Paul Allatson | University of Technology Sydney (original) (raw)
Papers by Paul Allatson
With his first short-story collection, The Boy without a Flag: Tales of the South Bronx (1992), A... more With his first short-story collection, The Boy without a Flag: Tales of the South Bronx (1992), Abraham Rodriguez established himself as one of the leading Latino writers of his generation, part of a wave of successful authors who emerged in the late 1980s and 1990s that includes the Dominican Junot Díaz, the Cuban American Achy Obejas, the Chicanos Diego Vázquez Jr, Yxta Maya Murray, and Dagoberto Gilb, and the Nuyorican Ernesto Quiñones. Rodriguez’s reputation was consolidated by the publication of the novels Spidertown (1993) and The Buddha Book (2001). Both texts confirmed Rodriguez as an uncompromising and decidedly unromantic chronicler of the disenfranchised Nuyorican youth of New York’s South Bronx, or El Bronx, and a gifted transmitter of Nuyorican English. Mainstream publishing success and laudatory book reviews in major U.S. newspapers and magazines, and the inclusion of his fiction in Puerto Rican, Latino, and American literature courses in schools and universities across the United States, and beyond, also attest to Rodriguez’s reputation. Alongside these achievements, however, Rodriguez’s confrontational representations of El Bronx, and his public comments on his literary elders, have embroiled him in a highly charged debate about the sociocultural validity and political impact of Nuyorican literary and cultural productions. Despite the significance of that debate, Rodriguez’s writing has to date attracted surprisingly little academic attention, perhaps a reflection of a general critical resistance to the author’s outspoken public persona and his unapologetic characterizations of an embattled and violence-prone inner city.
Frontiers: The interdisciplinary journal of study abroad, Aug 31, 2022
Research into university study abroad programs suggests that while students may have some experie... more Research into university study abroad programs suggests that while students may have some experience of local culture(s) and practices, they may be achieving no more than a superficial understanding of the host society. Alternatives to the standard study abroad models are thus essential to encourage students to engage more deeply with the host society. Research on study abroad programs argues for additional interventions and the provision of close supervision and mentoring to students. Given these arguments, this paper examines a scaffolded assessment model, designed for students at an Australian university in an international studies program established 26 years ago, and intended to enhance their learning during their compulsory year of study abroad. Through ongoing academic supervision and the design of a scaffolded fieldwork research project on aspects of the host society, we argue, the students have the potential to develop key skills such as transcultural awareness, engagement and capacity for working with diversity.
Griffith Review Online, 2023
Why do certain animals seem to magically capture the zeitgeist, invading our dreams and animating... more Why do certain animals seem to magically capture the zeitgeist, invading our dreams and animating our fears and anxieties? Animals have always played a part in the myths and stories that help us make sense of and order the world around us. But some animals push the boundaries and unsettle this order. They sit on the fence, offering a strange combination of delight and disturbance, anxiety and wonder. The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss famously wrote that animals become totemic not because they’re ‘good to eat’ but because they’re ‘good to think’. Few animals have captured the popular imagination quite like the Australian white ibis, aka the bin chicken, a species that is not only good to think (about and with) but that also has something to say to us. In March 2021, the Macquarie dictionary selected ‘bin chicken’ as its Aussie Word of the Week, noting, ‘The bin chicken has pecked and scavenged its way into Australian culture.’ The dictionary even dared to suggest that the bin chicken might surpass the kangaroo as Australia’s most iconic animal. It was recognition of the urban journey of the ibis, a native species that in a few short years has gained a highly visible and permanent presence in many Australian cities and in the cultural landscape.
Camino Real, v13, n16, 2021
In 1972, the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA) published a comic by the Mexican co... more In 1972, the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA) published a comic by the Mexican comic artist Rius: NACLA Presents Rius: The Chicanos. This was an English-language version of Los Chicanos, which Rius had released in his Los Agachados series in 1972. In US Latino cultural and comic history The Chicanos is an overlooked artefact: it is the first comic book-length treatment of Chicanos and the diverse drives of the Chicano Movement. In this essay I assess The Chicanos as a key example of transborder information exchange about a US population with direct links to Mexico. The Chicanos, I suggest, survives as a cultural artefact—which comes to the discussion with inevitable historical biases and oversights—that illustrates how important historical memory is in a USA in which prevail ephemeral media soundbites and claims of “fake news.”
Intellect Books, Dec 1, 2015
The University of Chicago Press eBooks, Dec 15, 2015
Cultural Studies has not devoted much notice to one of the keynote developments in modern culture... more Cultural Studies has not devoted much notice to one of the keynote developments in modern culture over the last 30 years: namely, the rise of various charity projects fronted and, in the public mind, defined by celebrities. (Rojek 2014: 127) In the very noisy and complicated world that we have, people that reach large numbers of people, like Madonna does, have an extraordinarily important role to play [in promoting philanthropy]. When they're devoting their time, their money, their name, a lot of effort, a lot of organization skill to all of this, it makes a huge difference. (Jeffrey Sachs cited in Luscombe 2006). [C]elebrity humanitarianism […] is most often self-serving […] it advances consumerism and corporate capitalism, and rationalizes the very global inequality it seeks to redress; it is fundamentally depoliticizing, despite its pretensions to 'activism'; and it contributes to a 'postdemocratic' political landscape, which appears outwardly open and consensual, but is in fact managed by unaccountable elites. (Kapoor 2013: 1) Celebrity philanthropy is a visible and controversial phenomenon, as the opening quotations suggest. According to the 'Look to the Stars: The World of Celebrity Giving' website, which is advertised as 'the web's number one source of celebrity charity news and information' since 2006, there are now more than 3,400 [Hollywood-branded] celebrities involved with over 2,000 charities that aim to 'make a positive difference in the world' ('Look to the stars' 2006-15). Besides the apparent upsurge of commentary on celebrity and charity in tabloids, gossip magazines, business and news magazines, and social networking sites, there are a
Intellect Books, Dec 1, 2015
Culture, Theory and Critique, 2007
Abstract This essay proposes that kitsch, in this instance the kitsch exempli-fied by the musical... more Abstract This essay proposes that kitsch, in this instance the kitsch exempli-fied by the musical and sartorial look, sound and feel of Eurovision Song Contests (ESC), may not only influence the popular appeal of the current European-unity project, but provide that project with its ...
Chasqui, 2006
Launched with considerable media coverage in 2000, Ilan Stavans's Latino USA: A Cartoon History, ... more Launched with considerable media coverage in 2000, Ilan Stavans's Latino USA: A Cartoon History, with illustrations by comic-artist Lalo Alcaraz, aimed to render accessible the history of the U.S.A.'s heterogeneous Latino sectors. i In the Foreword Stavans justifies the book's comic format by distancing it from Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart's Para leer al Pato Donald, which in English translation became How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic. ii That 1971 study targeted the Disney comic as paradigmatic of U.S. cultural imperialism, a mass-cultural form capable of corrupting Third World youth with nefarious "American" capitalist and bourgeois individualist values. Stavans dismisses this argument as simplistic, tired, and tied to a bygone era of left-right Latin American antagonisms. Rather, Stavans insists, the worldwide popularity of the comic medium confirms that "Our global culture is not about exclusion and isolation, but about cosmopolitanism, which, etymologically derives from the Greek terms cosmos and polis, a planetary city" (xi). This appeal to an all-inclusive cosmopolitanism underwrites Stavans's desire for his cartoon history "to represent Hispanic civilization as a fiesta of types, archetypes, and stereotypes," and thus to avoid "an official, impartial tone, embracing instead the rhythms of carnival" (xv). Concomitant with Stavans's ambitions to generate a highly playful historical text, Latino USA is also committed to elucidating the author's own personal history. As Stavans puts it, "History, of course, is a kaleidoscope where nothing is absolute. The human past and present are far more malleable than the future. This, in short, is my own account, a pastiche of angles I have made my own" (xv). Indeed, Mexican-born and raised Stavans consistently
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, 2019
Emerging in Los Angeles in the late 1980s and early 1990s as a queer Chicano performance artist, ... more Emerging in Los Angeles in the late 1980s and early 1990s as a queer Chicano performance artist, playwright, and writer, Luis Alfaro quickly established himself as an influential contributor to wider cultural debates about the intersections between gender, sexual, ethno-racial, class, religious, and national affiliations in the United States. In his early career Alfaro was a key player in the solo performance movement, in which performance artists used their own bodies and lives as self performance: that is, as primary physical and lived matter for interrogating their identities within a broader political questioning of US multicultural discourses. That questioning coincided with the prominence of Chicana feminist, queer, and AIDS activisms in California, all of which framed Alfaro’s early performances. Much of Alfaro’s work from the 1990s thus survives as historically significant chronicles of Chicana/o queer lives on the US West Coast. Alfaro consolidated his reputation in that de...
This book presents case studies of celebrity philanthropy from around the globe—including such fi... more This book presents case studies of celebrity philanthropy from around the globe—including such figures as Shakira, Arundhati Roy, Zhang Ziyi, Bono, and Madonna—looking at the tensions between celebrity activism and ground-level work and ..
M/C Journal, 2004
For seven months in 1999/2000, six-year old Cuban Elián González was embroiled in a family feud p... more For seven months in 1999/2000, six-year old Cuban Elián González was embroiled in a family feud plotted along rival national and ideological lines, and relayed televisually as soap opera across the planet. In Miami, apparitions of the Virgin Mary were reported after Elián’s arrival; adherents of Afro-Cuban santería similarly regarded Elián as divinely touched. In Cuba, Elián’s “kidnapping” briefly reinvigorated a torpid revolutionary project. He was hailed by Fidel Castro as the symbolic descendant of José Martí and Che Guevara, and of the patriotic rigour they embodied. Cubans massed to demand his return. In the U.S.A., Elián’s case was arbitrated at every level of the juridical system. The “Save Elián” campaign generated widespread debate about godless versus godly family values, the contours of the American Dream, and consumerist excess. By the end of 2000 Elián had generated the second largest volume of TV news coverage to that date in U.S. history, surpassed only by the O. J. S...
Literature and Racial Ambiguity, 2002
ABSTRACT:'" I May Create a Monster": Cherrie Moraga's Transcultural Conundrum... more ABSTRACT:'" I May Create a Monster": Cherrie Moraga's Transcultural Conundrum.'Literature and Racial Ambiguity. Eds. Teresa Hubel and Neil Brooks. Perspectives on Modern Literature Series. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi Press, 2002 ...
Fashion Theory The Journal of Dress Body & Culture
Review of Berg Encyclopedia of World Dress and Fashion. Volume 2: Latin America and the Caribbean... more Review of Berg Encyclopedia of World Dress and Fashion. Volume 2: Latin America and the Caribbean, ed. Margot Blum Schevill (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2010). In Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body and Culture 16 (Supplement 1, March 2012): S15-S21.
With his first short-story collection, The Boy without a Flag: Tales of the South Bronx (1992), A... more With his first short-story collection, The Boy without a Flag: Tales of the South Bronx (1992), Abraham Rodriguez established himself as one of the leading Latino writers of his generation, part of a wave of successful authors who emerged in the late 1980s and 1990s that includes the Dominican Junot Díaz, the Cuban American Achy Obejas, the Chicanos Diego Vázquez Jr, Yxta Maya Murray, and Dagoberto Gilb, and the Nuyorican Ernesto Quiñones. Rodriguez’s reputation was consolidated by the publication of the novels Spidertown (1993) and The Buddha Book (2001). Both texts confirmed Rodriguez as an uncompromising and decidedly unromantic chronicler of the disenfranchised Nuyorican youth of New York’s South Bronx, or El Bronx, and a gifted transmitter of Nuyorican English. Mainstream publishing success and laudatory book reviews in major U.S. newspapers and magazines, and the inclusion of his fiction in Puerto Rican, Latino, and American literature courses in schools and universities across the United States, and beyond, also attest to Rodriguez’s reputation. Alongside these achievements, however, Rodriguez’s confrontational representations of El Bronx, and his public comments on his literary elders, have embroiled him in a highly charged debate about the sociocultural validity and political impact of Nuyorican literary and cultural productions. Despite the significance of that debate, Rodriguez’s writing has to date attracted surprisingly little academic attention, perhaps a reflection of a general critical resistance to the author’s outspoken public persona and his unapologetic characterizations of an embattled and violence-prone inner city.
Frontiers: The interdisciplinary journal of study abroad, Aug 31, 2022
Research into university study abroad programs suggests that while students may have some experie... more Research into university study abroad programs suggests that while students may have some experience of local culture(s) and practices, they may be achieving no more than a superficial understanding of the host society. Alternatives to the standard study abroad models are thus essential to encourage students to engage more deeply with the host society. Research on study abroad programs argues for additional interventions and the provision of close supervision and mentoring to students. Given these arguments, this paper examines a scaffolded assessment model, designed for students at an Australian university in an international studies program established 26 years ago, and intended to enhance their learning during their compulsory year of study abroad. Through ongoing academic supervision and the design of a scaffolded fieldwork research project on aspects of the host society, we argue, the students have the potential to develop key skills such as transcultural awareness, engagement and capacity for working with diversity.
Griffith Review Online, 2023
Why do certain animals seem to magically capture the zeitgeist, invading our dreams and animating... more Why do certain animals seem to magically capture the zeitgeist, invading our dreams and animating our fears and anxieties? Animals have always played a part in the myths and stories that help us make sense of and order the world around us. But some animals push the boundaries and unsettle this order. They sit on the fence, offering a strange combination of delight and disturbance, anxiety and wonder. The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss famously wrote that animals become totemic not because they’re ‘good to eat’ but because they’re ‘good to think’. Few animals have captured the popular imagination quite like the Australian white ibis, aka the bin chicken, a species that is not only good to think (about and with) but that also has something to say to us. In March 2021, the Macquarie dictionary selected ‘bin chicken’ as its Aussie Word of the Week, noting, ‘The bin chicken has pecked and scavenged its way into Australian culture.’ The dictionary even dared to suggest that the bin chicken might surpass the kangaroo as Australia’s most iconic animal. It was recognition of the urban journey of the ibis, a native species that in a few short years has gained a highly visible and permanent presence in many Australian cities and in the cultural landscape.
Camino Real, v13, n16, 2021
In 1972, the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA) published a comic by the Mexican co... more In 1972, the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA) published a comic by the Mexican comic artist Rius: NACLA Presents Rius: The Chicanos. This was an English-language version of Los Chicanos, which Rius had released in his Los Agachados series in 1972. In US Latino cultural and comic history The Chicanos is an overlooked artefact: it is the first comic book-length treatment of Chicanos and the diverse drives of the Chicano Movement. In this essay I assess The Chicanos as a key example of transborder information exchange about a US population with direct links to Mexico. The Chicanos, I suggest, survives as a cultural artefact—which comes to the discussion with inevitable historical biases and oversights—that illustrates how important historical memory is in a USA in which prevail ephemeral media soundbites and claims of “fake news.”
Intellect Books, Dec 1, 2015
The University of Chicago Press eBooks, Dec 15, 2015
Cultural Studies has not devoted much notice to one of the keynote developments in modern culture... more Cultural Studies has not devoted much notice to one of the keynote developments in modern culture over the last 30 years: namely, the rise of various charity projects fronted and, in the public mind, defined by celebrities. (Rojek 2014: 127) In the very noisy and complicated world that we have, people that reach large numbers of people, like Madonna does, have an extraordinarily important role to play [in promoting philanthropy]. When they're devoting their time, their money, their name, a lot of effort, a lot of organization skill to all of this, it makes a huge difference. (Jeffrey Sachs cited in Luscombe 2006). [C]elebrity humanitarianism […] is most often self-serving […] it advances consumerism and corporate capitalism, and rationalizes the very global inequality it seeks to redress; it is fundamentally depoliticizing, despite its pretensions to 'activism'; and it contributes to a 'postdemocratic' political landscape, which appears outwardly open and consensual, but is in fact managed by unaccountable elites. (Kapoor 2013: 1) Celebrity philanthropy is a visible and controversial phenomenon, as the opening quotations suggest. According to the 'Look to the Stars: The World of Celebrity Giving' website, which is advertised as 'the web's number one source of celebrity charity news and information' since 2006, there are now more than 3,400 [Hollywood-branded] celebrities involved with over 2,000 charities that aim to 'make a positive difference in the world' ('Look to the stars' 2006-15). Besides the apparent upsurge of commentary on celebrity and charity in tabloids, gossip magazines, business and news magazines, and social networking sites, there are a
Intellect Books, Dec 1, 2015
Culture, Theory and Critique, 2007
Abstract This essay proposes that kitsch, in this instance the kitsch exempli-fied by the musical... more Abstract This essay proposes that kitsch, in this instance the kitsch exempli-fied by the musical and sartorial look, sound and feel of Eurovision Song Contests (ESC), may not only influence the popular appeal of the current European-unity project, but provide that project with its ...
Chasqui, 2006
Launched with considerable media coverage in 2000, Ilan Stavans's Latino USA: A Cartoon History, ... more Launched with considerable media coverage in 2000, Ilan Stavans's Latino USA: A Cartoon History, with illustrations by comic-artist Lalo Alcaraz, aimed to render accessible the history of the U.S.A.'s heterogeneous Latino sectors. i In the Foreword Stavans justifies the book's comic format by distancing it from Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart's Para leer al Pato Donald, which in English translation became How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic. ii That 1971 study targeted the Disney comic as paradigmatic of U.S. cultural imperialism, a mass-cultural form capable of corrupting Third World youth with nefarious "American" capitalist and bourgeois individualist values. Stavans dismisses this argument as simplistic, tired, and tied to a bygone era of left-right Latin American antagonisms. Rather, Stavans insists, the worldwide popularity of the comic medium confirms that "Our global culture is not about exclusion and isolation, but about cosmopolitanism, which, etymologically derives from the Greek terms cosmos and polis, a planetary city" (xi). This appeal to an all-inclusive cosmopolitanism underwrites Stavans's desire for his cartoon history "to represent Hispanic civilization as a fiesta of types, archetypes, and stereotypes," and thus to avoid "an official, impartial tone, embracing instead the rhythms of carnival" (xv). Concomitant with Stavans's ambitions to generate a highly playful historical text, Latino USA is also committed to elucidating the author's own personal history. As Stavans puts it, "History, of course, is a kaleidoscope where nothing is absolute. The human past and present are far more malleable than the future. This, in short, is my own account, a pastiche of angles I have made my own" (xv). Indeed, Mexican-born and raised Stavans consistently
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, 2019
Emerging in Los Angeles in the late 1980s and early 1990s as a queer Chicano performance artist, ... more Emerging in Los Angeles in the late 1980s and early 1990s as a queer Chicano performance artist, playwright, and writer, Luis Alfaro quickly established himself as an influential contributor to wider cultural debates about the intersections between gender, sexual, ethno-racial, class, religious, and national affiliations in the United States. In his early career Alfaro was a key player in the solo performance movement, in which performance artists used their own bodies and lives as self performance: that is, as primary physical and lived matter for interrogating their identities within a broader political questioning of US multicultural discourses. That questioning coincided with the prominence of Chicana feminist, queer, and AIDS activisms in California, all of which framed Alfaro’s early performances. Much of Alfaro’s work from the 1990s thus survives as historically significant chronicles of Chicana/o queer lives on the US West Coast. Alfaro consolidated his reputation in that de...
This book presents case studies of celebrity philanthropy from around the globe—including such fi... more This book presents case studies of celebrity philanthropy from around the globe—including such figures as Shakira, Arundhati Roy, Zhang Ziyi, Bono, and Madonna—looking at the tensions between celebrity activism and ground-level work and ..
M/C Journal, 2004
For seven months in 1999/2000, six-year old Cuban Elián González was embroiled in a family feud p... more For seven months in 1999/2000, six-year old Cuban Elián González was embroiled in a family feud plotted along rival national and ideological lines, and relayed televisually as soap opera across the planet. In Miami, apparitions of the Virgin Mary were reported after Elián’s arrival; adherents of Afro-Cuban santería similarly regarded Elián as divinely touched. In Cuba, Elián’s “kidnapping” briefly reinvigorated a torpid revolutionary project. He was hailed by Fidel Castro as the symbolic descendant of José Martí and Che Guevara, and of the patriotic rigour they embodied. Cubans massed to demand his return. In the U.S.A., Elián’s case was arbitrated at every level of the juridical system. The “Save Elián” campaign generated widespread debate about godless versus godly family values, the contours of the American Dream, and consumerist excess. By the end of 2000 Elián had generated the second largest volume of TV news coverage to that date in U.S. history, surpassed only by the O. J. S...
Literature and Racial Ambiguity, 2002
ABSTRACT:'" I May Create a Monster": Cherrie Moraga's Transcultural Conundrum... more ABSTRACT:'" I May Create a Monster": Cherrie Moraga's Transcultural Conundrum.'Literature and Racial Ambiguity. Eds. Teresa Hubel and Neil Brooks. Perspectives on Modern Literature Series. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi Press, 2002 ...
Fashion Theory The Journal of Dress Body & Culture
Review of Berg Encyclopedia of World Dress and Fashion. Volume 2: Latin America and the Caribbean... more Review of Berg Encyclopedia of World Dress and Fashion. Volume 2: Latin America and the Caribbean, ed. Margot Blum Schevill (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2010). In Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body and Culture 16 (Supplement 1, March 2012): S15-S21.