Re: [-empyre-] Under the Beach

[Danny Butt <db@dannybutt.net>]

Well my last post obviously got held up in my outbox for a couple of  
days to become completely irrelevant and repetitive of what others  
said, sorry about that.

While I'm a fan of Angela's work and this piece has many aspects of  
interest (the sham of the egalitarianism of Australian beach culture  
being very well expressed) I'd be curious to hear more on ways the  
"sedition"/"neoliberal globalisation" couplet can be questioned. I'm  
interested in the extent to which the governments mobilising  
nationalist sentiment through sedition laws are reflecting a  
resistance to elite cosmopolitanism that is a function contemporary  
globalisation (the rich urban coastal fringes of the settler  
societies). In that respect, I wonder whether a focus on flexible  
labour practices and transnational capital is the kind of political  
imaginary where many of us are more comfortable, rather than the more  
fraught affective domain of colonial-national psychology (a world  
where art seems to have more leverage than political theory).

Regards

Danny

--
http://www.dannybutt.net



On 10/02/2006, at 12:13 PM, Ryan Griffis wrote:

> just read an article by Angela Mitropoulos on Mute regarding last  
> year's "race riots" in Cronulla
> http://www.metamute.org/en/Under-the-Beach-the-Barbed-Wire
> i don't remember seeing this posted here yet, but i apologize if i  
> missed it.
> She discusses the relationship between racist policies and recent  
> anti-terror laws, and goes on to incorporate economic structures  
> ("flexibilization") as well:
> "On the third day of rioting, the NSW Premier announced emergency  
> laws to give police, among other measures, the power to ‘lockdown’  
> those beachside suburbs under threat. This was, he declared, a  
> ‘war’ and the state would ‘not be found wanting in the use of  
> force’. And so the task of the Cronulla pogrom was more smoothly  
> accomplished by the police acting as border guards, refusing entry  
> to the beaches to those who could not prove that they belonged  
> there. The ‘lockdown’ laws, in summary, allow the state to remove  
> entire suburbs from the ostensibly normal functioning of the law  
> for periods of 48 hours. Among other things, and within the  
> designated ‘lockdown’ zone, the laws remove the presumption of bail  
> for riot and affray, allow for the area to be cordoned off to  
> prevent vehicles and people from entering it, empower police to  
> stop and search people and vehicles without warrant or the standard  
> criterion of suspicion, and to seize cars and mobile phones for up  
> to a week.
> In some respects, this could be viewed as a sequel to the so-called  
> ‘anti-terror’ laws; recast here as an explicit attempt to  
> reterritorialise the ‘moving mêlée’ – as one journalist described  
> those engaged in the retaliatory riots."
> This article also reminded me of Francesca da Rimini's text in the  
> last Sarai Reader...
> best,
> ryan
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