Search results
Translations is a personal history written at the intersection of colonial anthropology, creative practice and migrant ethnography. Renowned postcolonial scholar, public artist and radio maker, UK-born Paul Carter documents and discusses a prodigiously varied and original trajectory of writing, sound installation and public space dramaturgy produced in Australia to present the phenomenon of contemporary migration in an entirely new light. Rejecting linear conceptualisations of migrant space–time, Carter describes a distinctively migrant psychic topology, turbulent, vortical and opportunistic. He shows that the experience of self-becoming at that place mediated through a creative practice that places the enigma of communication at the heart of its praxis produces a coherent critique of colonial regimes still dominant in discourses of belonging. One expression of this is a radical reappraisal of the ‘mirror state’ relationship between England and Australia, whose structurally symmetrical histories of land theft and internal colonisation repress the appearance of new subjects and subject relations. Another is to embrace the precarity of the stranger–host relationship shaping migrant destiny, to break down art’s aesthetic conventions and elide creative practice with the poetics (and politics) of social production – what Carter calls ‘dirty art’. Carter tackles the argument that immigrants to Australia recapitulate the original invasion. Reflecting on collaborations with Aboriginal artists, he frames an argument for navigating incommensurable realities that profoundly reframes the discourse on sovereignty. Translations is a passionately eloquent argument for reframing borders as crossing-places: framing less murderous exchange rates, symbolic literacy, creative courage and, above all, the emergence of a resilient migrant poetics will be essential.
vital constitutional (including religious) questions. The first point to note is that only two of the three areas of legislation examined here led to many acts of parliament. Vast numbers of estates and enclosure acts were passed, only a handful regarding land registries. The broad patterns for estates and enclosure statutes are set out in Table 5.1. Table 5.1 Estate and enclosure acts passed at Westminster, 1660–1800 1660–88 1689–1714 1714–60 1760–82 1782–1800 Total All acts Estate as % Enclosure as % 564 1,752 3,549 4,195 4,157 14,217 181 655 790 508 322 2
blocks of another (unpublished) book project called ‘Enclosure Acts’. This was an unsolicited attack on autobiography and its premiss that the self could be reliably derived from a combination of parentage, place and cultural circumstance. Looking back, I was familiarising myself with historians, theorists of culture and philosophers that in my wandering years had passed me by. Yet the thesis, that the sources of the autobiographical narrative were empty cuirasses enclosing the creative spirit, inhibiting free metamorphosis and butterfly emergence, scarcely concealed
-Gibbon. Marketable values: inventing the property market in modern Britain (Chicago, 2018 ), 6–7. That ‘private property’ requires specific ways of seeing the world is true of many different times and places. 4 Frank A. Sharman. ‘An introduction to the Enclosure Acts’, Legal History , Vol. 10, No. 1 ( 1989 ), 47. 5 Gregory Clark, Anthony Clark. ‘Common rights to land in England, 1475–1839’, The Journal of Economic History , Vol. 61, No. 4 ( 2002 ), 1009–36. The
level? No one really knew, but the question became pressing at the beginning of the twentieth century. Enclosure was held to have been a key feature of the agricultural revolution, but various historians claimed it had also brought about the disappropriation of the peasantry, and that the adverse consequences of this became apparent in the agricultural depression at the end of the nineteenth century.19 Clearly there was a need to establish what had actually happened. W.E. Tate set about compiling a comprehensive list of enclosure acts and awards county by county. The
temples’ (The Discovery of … Guiana, London, 1595, fo.99). New World land usually signified an invitation to possession: gender is used both to convey and justify this signification, and to justify a gendered, racial and epistemological hierarchy. See Richard Burt and J. Archer (eds), Enclosure Acts: Sexuality, Property and Culture in Early Modern England (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1993); Annette Kolodny, The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1975); Peter Mason
reprieve. 11 Charles Ripley Gillett, Burned Books: Neglected Chapters in English History and Literature , 2 vols (New York: Columbia University Press, 1932 ), I.90; Lynda Boose, ‘The 1599 Bishops’ Ban and Renaissance Pornography’, in Richard Burt and John Michael Archer, eds, Enclosure Acts
‘Z’, Agamben to Žižek: Contemporary Critical Theorists , this time pulling out the thread of surplus populations as a major theme from the Enclosure Acts to the tourists and vagabonds and refugees of modern times. I also published a small piece on the ‘Another Bauman’, as in the anthropological imagination. Ritzer commissioned a substantial new survey for his major, two-volume Companion to Major Social Theorists in 2011; this included a scan of themes and also some engagement with the context and reception of Bauman’s work. I always wrote these surveys from
Britain, this law followed in the wake of decades of the Enclosure Acts of the eighteenth century, and the continued implementation of enclosure well into the nineteenth century, which forced many people off the land, leaving them homeless and destitute. The end of the Napoleonic War (1803–15) had also precipitated the greater mobility of peoples. Drawn to the urban areas for
peasants: status, genre, and the representation of rebellion’, Representations 1 (1983), 1–29 (pp. 23–5); Thomas Cartelli, ‘Jack Cade in the Garden: Class Consciousness and Class Conflict in 2 Henry VI ’, in Richard Burt and John Michael Archer (eds), Enclosure Acts: Sexuality, Property, and Culture in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), pp. 48–67; Elyssa Y. Cheng, ‘Disputing boundaries: space and social boundary in 2 Henry VI ’, Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 34, no. 1 (2008), 185–201; and Simon C. Estok, Ecocriticism and