Document Type
Book Chapter
RIS ID
26597
Citation
Hamilton, Margaret M., 2009, Questions of 'identity': staging 'the culturally complex Australian body' in Germany, in U. Garde and A. Meyer (Eds), Belonging and exclusion: case studies in recent Australian and German literature, film and theatre, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 45-59.
http://ro.uow.edu.au/era/945
Abstract
In an article on contemporary performance in Australia Keith GalIasch, the editor of RealTime, a national journal of contemporary arts, described the Australian body as 'culturalIy complex'. For GalIasch 'a body rich in its diversity', that is, a body or corpus increasingly open to Indigenous Australia and the influence of migrant, feminist and queer Australia has displaced a working class ethos and a culture 'reticent and wary of high culture and the intellect'. What GalIasch is suggesting is a shift from 'unmarked' white Australia - the myth of a mono Anglo-Celtic national culture - to a landscape characterised by heterogeneous 'presences', and in doing so, points to the question of the relationship between cultural identities and the 'imagined community' of the nation.