This book aims to bring together new and exciting essays on a topic currently receiving a lot of critical attention within Cultural Studies: space. The essays aim to explore some fundamental questions not only about space itself ('what is space?') but also about the concept of space ('what does "space" (as a concept) do?')
The essays consider space as a tool designed to carry out a very specific, but not unchanging, set of cultural tasks. Thus, they both address particular spaces in the world, while also, on a more abstract level, observe some transformations of the concept of space itself, which allows us to begin to chart the larger histories in which particular spaces are caught up and produced.
The essays in this volume activate many modes of spatial inquiry. The collection aims to demonstrate the variety of methodologies and approaches that have been crucial and productive in the building of Australian Cultural Studies, including semiotics, discourse analysis, phenomenology, ethnography, Aboriginal Studies, literary analysis, historical research, psychoanalysis. The essays also aim to explore a reasonably representative range of Australian spaces.
There are many modes of spatial inquiry, that is, many questions one can ask about space and spaces, many different kinds of space, and many different methodologies one can employ. Hence, the ordering and grouping of the essays is only one possible way of making oneís way through the book. We could instead have chosen to order the essays around actual spaces in the world: towns, cities, wilderness, internal architecture, cyberspace, and so on. Alternatively, we could have tried to establish a sort of history of spaces or of spatial concepts, or we could have grouped the essays according to methodology, thus foregrounding the role of Australian Cultural Studies in the understanding of Australian space. In the end, we have chosen combinations that, we hope, keep most of these modes of spatial inquiry in play. We hope that readers will make their own connections -- and discover the differences -- between the essays.
Despite their differences, these essays have much in common, sharing as they do a set of foundations which we take to constitute the philosophical and political bedrock of spatial inquiry within the transdisciplinary space of Australian Cultural Studies. They all recognise, for example, that space is imagined into being --that is, that the biological, geological, material world around us is discursively imagined, understood and produced, and that even our bodily perception and experience of it does not occur outside of culture and history.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Ruth Barcan and Ian Buchanan
Introduction: Imagining Space
Imagining 'Australia'
John O'Carroll
Upside-Down and Inside-Out: Notes on the Australian Cultural Unconscious
Paul Longley Arthur
Fantasies of the Antipodes
Tony Hughes-d'Aeth
'A Prospect of Future Regularity': Spatial Technologies in Colonial Australia
Spatial Semiotics
Bob Hodge
White Australia and the Aboriginal Invention of Space
Ruth Barcan
Privates in Public: The Space of the Urinal
Bodies in Space
Susan Best
Driving Like A Boy: Sexual Difference, Embodiment and Space
Elizabeth Dempster
Bodies in Motion: Spatialising Practice in Australian Dance
Outback, Wilderness, Nature
Susan K. Martin
The Gender of Gardens: The Space of the Garden in Nineteenth-Century Australia
Stephen Muecke
Outback
Fiona Polack
Place and Space: Views from a Tasmanian Mountain
Lost Spaces
Peter Read
Drowned, Moved, Transferred or Rebuilt? Thinking about the Language of Lost Places
Postmodern Space
Ian Buchanan
Non-Places: Space in the Age of Supermodernity
John Macarthur
Tactile Simulations: Architecture and the Image of the Public at Brisbane's Kodak Beach
Elizabeth Ferrier
Little Home Page on the Prairie: Narratives of Exploration and Settlement on the Electronic Frontier
Notes on Contributors
Index