Australasian Journal of Popular Culture - Volume 2, Issue 3, 2013

Indian movies shot overseas have attracted the attention of not only advertising agencies keen to see their clients’ brands appearing on-screen, but also government tourism commissions eyeing India’s growing middle classes as potential visitors. Australian federal and state governments offer Indian film producers financial incentives to film in Australia, and Australian cities now regularly supply Indian movies with backdrops of upmarket shopping malls, stylish apartments and exclusive restaurants. Yet in helping to project the lifestyle fantasies of India’s new middle classes, Australian government agencies are supporting an Indian view of Australia. While this image may attract Indian tourists to Australia, it presumes Australia is culturally White and British, and as a result Australian agencies market an Australian cosmopolitanism defined not in terms of cultural diversity but in terms of the availability of global brands. The absence of cultural diversity in how Australia is branded in Indian movies is at heart a political rather than a marketing issue and one that can be challenged effectively only by holding to account those who are politically responsible for branding the nation.

In 1994, five made for television movies – Hercules and the Amazon Women by Bill L. Norton, Hercules and the Lost Kingdom by Harley Cokeliss, Hercules and the Circle of Fire by Doug Lefler, Hercules in the Underworld by Bill L. Norton and Hercules in the Maze of the Minotaur by Josh Becker – became the forerunners of two popular, even cult, series screened from the mid-1990s: Hercules: The Legendary Journeys (Various, 1995–1999) and its spin-off Xena: Warrior Princess (Various, 1995–2001). Despite being set in a mythical Ancient Greece, the movies and the subsequent programmes were filmed on location in New Zealand. Indeed, New Zealand has become a frequent site for fantasy cinema and television production, perhaps most notably through the work of Peter Jackson, and Film New Zealand have actively promoted the country’s potential to be ‘many worlds’. The varied and dramatic topography has played a significant role in encouraging filmmakers to base their productions in the country, but New Zealand’s own mythology as a land of Edenic, untouched beauty and its relative ‘youth’ are also integral to understanding its appeal. This article, which primarily focuses on the five Hercules films, will explore the unique relationship and the dynamic interaction between the classical/fantasy narrative and New Zealand.

James Bigglesworth, known as ‘Biggles’, is a children’s fictional character created by the English author Captain W. E. Johns in the 1930s. The ‘Biggles’ books became some of the most popular children’s titles of the twentieth century. Biggles had adventures worldwide, but after World War II his adversaries were often communists. These stories reflect Cold War tensions, and many explore issues that are directly pertinent to Australian readers, including Korea, China and even a story set in Australia itself – where Biggles was particularly popular – in which Biggles thwarts a planned communist uprising involving Aborigines. This article explores the extent to which the books were influential in shaping Cold War attitudes during the 1950s and 1960s, in light of Johns’ expressed intentions when writing the books.

From its genesis over two decades ago in exotic dance clubs, pole dance has consciously shed its striptease origins to become a global phenomenon. This article takes Japan as a case study to explain the evolution of pole dance as both a competitive sport and as a performance art, and then proposes that Japanese pole dancers are leading the way in the latter category. The analysis is driven by the author’s personal experience as a pole dancer in Japan: an experience ineluctably marked by gender and ethnicity. As a Caucasian male, the author stands apart from Japanese pole dancers; yet, this difference also enables him to stand in for the non-Japanese audience most likely to view the new performances in Japan through the racial stereotyping that defines ‘Oriental’ fetishism. However, the psychoanalytic concept of fetishism, reformulated and depathologized in recent queer theory, also yields insights into how pole dancers across the world have developed the new pole dance around a shared, embodied experience. This article employs queer theory to analyse the new expressions of this shared experience that troupes of Japanese pole dancers are developing. The article concludes by proposing that the global pole dance community comprises the best site of resistance to the inevitable fetishization that Japanese pole dancers will face as their highly theatrical ensemble shows debut to an international audience.

This article is a case study on international migration and the importing of material culture from abroad. In the second half of the nineteenth century, Japan, after some 200 years of national seclusion, was forced by western powers to open itself to international exchange. International migrants and overseas culture impacted on Japanese society and the lives of ordinary individuals. One response of ordinary Japanese to contact with imported material culture was booms for particular commodities. This article examines Japanese interest in overseas rats, pigs and rabbits, delineating how booms for these commodities brought to the fore important social, economic and political dynamics in the conflicted milieu of newly opened Japan. Issues of socio-economic class, individual agency and colonial aggrandizement were at play in Japanese interest in these innocuous imports.

Mainstream scholarship on Wumingshi – a marginal figure in modern Chinese literary history, but a very popular writer in the 1940s – interprets his writings as ‘neo-romanticism’, ‘late romanticism’ or ‘popular modernism’. This study, through the practice of political hermeneutics, contends that his works are in fact an example of ‘modern literati fiction’ or ‘fiction of ideas’ – a sort of middlebrow fiction for the popular culture market of modern China.

This article examines the popularity of Ivy fashion in Japan in the 1960s to analyse the ways in which Japanese businesses and consumers domesticated American culture. Ivy fashion, together with folk music, represented the idyllic American college life and the affluence of American society, while at the same time, marked the rapid economic growth of Japan and the youth and optimism of Japanese baby boomers. Businesses that promoted Ivy fashion idealized Ivy League students, identifying them both as the privileged elite Americans as well as the appropriate role models for young Japanese men. Consumption of Ivy fashion provided young men who lacked role models domestically with a means to define a generational and gender identity by misappropriating American culture.

It is widely acknowledged that the action film has been one of Hollywood’s most successful products over the last three decades or so. However, many commentators, both popular and academic, continue to marginalize or dismiss the value of the action film as a critical, socially conscious, and aesthetically potent artefact. Scholarship that has approached the action film has tended to be based upon readings of gender and political ideology. Aesthetic readings of 1980s action films (the decade when the genre was at its peak), such as Eric Lichtenfeld’s Action Speaks Louder (2004), have tended to be dismissive of the films as examples of propagandistic, exceedingly patriotic ‘Reaganite entertainments’. It is the intention of this article, through a close analysis of George P. Cosmatos’ 1986 film Cobra, to demonstrate that – rather than simply a piece of replicatory right-wing propaganda – the 1980s action film (and action cinema in general) challenges the notions of American political identity, patriotism and heroism upon which it is founded, thereby opening the way for a deeper critical understanding of American cultural and mythical impulses at large.

‘LOUIS VUITTON – MARC JACOBS’, LES ARTS DÉCORATIFS, PARIS, 9 MARCH–16 SEPTEMBER 2012

WHO TAKES THE PICTURES? AN EXHIBIT REVIEW OF CINDY SHERMAN, MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, 2012

ANNA MAY WONG’S LUCKY SHOES: 1939 AUSTRALIA THROUGH THE EYES OF AN ART DECO DIVA, DERHAM GROVES (2011) Ames, IA: Culicidae Press, 103 pp., ISBN: 978-1-257-71315-8, p/bk, AUS$39.95

WHACKADEMIA: AN INSIDER’S ACCOUNT OF THE TROUBLED UNIVERSITY, RICHARD HIL (2012) Sydney: New South Press Press, ISBN: 9781742232911; 240 pp., p/bk, RRP AUD$34.99

CAMOUFLAGE AUSTRALIA: ART, NATURE, SCIENCE AND WAR, ANN ELIAS(2011) Sydney: Sydney University Press, 239 pp., ISBN: 9781920899738, p/bk, AUD$60.00

WITNESSES TO WAR: THE HISTORY OF AUSTRALIAN CONFLICT REPORTING, FAY ANDERSON AND RICHARD TREMBATH (2011) Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 500 pp., ISBN: 2780522856446, p/bk, AUS$36.99, ISBN: 9780522860221, e-publication.

ENDING WAR, BUILDING PEACE, LYNDA-ANN BLANCHARD AND LEAH CHAN (EDS) (2009) Sydney: Sydney University Press, 187 pp., ISBN: 781920899431, p/bk, AUS$35.00

SPHERE OF INFLUENCE: WRITINGS ON CRICKET AND ITS DISCONTENTS, GIDEON HAIGH (2010) Melbourne: Victory Books, 386 pp., ISBN: 978-0-522-85787-0, p/bk, AUD$ 34.99

RE-AWAKENING LANGUAGES: THEORY AND PRACTICE IN THE REVITALISATION OF AUSTRALIA’S INDIGENOUS LANGUAGES, JOHN HOBSON, KEVIN LOWE, SUSAN POETSCH AND MICHAEL WALSH (EDS) 2010 Sydney: Sydney University Press, 457 pp., ISBN: 9781920899554, p/bk, AUS$65.00.

GLOBAL TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGE: FROM HARD TECHNOLOGY TO SOFT TECHNOLOGY, ZHOUYING JIN (2011) 2nd ed., Bristol, UK: Intellect, 366 pp., ISBN: 978-1-84150-376-9, p/bk, AUS$69.95