Basu Ned Kelly as Memory Dispositif

The Cultural Memory of Ned Kelly and the Development of Australian Identities
1. Auflage 2012
ISBN: 978-3-11-028879-7
Verlag: De Gruyter
Format: PDF
Kopierschutz: 1 - PDF Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, Band 13, 219 Seiten

Reihe: Media and Cultural Memory

Nineteenth-century outlaw Ned Kelly is perhaps Australia's most famous historical figure. Ever since he went on the run in 1878 his story has been repeated time and again, in every conceivable medium. Although the value of his memory has been hotly contested – and arguably because of this – he remains perhaps the main national icon of Australia.

Kelly's flamboyant crimes turned him into a popular hero for many Australians during his lifetime and far beyond: a symbol of freedom, anti authoritarianism, anti imperialism; a Robin Hood, a Jesse James, a Che Guevara. Others have portrayed him as a villain, a gangster, a terrorist. His latest incarnation has been as WikiLeaks founder and fellow Australian "cyber outlaw" Julian Assange. Despite the huge number of representations of Kelly – from rampant newspaper reporting of the events, to the iconic Sidney Nolan paintings, to a movie starring Mick Jagger, to contemporary urban street art – this is the first work to take this corpus of material itself as a subject of analysis.

The fascinating case of this young outlaw provides an important opportunity to further our understanding of the dynamics of cultural memory. The book explains the processes by which the cultural memory of Ned Kelly was made and has developed over time, and how it has related to formations and negotiations of national identity. It breaks new ground in memory studies in the first place by showing that cultural memories are formed and develop through tangles of relations, what Basu terms In introducing the concept of the memory dispositif, this volume brings together and develops the work of Foucault, Deleuze, and Agamben on the dispositif, along with relevant concepts from the field of memory studies such as and the – especially as developed by Ann Rigney – and Jan Assmann's

Secondly, this work makes important headway in our understanding of the relationships between cultural memory and national identity, at a time when matters of identity appear to be more urgent and fraught than ever. In doing so, it shows that national identities are never purely national but are always sub- and transnational. The Ned Kelly memory dispositif has made complex and conflicting contributions to constructions of national identity. Ever since his outlawry, the identities invested in Kelly and those invested in the Australian nation have, in a two-way dynamic, fused into and strengthened each other, so that Kelly is in many ways a symbol for the national identity. Kelly has come to stand for an anti-establishment, working class, subaltern, Irish-inflected national identity. At the same time he has come to represent and enforce the whiteness, hyper-heterosexual masculinity and violence of "Australianness". Basu shows that Kelly has therefore always functioned in both radical and conservative ways, often both at once: a turbulent, Janus-faced figure.

Zielgruppe

Scholars of Literature, Media and History, Libraries, Departments

Autoren/Hrsg.

Basu, Laura

Fachgebiete

• Interdisziplinäres Wissenschaften Wissenschaft und Gesellschaft | Kulturwissenschaften Museumskunde, Materielle Kultur, Erinnerungskultur
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Geschichte einzelner Länder Australische und Pazifische Geschichte
• Sozialwissenschaften Ethnologie | Volkskunde Ethnologie Kultur- und Sozialethnologie: Politische Ethnologie, Recht, Organisation, Identität

Inhaltsverzeichnis

1;Introduction;11
1.1;1. Sites and Dispositifs;12
1.2;2. Media;17
1.3;3. Time;19
1.4;4. Power;22
1.5;5. Australian Identities;24
1.6;6. Ned Kelly;28
2;Chapter 1. 1878-1882: The Power of the Press;34
2.1;1. The Kelly Memory Dispositif: The Power of the Press;35
2.1.1;i. Memorialisation: Mediation and Time;37
2.1.2;ii. Incorporation part I: Mediation;41
2.1.3;iii. Incorporation part II: Mediation and Power;46
2.1.4;iv. The Press, the Sympathisers, and the Authorities;50
2.2;2. Identity;54
2.2.1;i. The Criminal Class;55
2.2.2;ii. From Antithetical Identity to Non-Identity;60
2.2.3;iii. Between Antithetical and Extinct: The Irish;65
2.3;Conclusion;67
3;Chapter 2. 1882-1930: Truth and Myth, the Bushman and the Empire;70
3.1;1. Truth and Myth: Mediation, Temporality, and Power;72
3.1.1;i. Authority and Authenticity;72
3.1.2;ii. Romance and Myth;79
3.2;2. The Bushman and the Empire: Identity;82
3.2.1;i. The Radical Bushman;83
3.2.2;ii. The Imperial Bushman;89
3.2.3;iii. Displacement and Double Displacement;95
3.3;Conclusion;100
4;Chapter 3. 1930—1960: High Culture and Deferred Identities;102
4.1;1. Ned Kelly and Australian Historiography;103
4.2;2. Ned Kelly and High Culture;107
4.2.1;i. Douglas Stewart;107
4.2.2;ii. Sidney Nolan;112
4.3;3. Deferred Identities;117
4.4;Conclusion;130
5;Chapter 4. 1960—1990: The Bushman Breaks Down;132
5.1;1. Ned Kelly as Social Bandit and the Memory of British Imperialism;135
5.1.1;i. Ned Kelly: Social Bandit;136
5.1.2;ii. Back to the “Present”: Mediation and Power;139
5.1.3;iii. What’s Missing?;142
5.2;2. Law and Out-Law;148
5.3;3. New Articulations of Gender and Sexuality;155
5.3.1;i. Ned Kelly: Herstory;156
5.3.2;ii. “Perfumed Ned was no Pansy”;160
5.4;Conclusion;163
6;Chapter 5. 1990-2010: Ned Kelly and the Global Nation;165
6.1;1. Ned Kelly and the Memory Industry;167
6.1.1;i. Globalisation, Commodification, and Ned’s Loss of Meaning;167
6.1.2;ii. Privatisation of the Nation;175
6.2;2. Reconciliation, the “History Wars”, and Ned Kelly post 9/11;180
6.2.1;i. Reconciliation;182
6.2.2;ii. The History Wars;188
6.2.3;iii. Ned Kelly post 9/11;192
6.3;Conclusion;197
7;Conclusion;199
8;References;202
9;References without Author;210
10;Index;213

Über Autor(innen)

Laura Basu, Utrecht University, Niederlande.

Laura Basu, Utrecht University, Niederlande.