Australasian Journal of Popular Culture - Volume 1, Issue 1, 2011

This article considers the divide between popular and academic history, especially as perceived by popular and academic historians. It argues that the two forms of history, though clearly connected to one another, have different priorities and audiences. In particular, where academic historians prize originality of research, popular historians will tend to prize powerful storytelling. The article suggests that popular historians could acknowledge more handsomely that many do owe their debt to the research findings of academic historians, while in their turn academic historians have much to learn from popular historians about how to communicate the pleasures and importance of understanding the past.

Since the early 1990s, numerous corporations have signaled their social responsibility by marketing goods and services in ostensibly ethical terms. This phenomenon rests on the discourse of ethical consumption. The practice is predicated on consumers’ interest in such matters, which are often of a humanitarian or environmentalist nature. In turn, consumers can either reward brands and businesses that are similarly inclined, or punish those that are not. This article considers both the efficacy and politics of such activity through the Green & Black’s brand of organic, Fairtrade chocolate. This was the first Fairtrade product sold in the United Kingdom. The nuanced dynamics of the Green & Black’s brand though underline the necessary compromise of ethical consumption, and reflect a complex grid of contingent ideals and institutionalized hurdles. This article shows how, in articulating a popularly agreeable narrative, the brand’s ethics involves an inherent trade between quantitative gains at a qualitative cost.

This article frames Hergé’s The Adventures of Tintin in terms of its treatment of ethnic, cultural and geographic Others. The series has been accused of bundling right wing, reactionary and racist viewpoints into its codes of visual representation and storylines. I argue that the pervasiveness of the series, its institutionalization in francophone culture, and its currency as a global franchise makes the question one of particular relevance at a time when big-budget productions by Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson look set to further cement Tintin’s place in popular culture. With other critics I see Tintin’s Chinese adventure, The Blue Lotus (1934−1935), as central to addressing these concerns, as even though this fourth album in the series continues to perpetuate certain Orientalist assumptions it represents Hergé’s first serious attempt to depict the Other in less than pejorative terms. What this article does is seek to place The Blue Lotus within the Adventures and their cultural-historical contexts, as well as the corresponding evolution of Herge’s ideology, thus broadening the Orientalism of the title to encompass not only Asia and the Mideast but the subaltern and Europe’s own ‘internal Others’.

The critical acclaim enjoyed by such recent Australian graphic novels as Shaun Tan’s The Arrival (2006) and Nicki Greenberg’s adaptation of The Great Gatsby (2007) suggested that Australia had finally ‘caught up’ with the United States and Britain, by embracing the graphic novel as a legitimate creative medium, on a par with literature and cinema. The media interest generated by a succession of Australian graphic novels during recent years often implied that their very existence was a relatively new phenomenon. Accepting this premise without question, however, overlooks the evolution of the graphic novel in Australia, early examples of which – such as Syd Nicholls’ Middy Malone: A Book Pirates (1941) – date back to the 1940s. Documenting how historical changes in the production and dissemination of graphic novels in Australia have influenced their critical and popular reception therefore creates new opportunities to explore a largely overlooked facet of Australian print culture. Furthermore, the study of the graphic novel in an exclusively Australian context provides a new perspective for re-examining the origins, definitions and, indeed, the limitations of the term ‘graphic novel’, and extends the parameters of the academic literature devoted to the medium beyond the traditionally dominant Anglo-American focus.

In 1965 Diana Rigg, aka Mrs Emma Peel, burst onto English television screens in the ‘spy-fi’ series The Avengers (Roy Baker, 1965) wearing, amongst other things, a skin-tight black vinyl catsuit. Her costumes offered a visual excess which reinforced the effects of the series’ highly stylized mise-en-scène. This visual excess was also played out in public life, where Mrs Peel’s clothes were available in retail outlets, and Diana Rigg as exemplary modern woman wore some of the styles both as public obligation and private pleasure. This article outlines the way the catsuit, as worn by Mrs Peel, is part of a technological nexus: its fabrication, its implicit and imminent activity and its sexual narrative. In her catsuit Mrs Peel represents and manifests the modern technological body, and this clothed body became central to conflict in The Avengers’ narrative. But despite being strapped to a drainpipe or bound into a catsuit Mrs Peel was always firmly in control.

This article provides a gendered analysis of the zoot suit and the Zoot Suit Riots. It focuses on the perspective of young Mexican American zoot suiters and emphasizes that their understanding of the zoot suit’s meaning varied considerably from that of their attackers. The article provides a historiographical overview of the zoot suit and the Zoot Suit Riots, incorporating both design and social scientific perspectives. It builds upon the existing historiography by incorporating sources that emphasize the experiences, statements and actions of Mexican American zoot suiters in the 1940s. It concludes that Mexican Americans did not adopt the zoot suit style as an expression of resistance. In contrast, the men who attacked Mexican Americans during the riots did so because they interpreted the zoot suit as a sign of subversion.

MANGA: AN ANTHOLOGY OF GLOBAL AND CULTURAL PERSPECTIVES, TONI JOHNSON-WOODS (ED.) (2010) New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 350 pp., ISBN: 978-0-8264-2938-4, Paperback, US $27.95 THE GOOD MOTHER: CONTEMPORARY MOTHERHOODS IN AUSTRALIA, SUSAN GOODWIN AND KATE HUPPATZ (EDS.) (2010) Sydney: Sydney University Press, pp. 246, ISBN: 9781920899530, Paperback, AUD $35.00 VAMPIRES: A BITE-SIZED HISTORY, JUDYTH A. McLEOD (2010) Sydney: Murdoch Books, 239 pp., ISBN: 9781741967739, Paperback, AUD $24.95 POLITICS AND RELIGION IN THE NEW CENTURY: PHILOSOPHICAL REFLECTIONS, PHILIP ANDREW QUADRIO AND CAROL BESSELING (EDS.) (2009) Sydney: Sydney University Press, 416 pp., ISBN: 9781920899318, Paperback, AUD $40.00 REG GRUNDY, REG GRUNDY (2010) Sydney: Murdoch Books. 367 pp., ISBN: 978-1742660349, Hardback, AUD $45.00