Boats, Borders and the Geo-Imaginaries of the South

Main Article Content

Francis Maravillas

Abstract

This paper activates a mode of spatial inquiry into Australia’s identity through an analysis of a number of frames through which the passage and interdiction of boats off the coast of the nation may be viewed. In particular, I explore the way in which Australia’s paradoxical geographical location as South of both the West and Asia play a key role in affixing the horizon within which a conception of the nation and its relationship with the world was – and continues to be – defined and shaped. Moreover, I not only critically probe the constitutive fears and anxieties that underlie bounded conceptions of the trope of the South, but also to examine how such a trope can articulate itself as a site of exchange and negotiation, a distinctive borderland that engenders new cartographies of difference and belonging in an increasingly globalised and interconnected world. I show how these frames overlap and converge on the wider questions of space, place and identity at the very moment when the process of globalisation and migration has done so much to shake any certainties about Australia’s identity as a geographically distinct and spatially bounded nation-state. In so doing, they represent crucial sites for articulating and enacting a transcultural politics of mobility and spatiality that attends to the ways in which the trope of the South may been imagined not as a sphere of containment or an enclaved territory, but as an evolving cartography, the shifting outlines of which opens up new horizons of possibility for rethinking the spatial and temporal coordinates of Australia in a globalizing world.

Article Details

Section
General Articles (Peer Reviewed)
Author Biography

Francis Maravillas, University of Technology Sydney

Francis Maravillas is Associate Member of the Transforming Cultures Research Centre at the University of Technology, Sydney, where he also teaches in the cultural studies program. His current research interests include contemporary art and visual culture in Asia and Australia, curatorial practice and international exhibitions and art in urban spaces. His work on Asian art in Australia appears in various journals and exhibition catalogues as well as recent edited collections including Crossing cultures: conflict, migration and convergence (2009), Cosmopatriots: On Distant Belongings and Close Encounters (2007) and In the Eye of the Beholder Reception and Audience for Modern Asian Art (2006). He was previously a board member of the 4a Centre for Contemporary Asian Art in Sydney (2004-2007).