DLC

This article deals with the politics of observing and commenting on “elsewhere” in John Mateer’s “Portuguese collection” of poetry, Southern Barbarians (2011), with particular recourse to Marc Augé’s anthropological theories of places and non-places. It also attempts to establish connections between Mateer’s perceptions of Portugal and questions related to a Portuguese national identity as formulated by contemporary cultural commentators (Eduardo Lourenço, José Gil, Boaventura de Sousa Santos). In doing so, an exploration of the relationship between Portugal and Australia becomes inevitable.

Studies that engage with the ideological aspects of international exhibitions highlight the connections between the worldviews promoted by such exhibitions and colonialism. The fact that world fairs have continued to be successful events throughout the 20th century and even into the 21st century speaks of persistent representational practices that reproduce and reinforce imperial world orders.
The two last exhibitions of the 20th century in the Expo series set out to commemorate two landmarks in European colonial history: Expo ’92 in Seville marked the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s first voyage to the Americas, and Expo ’98 in Lisbon celebrated the (also) 500th anniversary of Vasco da Gama’s discovery of a sea route from Western Europe to India. With Expo ’92 and Expo ’98, both Spain and Portugal attempted to assert their position in modern Europe, as well as an unequivocal European identity, by trading on their seminal roles in the context of the development of European imperialism and expansion, which, according to these commemorations, at the end of the twentieth century, was still perceived as vital to the construction of Europe’s identity.

Janet Frame’s constant preoccupation with death, fear, failure and loneliness finds a surprisingly productive venue in relation to the difficulty of sharing space and time with things and objects. This article considers some of the consequences of reading Frame’s work in terms of the separation between things and objects as theorized by thing theory, in which things are seen as alien and resistant, prior to their being transformed into objects to which we ascribe uses, and in which we invest meanings. Dealing with things and objects will be seen to be modulated in terms related to the difficulties in defining selfhood faced by her characters within the ordinary boundaries of language and memory, evoked by Frame’s famously awkward linguistic and literary strategies. The article thus focuses on the resonances Frame’s novels establish between existing in the world and facing up to the presence of non-human and inanimate bodies.