part. Nevertheless, few predicted the impact that far-reaching changes would have on the West; immigration and new minorities alter the status quo of any society, and with Germany’s increase in size and population, its citizens in both East and West had to adapt and adjust to a new image and to new expectations placed on them from within and without. As a result a certain unease began to be felt by many an otherwise self-assured individual. Slower and less obvious than the transition phase experienced by most East Germans, the changes in West German society and consciousness were nevertheless similar in their psychological effects; resulting in a subtle feeling of displacement. Indeed, it was soon noted that “the end of German division has given rise to a sense of crisis in the West, particularly within the sphere of West German culture, engendering a Western nostalgica for the old FRG” (Cooke 35), also referred to as Westalgia. Not too dissimilar to the historical rehabilitation of the East played out in Ostalgic fashion, films appeared which revisit moments worthy of celebration in West German history, such as the 1954 Soccer World Championship status which is at the centre of the narrative in Sönke Wortmann’s Das Wunder von Bern [Miracle of Bern, 2003]. Hommages to the 1968 generation (Hans Weingartner’s Die fetten Jahre sind vorbei [The Educators, 2004]) and requiems for West Berlin’s subculture (Leander Haußmann’s Herr Lehmann [Mr Lehmann, 2003]) were similar manifestations of this development. Ostalgic and Westalgic practices coexisted for several years after the turn of the millennium, and are a tribute to the highly complex interrelationship that exists between personal histories and public memories. Both narratives reveal “the politics, ambiguities, and paradoxes of memory, nostalgia, and resistance” (Berdahl 207). In their nostalgic contemplation of the good old days, Ostalgic and Westalgic films alike express a longing to return to familiar and trusted values. Both post-hoc constructions of a heimatesque cosmos demonstrate a very real reinvention of Heimat. Their deliberate reconstruction and reinterpretation of history, as well as the references to and glorification of personal memory and identity fulfil the task of imbuing history – in particular personal history – with dignity. As such these Heimat films work in a similar fashion to myths in the way they explain the world. The heimatesque element of Ostalgic and Westalgic films which allows for the potential to overcome crises reveals a great deal about the workings of myths in general. Irrespective of their content, whether they are cosmogonic (about the beginning of time), eschatological (about the end of time) or etiologic myths (about the origins of peoples and societal order), all serve as a means to cope with change. According to Hans Blumenberg, myth making may be seen as an attempt to counter the absolutism of reality (cf. Blumenberg 9), by providing a response to its seemingly overriding arbitrariness. Myths become a means of endowing life with meaning through art and thus aid positive self-assurance and the constructive usage of past experiences in the present and the future. Judging from the popular success of both Ostalgic and Westalgic films in unified Germany, one hopes that communication is taking place across the perceived ethnic divide of Eastern and Western identities. At the very least, people of quite different backgrounds have access to the constructions and fictions relating to one another pasts. By allowing each other insight into the most intimate recesses of their respective psychological make-up, understanding can be fostered. Through the re-activation of one’s own memory and the acknowledgment of differences these diverging narratives may constitute the foundation of a common Heimat. It is thus possible for Westalgic and Ostalgic films to fulfil individual and societal functions which can act as a core of cohesion and an aid for mutual understanding. At the same time these films revive the past, not as a liveable but rather as a readable alternative to the present. As such, the utilisation of myths should not be rejected as ideological misuse, as suggested by Barthes (7), nor should it allow for the cementing of pseudo-ethnic differences dating back to mythological times; instead myths can form the basis for a common narrative and a self-confident affirmation of history in order to prepare for a future in harmony. Just like myths in general, Heimat tales do not attempt to revise history, or to present the real facts. By foregrounding the evidence of their wilful construction and fictitious invention, it is possible to arrive at a spiritual, psychological and symbolic truth. Nevertheless, it is a truth that is essential for a positive experience of Heimat and an optimistic existence. What can the German situation reveal in an Australian or a wider context? Explorations of Heimat aid the socio-historical investigation of any society, as repositories of memory and history, escape and confrontation inscribed in Heimat can be read as signifiers of continuity and disruption, reorientation and return, and as such, ever-changing notions of Heimat mirror values and social change. Currently, a transition in meaning is underway which alters the concept of ‘home’ as an idyllic sphere of belonging and attachment to that of a threatened space; a space under siege from a range of perils in the areas of safety and security, whether due to natural disasters, terrorism or conventional warfare. The geographical understanding of home is increasingly taking second place to an emotional imaginary that is fed by an “exclusionary and contested distinction between the ‘domestic’ and the ‘foreign’ (Blunt and Dowling 168). As such home becomes ever more closely aligned with the semantics of Heimat, i.e. with an emotional experience, which is progressively less grounded in feelings of security and comfort, yet even more so in those of ambivalence and, in particular, insecurity and hysteria. This paranoia informs as much as it is informed by government policies and interventions and emerges from concerns for national security. In this context, home and homeland have become overused entities in discussions relating to the safeguarding of Australia, such as with the establishment of a homeland security unit in 2003 and annual conferences such as “The Homeland Security Summit” deemed necessary since 9/11, even in the Antipodes. However, these global connotations of home and Heimat overshadow the necessity of a reclaimation of the home/land debate at the national and local levels. In addressing the dispossession of indigenous peoples and the removal and dislocation of Aboriginal children from their homes and families, the political nature of a home-grown Heimat debate cannot be ignored. “Bringing them Home”, an oral history project initiated by the National Library of Australia in Canberra, is one of many attempts at listening to and preserving the memories of Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders who, as children, were forcibly taken away from their families and homelands. To ensure healing and rapprochement any reconciliation process necessitates coming to terms with one’s own past as much as respecting the polyphonic nature of historical discourse. By encouraging the inclusion of diverse homeland and dreamtime narratives and juxtaposing these with the perceptions and constructions of home of the subsequent immigrant generations of Australians, a rich text, full of contradictions, may help generate a shared, if ambivalent, sense of a common Heimat in Australia; one that is fed not by homeland insecurity but one resting in a heimatesque knowledge of self. References Barthes, Roland. Mythen des Alltags. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1964 Berdahl, Daphne. “‘(N)ostalgie’ for the Present: Memory, Longing, and East German Things.” Ethnos 64.2 (1999): 192-207. Blumenberg, Hans. Arbeit am Mythos. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1979. Blunt, Alison, and Robyn Dowling. Home. London: Routledge, 2006. Brandt, Willy. “Jetzt kann zusammenwachsen, was zusammengehört [Now that which belongs together, can now grow together].” From his speech on 10 Nov. 1989 in front of the Rathaus Schöneberg, transcript available from http://www.bwbs.de/Brandt/9.html>. Cooke, Paul. “Whatever Happened to Veronika Voss? Rehabilitating the ‘68ers’ and the Problem of Westalgie in Oskar Roehler’s Die Unberührbare (2000).” German Studies Review 27.1 (2004): 33-44. Gaschke, Susanne. “Neues Deutschland. Sind wir eine Wirtschaftsgesellschaft?” Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte B1-2 (2000): 22-27. Hell, Julia, and Johannes von Moltke. “Unification Effects: Imaginary Landscapes of the Berlin Republic.” The Germanic Review 80.1 (Winter 2005): 74-95. Heneghan, Tom. Unchained Eagle: Germany after the Wall. London: Reuters, 2000. Kohl, Helmut. “Debatte im Bundestag um den Staatsvertrag.” 21 June 1990. Morley, David. Home Territories: Media, Mobility and Identity. London: Routledge, 2000. Naughton, Leonie. That Was the Wild East. Film Culture, Unification, and the “New” Germany. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2002. Rentschler, Eric. “There’s No Place Like Home: Luis Trenker’s The Prodigal Son (1934).” New German Critique 60 (Special Issue on German Film History, Autumn 1993): 33-56. Reitz, Edgar. “The Camera Is Not a Clock (1979).” In Eric Rentschler, ed. West German Filmmakers on Film: Visions and Voices. New York: Holmes and Meier, 1988. 137-141. Rutschky, Michael. “Wie erst jetzt die DDR entsteht.” Merkur 49.9-10 (Sep./Oct. 1995): 851-64. Strzelczyk, Florentine. “Far Away, So Close: Carl Froelich’s Heimat.” In Robert C. Reimer, ed., Cultural History through the National Socialist Lens. Essays on the Cinema of the Third Reich. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2000. 109-132. Walsh, Michael. “National Cinema, National Imaginary.” Film History 8 (1996): 5-17. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Ludewig, Alexandra. "Home Meets Heimat." M/C Journal 10.4 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/12-ludewig.php>. APA Style Ludewig, A. (Aug. 2007) "Home Meets Heimat," M/C Journal, 10(4). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/12-ludewig.php>.