Abstract
A 1994 cartoon by John Spooner depicts an ardent Hitler addressing a scattered and only mildly interested group of sunbathers on a beach. The caption reads: “The problem of raising a pogrom.”1 The cartoon was Spooner’s contribution to the debate over the introduction of racial vilification laws in Australia. Huntsman, who reproduces the cartoon in her book on beach culture, draws from it the reflection that racist extremism is inimical both to Australian society and to beachscape itself: could it be that “the ranting of fanatics loses its power to persuade as it is dissipated into the sky and the sea above and beyond?”2
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Published in Quadrant, November 1994, and reprinted in Leone Huntsman, Sand in Our Souls (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2001), 180.
See Scott Poynting, “What Caused the Cronulla Riot?” Race & Class 48, no. 1 (2006): 85–92; Suvendrini Perera, “Race Terror, Sydney 2005,” Borderlands e-journal 5, no. 1 (2006), http://www.borderlands.net.au/vol5nol_2006/perera_raceterror.htm; Clifton Evers, “The Cronulla Race Riots: Safety Maps on an Australian Beach,” South Atlantic Quarterly 107, no. 2 (2008): 411–29; Angela Mitropoulos, “Under the Beach, the Barbed Wire,” Mute, February 2006, http://www.metamute.org/en/Under-the-Beach-the-Barbed-Wire
See Michael Taussig, “The Beach (A Fantasy),” Critical Inquiry 26 (2000): 249–77.
See Jon Stratton, “Dying to Come to Australia,” in Our Patch: Enacting Australian Sovereignty Post-2001, ed. Suvendrini Perera (Perth: Network Books, 2007), 168–72.
Meaghan Morris, “On the Beach,” in Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler (New York: Routledge, 1992), 453.
Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” trans. Libby Meintjes, Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003), 26.
William E Connolly, The Ethos of Pluralization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), xxii.
See Leonie Sandercock, “When Strangers Become Neighbours: Managing Cities of Difference,” Planning Theory and Practice 1, no. 1 (2000): 13–30.
Maria Giannacopoulos, “Terror Austmlis: White Sovereignty and the Violence of Law,” Borderlands e-journal 5, no. 1 (2006), pt. 4, http://www.borderlands.net.au/vol5no1_2006/giannacopoulos_whitesov.htm
Isobel Crombie, Body Culture (Mulgrave, Vic: Peleus Press, 2004), 9.
See Joseph Pugliese, “Demonstrable Evidence: A Genealogy of the Racial Iconography of Forensic Art and Illustration,” Law and Critique 15 (2006): 286–320; and “In Silico Race and the Heteronomy of Biometric Proxies: Biometrics in the Context of Civilian Life, Border Security and Counter-Terrorism Laws,” Australian Feminist Law Journal 23 (2005): 1–33.
See Amy Kaplan, “Homeland Insecurities: Reflections on Language and Space,” Radical History Review 85 (2003): 82–93.
James Baldwin, Going to Meet the Man (1965; repr., London: Penguin, 1991), 251.
Russell Banks, “John Brown’s Body: James Baldwin and Frank Shatz in Conversation,” Transition 81–2 (2000): 264.
Arjun Appadurai, Fear of Small Numbers (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 100.
Brian Galligan and John Chesterman, “Australia’s Citizenship Void,” in Globalization and Citizenship in the Asia-Pacific, ed. Alastair Davidson and Kathleen Weekley (Basingstoke, England: Macmillan, 1999), 73–74.
Henry Reynolds, “Part of a Continent for Something Less than a Nation? The Limits of Australian Sovereignty,” in Our Patch: Enacting Australian Sovereignty Post 2001, ed. Suvendrini Perera (Perth: Network Books, 2007), 66.
Aihwa Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 4.
Suvendrini Perera, “Fatal (Con)junctions,” in Asian and Pacific Inscriptions: Identities/Ethnicities/Nationalities, ed. Suvendrini Perera (Melbourne: Meridian, 1995), 4–7.
Jon Stratton, “Dying to Come to Australia” in Our Patch: Enacting Australian Sovereignty Post-2001, ed. Suvendrini Perera (Perth: Network Books, 2007), 169.
See Meaghan Morris, “White Panic or Mad Max and the Sublime,” in Trajectories: Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, ed. Kuan-Hsing Chen (London: Routledge, 1998), 247.
Copyright information
© 2009 Suvendrini Perera
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Perera, S. (2009). A Pogrom on the Beach. In: Australia and the Insular Imagination. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230103122_8
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230103122_8
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-37814-2
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-10312-2
eBook Packages: Palgrave Political & Intern. Studies CollectionPolitical Science and International Studies (R0)