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Representations of the Secular Neutrality, Spirituality and Mourning in Australian and Canadian Cultural Politics

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Representations of the Secular Neutrality, Spirituality and Mourning in Australian and Canadian Cultural Politics Representations of the Secular Neutrality, Spirituality and Mourning in Australian and Canadian Cultural Politics Sophie Sunderland B.A. (Hons) This thesis is presented for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy of the University of Western Australia School of Social and Cultural Studies Discipline of English and Cultural Studies 2009 ABSTRACT This thesis explores the ways in which ‘the secular’ is represented in contemporary Australian participatory art, screen, and print cultures. Secularisms are currently the subject of analysis in a broad range of disciplines within the humanities, and this thesis intervenes upon the field by focusing on the cultural politics of representations of embodied, spatialized secularisms. The secular is commonly defined in opposition to the ‘religious,’ and can also be extrapolated to the division of public and private spaces. Thus, by considering the occlusions and violences inherent in the ways bodies negotiate and are constructed through space, this thesis argues for the fluidity and porosity of these oppositions. By drawing from Janet Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini’s notion of secularisms, understood as specific, situated narratives of the secular, as well as Talal Asad’s and William E. Connolly’s conceptions of the secular, this thesis identifies ‘neutrality’ and ‘spirituality’ as two key narratives of the secular around which questions of language, embodiment, affect, and subjectivity are set in motion. Here, a regime of representation that constructs ‘religious’ subjects as outsiders to an imagined Australian national identity is critiqued and reconsidered in terms of anxieties about remembering and living with difference and loss. Rather than defining ‘the secular,’ this thesis seeks to maintain focus on the context and contingencies of enunciation. Thus, firstly the conflation of secularism with ‘neutrality’ and ‘objectivity’ is explored through a discussion of ‘defining’ secularisms, alongside critique of representations of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). By identifying the ways in which this ‘everyday’ text signals exclusions through the privileging of British Protestant Christianity in its contents, colonial history and usage, I consider how ‘neutrality’ is made contextually and contingently. This argument is then renegotiated in representations of subjectivity in two documentary texts. Read comparatively, God on my Side (2006) and John Safran versus God (2004), destabilize notions of a ‘neutral’ secular subjectivity through spatialization and participatory narration. John Safran’s performative, participatory engagements with the ‘religious’ blur boundaries that, through comparison with Andrew Denton’s God on my Side, illuminate the repetitious performativity of making ‘religious’ Others through the production of white, Anglo- Celtic, middle class, heteronormative, male, ‘secular’ identity and privilege. Not unlike the secular, the ‘spiritual’ is a ubiquitous term closely associated with, and yet differentiated from, institutional ‘religion.’ Australian spirituality studies scholar David Tacey’s significant body of work imagines the desert and Indigenous subjectivity as homogenously and contrastingly ‘spiritual.’ Thus, for the purposes of this study, the spiritual functions as a trope that intersects with narratives of secular, white, Anglo- Celtic, urban subjectivity as fundamentally ‘lacking.’ By closely reading Tacey’s works, alongside other relevant media, I argue that these constructions of space and subjectivity erase difference and enact neo-colonial violence. In order to complicate this narrative, I offer a reading of Jane Campion’s Holy Smoke (1999) in which representations of women’s negotiations of ‘spirituality’ through grief and loss destabilize normative heterosexual, patriarchal relations and subjectivities. Here, secular mourning is a suggestive concept that foregrounds ‘affective economies’ of loss, grief, and mourning alongside openness to the ways in which identity is made and lived relationally, and differently. Given that the representations of Australian secularisms I identify are made by locating ‘the religious’ elsewhere, this thesis reflects upon this process by including a contingent comparative study of representations of Canadian secularisms. Participatory art including the Secular Confession Booth (2007) in Toronto and The Booth (2008) in Perth, news media debates about secularism in Ontario and “reasonable accommodation” in Québec, as well as Nalo Hopkinson’s speculative fiction novel Brown Girl in the Ring, offer provisional and yet compelling sites for reflecting on the ways in which secularisms intersect with narratives of national identity. Further, this study places the limits and conceits of Australian representations of the secular into sharper relief. Thus, this thesis contributes to studies of critical whiteness, spatiality, critical mourning, and affective economies of relationality, as well as Australian-Canadian studies and cultural studies, to offer a reading of how critical secularisms, including secular mourning, set in motion possibilities for living multiple modes of potentiality and difference. TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract 3 Acknowledgments 7 List of Figures 9 INTRODUCTION Secular Privilege: Religion, secularism, and nation 11 Interlude 29 CHAPTER ONE Word Power: Secularism and the Oxford English Dictionary 31 Interlude 79 CHAPTER TWO Act Neutral: Embodiment and secular privilege 81 CHAPTER THREE Spirituality and the politics of ‘lack’ 123 Interlude 171 CHAPTER FOUR Secular Mourning: Spatial negotiations 173 Interlude 229 CODA (Confessing to) Reading Canadian secularisms 231 CONCLUSION Happy Mourning 265 References 271 Appendices 299 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS To the extent I have written this thesis, this thesis has also written me. It is therefore a special pleasure to acknowledge, within these pages, those who have engaged in this process with me and helped make it what it is. I firstly want to thank Gail Jones for her sensitive and invaluable supervision during the first three years of this project. Gail’s integrity, depth of knowledge and generous assumption of my abilities helped inspire my personal, intellectual and professional dedications to the task. Thank you so much. I am grateful to Alison Bartlett for taking over supervision after Gail left the university, and for offering the highest level of thoughtful engagement with me and my work. Alison’s extraordinary ability to think alongside me and thus to help open space for new possibilities and directions within this research has contributed significantly to its integrity. I must also thank Tanya Dalziell for her openness to this project and for her attentive communication that bears fruit long after the conversation has finished. An important contribution to this thesis was a significant travel award from the Association for Canadian Studies in Australia and New Zealand (ACSANZ) which enabled me to stay in Toronto for five months. This enabled me to gain an understanding of my positioning intellectually, relationally, personally and professionally that could not have happened had I pursued study only in Australia; a sensitivity which is perhaps reflected in the redistribution of the planned Canadian comparative component from half of this study to a reflective discussion in the Coda. For making my time in Canada warm, welcoming, intellectually rich and fun, I cannot thank enough Jamie Scott, Emily Gilbert, Nick, Josh, and Angela Failler, who generously hosted me in Toronto and Winnipeg, and each made my time in Canada rich, stimulating, and unforgettable. My second acquired home in Toronto was within the Robarts Centre for Canadian Studies at York University. Seth Feldman, Laura Taman and Gregory Klages were exceptionally kind in welcoming me to the Centre and sharing their office space, thoughtfulness and humour. It was a pleasure to conduct research in a new environment alongside such lovely and committed people. I must also thank Eva Mackey, Geraldine Finn, Janet Groen, and Steve Bailey for giving their time to discuss this project. Thank you also to Deborah Cowen for making me welcome in New York and to Talal Asad especially, who not only met with me but also generously read and commented on my work. This thesis has benefited immensely from travel to various conferences, and so I kindly thank the Dean of Arts and the Postgraduate Students Association at the University of Western Australia, as well as the Graduate Research School who awarded me no less than three travel grants, and particularly ACSANZ for a second grant to travel to Brisbane. I would especially like to thank Tseen Khoo, Olivia Khoo and Dean Chan for going out of their way to help fund a trip to Melbourne to the Asian Australian Studies Research Network Workshop with David Eng, given my research was obliquely relevant to the topic. I would also like to thank people whose engagement with this work has opened up unexpected friendships and dialogues. Thank you to Liana Christensen, Golnar Nabizadeh, Siri Barrett-Lennard and Jen Hayward for reading chapters and papers critically and creatively. Thank you also to Robyn Owens and Michael Azariadis who generously found time to read and comment on my research. I have had excellent mentors in Gareth Griffiths, Judy Johnston, Susan Broomhall, Krys Haq and Robyn Owens. I also thank Lisa Cluett, Siri Barrett-Lennard, Liana Christensen, Lucy Reilly and Cheryl Lange for their invaluable mentoring, and for making my research a priority within our work program. I especially want
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