[csaa-forum] Seminars on writing, affect and sensation at UWS

[Anna Gibbs]

The Writing and Society Research Group
at the University of Western Sydney presents

Chris Fleming (UWS)
on "Hallucinogens, thought and writing"

and 

Jennifer Biddle (College of Fine Arts, UNSW)
on "Festering Boils and Screaming Canvases: notes from an
anthropologist's diary un-written"

Friday 14 September
10.00am-12 midday (Chris Fleming)
2.00pm-4.00pm (Jennifer Biddle)
(Please join us for a sandwich lunch at 1pm, in Building 23, conference
room 1)

University of Western Sydney, Bankstown campus
Building 23, conference room 2
(via the Henry Lawson Drive exit of the M5)

All welcome. RSVP/info writing at uws.edu.au

---
"Hallucinogens, thought and writing"
When it comes to literature, the notion of "recreational drugs" becomes
something of a misnomer. Here, drugs have been regularly put to work on
the author's behalf in the service of creativity. Alternatively, writing
itself has sometimes been figured as a kind of drug. This paper will
seek to explore, in a somewhat haphazard way, some of the links between
drugs - particularly hallucinogens - and literature. In so doing, it
hopes to proffer some tentative claims about the relationship between
language and thought, between sensation and articulation.

---
"Festering Boils and Screaming Canvases: notes from an anthropologist's
diary un-written"
This paper reflects on almost twenty years of ethnographic field work
with Warlpiri Aboriginal people, specifically, the relationship between
Central Desert art production and the anthropologist's incarnate
involvement.   Drawing on the anecdotal and incidental, and figured
through the possibilities provided by a certain ficto-critical
confessional form -  a form which Jacqueline Rose (2004) describes as a
specifically female and modernist mode of 'faking it with the truth'  -
this paper reconsiders the palpable proximities of colliding life
worlds.  A model of culture as contagion is developed in order to
apprehend the complex material terms in which Aboriginal art operates as
an intercultural aesthetic enactment of recruitment, incorporation and
embrace.  The work of Merleau-Ponty, Silvan Tomkins, Christopher Bollas
and Deleuze are utilised to demonstrate the extent to which
intercultural art vexes the otherwise assumed autonomous nature of
culture, identity, body and object. A recent visit by six Warlpiri
women, and one baby, to Sydney, at CCAP, COFA, in March, for a ten day
Lajamanu Women's Painting Workshop, forms the basis of this account, as
well as the exhibition of the art works that resulted. The precarious
terms in which culture travels and the existential terrain it incites,
are explored.  Aboriginal women's art bursts, screams, infects literally
with a potency inescapable and irrefutable.  Those who encounter it
close hand are at risk from the violent terms of ontological difference
these works command  -  difference that will not quit because of, not
despite, the ongoing assailing effects of colonial trauma and
displacement.

www.uws.edu.au/research/writingandsociety