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Edward Said’s Orientalism ushered in a period of prolonged reflection about western practices of representing otherness particularly the construction of Islam and Muslim identity in the West. Said’s key argument that the West produces its identity by deni ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Memory and forgetting are potent sites of politics, as they condition the possibilities for contemporary practice. Nowhere is this more evident, nor more closely discussed, than in the case of Germany and the memory of the Nazi Holocaust. It is no less true, however, of other states and other moments of trauma, both inflicted and received. A number of scholars have explored the tendency of the United States, collectively and culturally, to forget its past in perhaps shorter order than any other power. This forgetting finds expression most publically in cinema, that quintessentially American cultural product. The Vietnam War was a wrenching political and cultural experience, and yet in a few short years it was transformed from the psychological brutality of Deer Hunter or Apocalypse Now to the hypermasculine victory march of First Blood II: Rambo, whose tag line captures the move to perfection: ?This time we get to win?.The danger of forgetting, of course, is the famed fate of repetition. Rather more actively stated, amnesia allows for blithely brutal practices, free from the guilty associations memory might inflict. In the case of the United States, it denial that it is an imperial power, enabled by its repeated amnesia about its imperial moments and practices, precisely enables the repeated iteration of those moments and practices. American imperialism is an imperialism of the persistent present, enabled by amnesia, and hence invisible to the American self, by virtue its vacant history.In this paper we explore the themes of forgetting and empire in relation to the War in Iraq, through a reading of series of recent films which centre on extreme amnesia in different ways. Memento is probably best known for its innovative narrative technique of telling its story in reverse ? if nothing else, putting a high premium on arriving at the theatre on time. It is, however, most centrally a story of repeated amnesia. This daily forgetting requires elaborate strategies for coping, but also creates the conditions of possibility for remarkable violences. The consequences of amnesia are less obviously violent in the other two films, both of which are, at least in part, romantic comedy: 50 First Dates and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Nevertheless, both allow us insight into the various forms and political consequences of forgetting. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For much of the 1980s and 1990s capitalist East and Southeast Asia was regarded as an exemplary model of economic development and rapid social and political progress. Asian cultural values became popular topics of Western academic and journalistic discourse and the perception that the American century would be eclipsed by a Pacific 21st century became widespread. Increasingly integrated into the global economy, East and Southeast Asian governments found it difficult to resist the spread of new media technologies and struggled to retain control over the dissemination of information and entertainment which led to tensions emerging between international broadcasters and Asian governments and to new opportunities for political activism within these nations. Meanwhile, Australian Labor governments of the 1980s and 1990s encouraged ‘engagement’ with Asia as an element of its social and economic development strategies and in part by seeking an expansion of news media coverage of ‘the region’. However, rather than allay traditional white Australian anxieties about Asia expanded coverage arguably created heightened concerns about the nations of Asia and the revitalization of xenophobic discourses in Australia. Moreover, with Islam prominent in the ‘war against terror’ evidence suggesting a long term decline in US media reporting of international news (Tomlinson 1999) indicates the electronic reproduction of Asia is of vital interest. This paper argues that whilst technologies like the fax, mobile phone and internet have been important tools in effecting political change in Asia, the effects of telemediation on the subjectivity of Western media consumers has led to a crisis of meaning and the formation of new elements in discourses of difference. Tomlinson, John (1999), Globalization and Culture, Cambridge: Polity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite decades of trying to discipline Southeast Asia into a coherent field of academic endeavour the future of Southeast Asian studies looks set to change. Individual countries have been admitted and expelled from academic literature on Southeast Asia as the region’s boundaries are redrawn to accommodate changes in the academy and in the region. The geographical imaginaries that were shaped by the rise of area studies during the Cold War are giving way to new spatial configurations that are influenced by the war on terror and its inevitable association with Islam, and the rise of China as an economic power. Southeast Asian studies was integral to the proxy wars and massacres that characterized the Cold War period and it remains to be seen whether its reconfiguration will see it drawn into service in the war against terror. This paper explores the power/knowledge nexus in the maintenance of Southeast Asia and the likely eclipse of Cold War Southeast Asian studies against the backdrop of wider changes in area studies and the passing of the Three Worlds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]