»í* ?#&; pni -„i/Š í,Si K^i' part ňv.e EMPIRE AND GLOBALISATION its accompanying images, cultures and modes of meaning-making. As we begin to think about what global capital has produced it is easy to imagine a disembodied environment of financial flows, but those flows of capital also transport ways of making meaning that in turn produce racial and ethnic identities in new and old ways. Sometimes it seems the question to ask of globalisation is: what of this is not colonialism? What changes when a representation is global or globalised? What new forms of racial or ethnic being have arisen or been further enforced? . globalisation« Globalisation can be described by many different models and vocabularies that would to varying degrees emphasise politics, identities and power. Globalisation as understood through cultural theory can be described as consisting of at least the following three characteristics, which bring together the key work of Zygmunt Bauman (1998) and Arjun Appadurai (2001). Globalisation is marked by a collapse of time and space, by a division between the mobile and immobile class, and by the way in which meaning circulates its multiple products across local and global communities within sets of flows or 'scapes. time and space« ;:■ The idea of a 'collapse' in time and space simply refers to the ways in which technologies like the internet, when linked to an idea of global share and finance trading, enables certain sorts of processes and activities to be no longer bounded by geography or nationhood. This is perhaps better understood through a shift in how something like manufacturing hwn. Equally, the factory will reflect the original connection to a pea-producing prea and so the sense of the town as a key pea place may be taken up by town promotion policies (and in Australia and America the suggestion of the building|of the 'Big Pea' will surely follow). As the factory continues its work it comes!to be understood as a stable source of employment (albeit with seasonal variation), and personal identities develop that reflect the factory's role in the lives of generations of people in the local area. The town bank and other local lending institutions are themselves invested in the factory's management and are aware of the natural rises and falls in possible profits depending on the quality of the seasons. Given the dependence on local 180 part five EMPIRE AND GLOBALISATION labour and seasonal variation in the supply of peas, this factory is tied both by the place it occupies and the seasonal times to make money. Given these ties it is the sort of business that during a drought, for example, one could imagine the local community undertaking to work at lower pay and adopting other strategies to ensure the long-term success of the factory. And in good times the local factory might in turn donate land or money for local parks or sporting grounds. This idea of how a factory might once have worked has now to be compared with what is possible in a globalised environment. The key shift is that the company is now owned by a globally spread set of share owners and investors who will support or abandon the company depending on its profit, as is shown in the share return gained by the investor. No set of share owners will necessarily know or care exactly where an individual company is located, or what time zone or seasonal system it may move within. Bauman begins his book Globalisation with a quote from AJ. Dunlop that sums this up: The Company belongs to people who invest in it—not to its employees, suppliers, nor the locality in which it is situated.' Thus a pea company needs to be performing at a profit at all times for a set of globally dispersed investors, and to do so needs to be willing to shift its operation or parts of its operation at any time. So if there is a drought one year in Australia but a bumper crop in Argentina the investors' money is withdrawn from the Australian operation and put into the Argentinian one. If this means the collapse of the Australian pea plant this is of no concern to the investor, who simply sees a rise or fall in their share return. In a similar way, if one part of the pea-producing process requires specialist equipment it may be best to have all the peas from all over the world have that part of their preparation performed in a low-wage, low-tax environment that may be quite disconnected from where the peas were first picked. In this way the peas themselves become globalised as they are shifted from one economic site to another. Because of the mobility of the capital and the precariousness of any commitment from the pea production companies, towns (but also particular nations) will compete with one another to offer more infrastructure or lower wages to keep the business in their area or within their nation. Some versions of this model would see the nation becoming increasingly reduced to the supplier of infrastructure, and this has led to debates about whether or not globalisation has superseded ideas of nationhood and to what extent nations can any longer control the activities of global business and finance. mobile and immobile classes. Once the above model is clear it is easy to see that the next characteristic of globalisation, a division between the mobile and immobile classes, simply identifies those people who can move easily around the world following flows of money via international corporations and those who remain committed to geography through familiar ties, traditional relationships with particular places and/or the inability to move anywhere else due to their economic position. Think, for example, of the |j part Eve 1||. EMPIRE AND GLOBALISATION Í ■I! person who lives in a small cottage in tlié country costed at about $30 000 trying to buy in a major capital city—immobility is not simply about choice. But think also of the thousands of people each year who are forced from their homes due to warfare, poverty, illness and environmental collapse. These people are forced to be mobile but are then highly contained in refugee camps, in exile or at staging posts within certain international processes. We could also consider the ways in which guest workers and other identified immigrant labour are attracted into wealthier countries from poorer ones. They certainly move away from their original homes but are then left relatively immobile with low wages and minimum conditions, and little chance of easy returns home. When we think about mobility we have to think about the style and conditions of that mobility and whether or not it can be understood as enduring mobility. Certain kinds of air travel between key sites of capitalist production, for example, are thoroughly supported with an infrastructure that eases ideas of difference and makes for effortless flow between time zones via generic ideas of comfort, rest and support, all these manifested by the similarity of hotels, airport layout, service mentality and luxury travel. flows and 'scapes* j] The final characteristic of globalisation1 refers to the ways in which meanings (and so understandings and readings of each other as well as products) flow through local and global communities via various 'scapes. This makes the important point that globalisation produces particular kinds of culture or, for Arjun Appadurai, a particular kind of cultural activity called the social imaginary, which consists of five particular flows, these five flows are 1) ethnoscapes: flows of people across the globe, e.g. tourists, refugees, immigrants, guest workers; 2) technoscapes: movement of machinery such as VCRs, computers, mobile phones; 3) financescapes: currents of money via markets, stock exchanges, the drug trade; 4) mediascapes: flows of images and information; and 5) ideoscapes: flows of ideologies and ideas, for example democracy and human rights. This sense of the global as simultaneously an imagining and a style of economy make up the strong sense that Hardt and Negri (2000) communicate in their idea of empire that there is nothing 'outside' this kind of globalisation. This does not mean that there is not strong and organised opposition to certain sorts of American cultural domination or worldwide environmental assault, but that the means of opposition are also likely to be global in their style. Groups will organise via the internet and local Indigenous communities will join with international Indigenous groups, for example, to produce results that have local and international effects. old and new empires. In the chapters that follow it is useful to remember at all times that all these flows are operating to differing degrees at any one moment in our global environment. If we think about what images do in this environment we need already to 182 part ň\e EMPIRE AND GLOBALISATION appreciate that media product (news, music, film, advertising) is as dependent as the globalised pea upon making global profit. This means that the attempts by local interest groups or indeed national governments to create images and ideas about themselves may have lessened, since what is shown to make global profits are generic and multiconnected (i.e. productive of multiple spin-offs) media products. But the media products produced are also a key way in which people make up new globalised identities, even down to the ways in which we organise and direct our individual lives. Thus ideologies, images and machinery all come together and reconnect through people and money, but these flows are not simple unchecked flows but become particularly contested, embraced or ignored. Osuri's chapter, for example, asks us to think about the ways in which an idea of 'beauty' has become embedded in our global culture through ideas of race that emerged from an older notion of imperialism that has joined with newer orders of empire that now connect 'whiteness' to a state achievable by the practice of particular beauty regimes including the use of 'whitening' creams. This, for Hardt and Negri, is one of the ways in which the existing empire differs from the older imperial order that was understood much more as a purely economic or regulatory system. For them the new empire is one that operates through a 'global form of sovereignty composed of agencies which operate in diverse arenas (national, regional and global), yet interlock to form a single framework of governance for the entire world' (Marks 2003: 461). One example of this interlocking would be the ways in which the same media company might be engaged in producing very local newspapers as well as international forms like the reality TV 'product', which in turn creates particular kinds of identities that produce stories at a local level which might be featured in the local newspaper. The understanding that the global works in very local ways and indeed through individuals is also one of the ways in which the new and old empires need to be differentiated. Older versions of empire occupied a centre which was partially reproduced in their colonies to bring into being a class of like-minded 'colonised' bureaucrats or to cater for expatriate settlers and workers who needed some of the reassurance of 'home'. A civil service, universities, communications system and other infrastructure were styled on the model of the imperial centre and put into place to (in part) produce knowledge about the colonised. These institutions were then subject to the underlying, usually racist, principles that motivated their construction. Some were for 'whites only', some for 'English educated' and they generally depended on dichotomies and hierarchies that reproduced the colonial order. But in the current order of globalisation, empire no longer depends on simple oppositions, for the hold of a single centre no longer works. There is no stable 'home' for many to return to and in many cases no stable home to begin with. Oppositions between colony and centre (or centre and periphery) are now cut across not only by migrational flows but also competing ideas about what it means to be English, for example as the Cornish, Scottish and Welsh (and many f É part í !?} EMPIRE AND GLOBALISATION other groups), question the overarching idea of England that the earlier emr. bought into being and circulated internationally Now we would have to th: of the ways in which people participate globally in modes of identification ť are more complex, often contain multiple points of opposition and connects and produce further styles of being that nonetheless are still circumscribed z informed by racialised orders. Has your own 'ethnic' identity shifted in y< lifetime or that of your parents? Do you wear clothing or eat food that 3 recognise as belonging to other cultures? How are those differences negotiated The first of the chapters to follow, by Fiona Nicoll, is indicative of that glo complexity and its limitations when we look at a specific practice of globalis empire. You will notice from the start that this is a comparative piece that s presents the USA and Australia as verv different places. This accentuates the glo reality that although certain forms or representation and decades of Americ media product flow into Australia to create a common language of charad such as The Simpsons or Friends, the different experiences of those products \ shift their meanings in sometimes radical ways. The glocal, or the localising global (most often American) content, occurs simultaneously with the reading the media product. But besides signalling the ongoing usefulness of cross-natio: comparisons, the chapter brings together three seemingly disconnected ide gambling, white possession and popular culture. This alerts us to the fact ť a globalising empire will produce new logics and thus bring people and thi] together in new and unexpected ways. Would the ways in which non-Indigen< Australians assume the possession of Australia have previously been conne.ctec gambling and popular culture? White possession of Australia and the elision Indigenous sovereignty would perhaps previously have been seen as someth. belonging wholly within the discourses of ideology and law, but as Nicoll ma clear, these ideas are now being played out via global ideas of Indigeneity ti leak across national borders to prevent (in this instance) alternative imaginii of what a recognition of Indigenous sovereignty and Indigenous gambling mij look like. That is, the satirising of Northern American Indigenous groups' 1 of their recognised land does many things in the cartoon itself, but in Austrc it contributes to what we rule in or out as imaginable in the Australian setti with quite a different history of Indigenous-colonial relations. This is a nuam chapter and requires the reader to recognise our own possible attachments denying Indigenous sovereignty alongside our possible pleasure in popu 'politically incorrect' cartoon shows such as South Park or Family Man. Does ( easy consumption of global cartooft content enable us to feel at home witl global media as long as we assume [that we are in some way included as fell 'white' global citizens? Understanding the global endurance of certain styles of racism has requi] some shifts. As Nicoll says: 184 part five EMPIRE AND GLOBALISATION To understand surviving and new patterns of racial inequality between and within peoples and nations, critical race and whiteness theory moves beyond a focus on cultural 'difference' to explore how whiteness functions as a gendered system of power that works ideologically through discourse and social institutions to promote, legitimate and protect the interests of white people as members of a racialised collective in Europe and its ex-settler colonies. This shift in how to think about race assumes that although the central organising ethos of colonialism may have been displaced (e.g. any simple idea of motherland and colonies), this does not mean that the independent nations that emerged after colonialism, for example, will necessarily cease to be colonising in their laws and ideologies, particularly towards Indigenous populations. The study of whiteness emerged within this environment. As Nicoll further says: [T]he critical study of whiteness simultaneously builds on and represents a departure from earlier research on the violence associated with policies and practices of white racism. From the late 20th century to the present, white dominance has necessarily operated through processes of invisibility, ex-nomination and normalisation rather than through the exclusionary 'whites only' practices of the segregated American South or Apartheid-era South Africa. Paying attention to how a figuration such as 'white' works not only locally and globally, via traditions of racist segregations, but also, in the contemporary moment, through conjoined modes of representation to keep on occupying the invisible norm, means that whiteness manifests itself in many ways. Would you now identify as 'white'? Why? Why not? One example of whiteness at work can be seen throughout Chapter 14 where Goldie Osuri looks at the ways in which Aishwarya Rai works within discourses of beauty, whiteness and commodification at once. For Osuri: Contemporary cultural theories can help us read the ways in which some of these non-white representations of beauty circulate transnationally. Using whiteness theory in particular, this chapter will examine how Aishwarya Rai (Miss World 1994 and a Bollywood star), packaged as an icon of Bollywood Indianness abroad, is simultaneously represented as an assimilable, marketable form of cultural difference in contemporary Western locations. As Osuri begins to unpack how these ideas of 'global' beauty came into being she identifies four elements that constitute the generative matrix which enable the transnational circulation of Aishwarya Rai as a world beauty. These are: 1 Aishwarya Rai's status as a Bollywood star 2 the construction of white femininity in Western contexts s the economic liberalisation process in India as partly responsible for validating and idealising the cultural form of beauty pageants and beauty queens 4 intensified discourses of skin-whitening and lightening in the Indian context. part five EMPIRE AND GLOBALISATION You can see in this list the ways in which a single globalised figure moves through and is seen as indicative of cultural forms that arise through specific individual histories, large philosophical movements, political and economic processes, and particular products aimed at national markets. Although the list is highly diverse it is not unlimited.! Analyses of globalised phenomena as cultural forms will still render rich, coherent readings that can be the grounds of global interventions or globalised support. It is very important to remember that globalisation is not a single force that overwhelms us but an environment that we are all within and in which we act. One of the ways we act is to produce new kinds of knowledges: in the Osuri chapter, for example, new ideas about what beauty could mean. At this moment can you write down what you think beauty is? Have you thought of it as a racial or ethnic category before? Is the application of lipstick a 'racial' act? (Or even racist?) Knowledge as power has also been a key way in which the world was ordered throughout the colonial era via the intermeshing of cultural forms and colonial practices. The discourse of Orientalism as articulated by Edward Said is used by Joseph Pugliese in Chapter 15 to look at the images of torture that came from Abu Ghraib. As Pugliese shows us, these images emerged not only as one part of a global flow of media images but began with the domestic and ubiquitous phone camera. This in turn connects new digital machinery with older styles of photography that included the photos taken of lynchings o| black Americans in the USA as well as the many colonial tableaux that staged Irijdigenous and colonised peoples for the ready consumption of those in power. But the displays of power enacted through physical and digital means on the bodies of the Iraqi prisoners are also reflective of the globalised moment we are currently within. The claims that the tortures were done 'just for the fun of it' and the evidence that certain shots of the scenes were sent home to family alongside conventional tourist snapshots of local markets and landscapes requires us to see the utter colonisation of the space of the Abu Ghraib prison. Even when the means used to torture is 'global' in both the style of machinery and ways the images were circulated we are reminded that bodies do not and often cannot move at the rate of digital images or transnational finance and in fact are further invaded and immobilised by the mobile image when taken in this environment. As Pugliese writes: " 'Imperialism and the culture associated with it,' Said (1994: 93) argues, 'affirms both the primacy of geography and an ideology about control of territory'. In the colonised sector of Abu Ghraib prison, the>Orientalised bodies of the Iraqi prisoners in the torture photographs become symbolically coextensive with the invaded territory of Iraq: they are the ground upon which violent military operations are physically performed and through which control of the colonised country is symbolically secured, even as outside 'the prison US imperial rule is violently contested and destabilised. ; art ňve EMPIRE AND GLOBALISATION This speaks of the endurability of Said's analysis that power is organised irough ways of knowing difference. That knowing includes stereotypes and thering' but also now the intense circulation of those knowledges in sometimes ^predictable conglomerations where styles of racism exercised over black merican bodies morph into ideas of the Arab as circulated in earlier colonial mes with styles of 'fun' and domination to make new kinds of torture that intre again and again on how something or someone can be made to be seen id so known. This idea of a stylisation of knowledge/power moves through each of these lapters linking images and politics and their joint circulation in new ways. We e the new and old empire in globalisation and the globalising and historicising Tees within a new idea of empire. Along with the emergence of new identities id new critiques we also have newly refigured modes of racism, new styles : colonisation, and circulating forms of exploitation that limit what can be lagined. Globalisation expands and contracts what is possible. Are you white? Why? Why not? How does the meaning of white change between countries colonised at different times and adopting,; different racial politics? Can you think of other examples where globalisation has bought together ideas that would not have previously been considered together? Can you see where popularly circulated ideas in cartoons or other popular media have constrained how we imagine national policy? Imagine you are particularly beautiful. How willyou now move your body talk, dress or shop? Can you identify how these acts are racial? Are you 'acting white'? What is a 'post-colonial' body? Name its characteristics and try and draw them. How does looking at images of and 'knowing' about other races and cultures also help us erase the experience of 'others'? Take a series of photos with your mobile phone at parties and other places where you are having fun and you are being encouraged to take photos as a part of the fun. Review them later and consider the ways in which this very ordinary activity also confirms particular ethnic identities or even displays of power. Who is in the centre of the frame? How do these images compare with mass-circulated news photos? Is race or ethnicity erased in these private images? Why? Why not? what's so funny about ind casinos? comparative nc on gambling, white possess australia and the v Successful tribes and new forms of Indian capitalism are forcing white Americans to reassess their relationship to and preoccupations with Native American peoples, and along the way are helping to forge a cultural revitalization within all Native American communities, which remain the most impoverished and deprived in the United States. (Darian-Smith 2004: 109) Wow, man—Indians have it good!—Eric upon arriving at the 'Three Feathers' casino on South Park, (quoted in Light & Rand 2005: 1) [These] people took 24 dollars for the Isle of Manhattan. They have no idea what things are worth!—Peter Griffin after losing the family car to 'Geronimo's Palace' on Family Guy, ep. 6, season 1. ^ art live EMPIRE AND GLOBALISATION This chapter will explore two apparently different things: a lack of cultural research m everyday representations, practices, spaces and identities related to gambling in Vustralia; and the fact that references to gambling in American animated sitcoms dmost always occur in the context of a central storyline about Indian casinos. Vhile South Park's episode The Red Man's Greed' (season 7, 2003), in which the iemolition of the entire community is planned to allow a superhighway leading lirectly to the door of the Three Feathers' Tribal casino, is arguably the most Icious representation, the storyline of white Americans being taken for a ride in íative casinos has the force of an established convention, with two episodes of The 'impsons addressing it (ep. 10, season 5 and ep. 17, season 11) as well as an episode )f Family Guy (ep. 6, season 1), which will be discussed in greater detail below. I vill conclude with some comparative reflections on how Indigenous people in Australia in are positioned in relation to economic, political and cultural aspects )f gambling. In considering the meanings of Indigeneity generated within animated sitcoms eaturing representations of Indian casinos, we can turn to an interdisciplinary and nternational field of research that has emerged over the past two decades. Critical ace and whiteness studies provide ways of understanding the relationship »etween aspects of our embodiment such as race and gender which are already ascribed with certain meanings, and the cultural tools and processes through vhich we might actively disrupt or challenge these meanings. Whether we :xperience our social identities as restrictive or even as violating of our individual .nd group agency depends on the relations of dominance in any given society t any given historical moment. This is why Stuart Hall (1997) argues that the ymbolic violence entailed in stereotyping is not a universal effect of the process )f identity construction itself but, rather^ is a result of the cultural hierarchies yhich order different social identities at particular moments and places. Building on the work of Hall and an established tradition of critical theorists >f race, from Franz Fanon (1982) to bell hooks (1992), critical race and whiteness tudies begin at the point where existing cultural theories of globalisation and >ost-colonialism fail to provide convincing explanations for the persistence of acialised relations of dominance. To understand surviving and new patterns »f racial inequality between and within peoples and nations, critical race and whiteness theory moves beyond a focus on cultural 'difference' to explore how whiteness functions as a gendered system of power that works ideologically hrough discourse and social institutions to promote, legitimate and protect the Qterests of white people as members of a racialised collective in Europe and its x-settler colonies. In her ground-breaking article 'Whiteness as Property', Cheryl Harris (1993) ixplains how the American state constructed the position and statics of slaves .nd first nations differentially in relation to whiteness, which operated as an nalienable property right to African persons, on the one hand, and Indian lands >n the other. It is with reference to relations of property and possession that we chapter thirteei WHAT'S SO FUNNY ABOUT INDIAN CASINOS? can understand how the critical study of whiteness simultaneously builds or and represents a departure from earlier research on the violence associated witr policies and practices of white racism. From the late 20th century to the present white dominance has necessarily operated through processes of invisibility, ex nomination and normalisation rather than through the exclusionary 'white: only' practices of the segregated American South or Apartheid-era South Africa. A: Richard Dyer articulates the contemporary challenge: Whites are everywhere in representation. Yet precisely because of this and their placing as the norm they seem not to be represented to themselves as whites but as people who are variously gendered, classed, sexualized and abled. At the level of racial representation, in other words, whites are [apparently] not of a certain race they're just the human race ... This is why studying whiteness matters, (quoted in Rothenberg 2002: 12) It is because whiteness tends to operate beneath the radar of everyday life thai its effects are often apparent less in relation to the things white people actively do than by the actions we fail to take to support positive changes to the status and situations of people racialised as Indigenous and non-white. 'But what can we do'? is a frequently voiced question of white people when our privilege is bought into clear view. Aileen Moreton-Robinson (2000: xvii) is an Indigenous Australian theorist of whiteness who disarmingly challenges such disingenuous protestations of powerlessness by posing a question of her own: 'What are the limits to what you would do?' In a range of case studies from interviews with white academic feminists to analyses of legal decisions over anti-discrimination and native title law; Moreton-Robinson (2004) identifies 'a possessive investment in patriarchal white sovereignty' as a limit to the collective white agency required to commit the nation to a positive process of 'post-colonising'. In her analysis of the High Court's Yorta Yorta Decision in 2001 that found Indigenous claimants' rights to native title had been 'washed away by the tide of history', she argues: The possessive logic of patriarchal white sovereignty is predicated on exclusion; that is it denies and refuses what it does not own—the sovereignty of the Indigenous other. Here I use the concept 'possessive logic' to denote a mode of rationalization... that is underpinned by an excessive desire to invest in reproducing and reaffirming the nation-state's ownership, control and domination. As such it is operationalised to circulate sets of meanings about white ownership of the nation, as part of common sense knowledge, decision making and socially produced conventions. (Moreton-Robinson 2004: para 5) Toula Nicolacopoulos and George Vassilacopoulos (2004: 32) build on Moreton-Robinson's arguments to show how the exclusion of Indigenous people from the status of property-owning subjects 'make possible distinctively white Australian constructions of whiteness'. part five EMPIRE AND GLOBALISATION The possessive investment in patriarchal white sovereignty is perhaps most obvious in the language used in everyday life to refer to Indigenous people and their affairs by white people official and non-official positions across the political spectrum. As Minister for Immigration and Indigenous Affairs, Amanda Vanstone justified the abolition of the elected Indigenous representative body the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (AT§IC) in 2004 by saying: 'the whole notion of separateness puts indigenous Australians into a different category and they are not. They are first Australians, they are ours ... and they deserve to get the treatment that everybody else gets' {Australian, 17-18 April 2004: 6, italics added) And Tony Abbott, Minister for Health, urged remote Indigenous communities to accept greater responsibility in the fight against petrol-sniffing by describing Aboriginal people as 'an asset to be cherished' (Australian, 24 September 2005: 6, italics added). More recently, an emailed letter to the editor of The Australian about the federal invasion of Indigenous communities in ihe Northern Territory on the pretext of saving children from sexual abuse by 'Robert of Roseville' complained that, 'Past governments have failed our indigenous people, each for a variety of reasons' (italics added).1 These everyday examples illustrate how intimately a sense of Australian citizenship is entangled with a possessive relationship to Indigenous people. Such pervasive understanding of Indigenous people as 'ours', as the property of a white nation, explain 1) why representations of Indigenous gambling are virtually non-existent in Australian popular cultural texts and 2) why representations of Indigenous gambling in American animated sitcoms are so fraught. The sleeve of the DVD of the first season df Family Guy promotes it as 'Uncut, Un-PC, Unsuitable for Kids' and wears a recommendation from Entertainment Weekly: Family Guy is what you'd get if you put Hank Hill, Homer Simpson and Cartman in i Blender.' A brief analysis of the episode summarised below will be used to generate new understandings of how the value of white possession circulates through the production and consumption of popular culture in America and Australia. [ will argue that the failure to recognise Indigenous people as self-possessed and possessing subjects makes possible the deployment of 'authenticity' as a weapon Df white cultural power within discourses of national identity that inform these popular texts. To pose issues in terms of 'authenticity' is to ask whether a given ching is, in the definitions of the Concise Oxford Dictionary, 'reliable', 'trustworthy' oi 'genuine'. We will see that, while the usually white male subject we encounter it the narrative heart of animated American comedies may be (and regularly is) chapter thirtee WHAT'S SO FUNNY ABOUT INDIAN CASINOS? experiencing a crisis of identity at the moment of his encounter with Indigenoi gambling, this crisis is at least partly resolved by emphasising the (usually mal< Indigenous subject's cultural inauthenticity (see Chaney 2004). Family Guy. product description. Meet the Griffins: Peter, the big, lovable oaf who always says what's on his mind. Lois, the doting mother who can't figure out why her baby son keeps trying to kill her. Their daughter Meg, the teen drama queen who's constantly embarrassed by her family. Chris, the beefy 13-year-old who wouldn't hurt a fly, unless it landed on his hot dog. Stewie, the maniacal 1-year-old bent on world domination. And Brian, the sarcastic dog with a wit as dry as the martinis he drinks. The animated adventures of this outrageous family will have your whole family laughing out loud.2 ploť suniinary» Chris hates being in the 'Scouts' (a parody of the Boy Scouts of America) and wants to quit, but is afraid to tell Peter. He is finally kicked out, and Peter insists on driving the family to Scout headquarters in New York to get Chris readmitted. While they are gone, Brian is unable to find the television's remote control and his intelligence drops sharply af daytime programming. The family stops at a Nat casino for a bathroom bres quickly becomes addicted to \ loses the car. Peter tries to get by claiming to be Native Ar great-grandfather's name was Cherokee.'), and the doubtful e that he go on a vision quest heritage. Chris accompanies Pet< wilderness, hoping to tell him wants to draw instead of being Delirious from hunger, Peter t to trees and sees a vision of guide, The Fonz. He finally listens to Chri: and realises that his son is a t; They return to the casino and car, ending the episode with NBC's The More You Know' j announcements.3 The narrative uses authenticity to support the possessive investment i patriarchal white sovereignty in several ways. The plot trigger that leads t the family's encounter with Indigenous gambling is Chris' desire to express a authentic artistic self rather than the limiting version of male identity imposed b the Scouts. And the troubled relationship between father and son is healed throug the 'Indian' ritual of self-discovery entailed by a vision quest in a 'wilderness' ju; beyond the casino. Lois' character is used to feminise political sympathy for th casino's owners as well as to embody gambling addiction through her compulsiv part five EMPIRE AND GLOBALISATION attachment to the slot machines. HerUole as the white dupe of Indigenous enterprise, coupled with the exclusion of Indigenous women from the cast of casino powerbrokers with whom the Griffin family has dealings, has the effect of associating questions of cultural authenticity with masculinity or rendering them 'men's business' (see Churchill 2003: 223-44) Supporting this narrative are many details of the text that highlight the use of authenticity judgments in securing the prerogative of white possession in America by invalidating contemporary expressions of Indigeneity. The casino's name, 'Geronimo's Palace', combines references to post-colonial resistance with a nostalgic nod to 'Caesar's Palace', that (icon of Mafia-ruled Vegas. And kitsch signifiers of Tndian-ness' abound within this space. What appears at first to be a sculptured towel.caddy for which Peter reaches after having relieved himself in the bathroom turns out to be a living employee who is name-tagged as 'Watch-As-You-Pee'. Nostalgic references to pre-colonial 'noble savagery' are juxtaposed with allusions to current developments in Indigenous or Indian welfare in the dialogue. Consider this exchange between Lois and a gaming machine attendant after he invites her to gamble. Lois: Thanks. But I don't—you know—approve of gambling. Attendant: Technically it's not really gambling; it's just us trying to rebuild our shattered culture after you raped our land and defiled our women. Lois: Well as long as you're not using it for fire-water! On other occasions the naive primitivism of the white characters is satirised. After Lois tells Peter she has gambled the family car, he makes the 'indecent proposal' of finding a high-roller who will sleep with his wife for a million dollars. Lois: That's ridiculous Peter: Come on Lois, these people took 24 dollars for the Isle of Manhattan. They have no idea what things! are worth! Following the decision to send Peter on a 'vision quest' to prove membership of the tribe which he has claimed in order to repossess his car, the casino's owners send him packing through the door majking spooky 'spiritual noises' and then collapse laughing at having taken Peterjifor a 'sucker'. These and other details accumulate throughout the episode to produce a vision of Indian casinos as a cynical capitulation to the commodification of Indigenous culture and traditions which, in turn, supports the episode's larger premise: successful Indian enterprises are a threat to the white man's family and his other material possessions, which is, in turn, countered by attacking the authenticity of the casino owners on their grounds of identity and possession. While the depiction of 'knowing natives' does acknowledge Indigenous agency the focus is on the characters' ^stance to this awareness, required for the plot device of the epiphanic 'vision jjuesť with which the episode achieves closure. With white father and son rebcShded and the losses incurred through chapter thirtee WHAT'S SO FUNNY ABOUT INDIAN CASINOS? the white mother and wife's initial desire to support the casino venture an her subsequent addiction reversed, the car drives away and the Indian casin fades into the distance to make way for the next adventure of this ordinär white American family. My argument here is that the episode's depiction c the 'knowing' exploitation of white subjects lured into Indian casino gamblin for all the 'right reasons' (guilt, pity, benevolence, not to mention the violer 'call of náture' that causes Peter to make an urgent bathroom stop at the casin in the first place) consistently translates political questions about Indigenou economic rights and self-governance into questions of 'authenticity'. The absenc of competing definitions of Tndian-ness' not only enables the casino's owners t be presented as wily captives of non-Indigenous popular cultural representation of what it means to be Indian (see Cuillier & Dente Ross 2007), but also preclude Indigenous articulations of the relationship between possession, authenticity an gambling, both historical and contemporary, from entering the picture. The point of this analysis has not been to view this text simply as a mimeti reflection of the value of white possession within American culture but rather t< use it to consider how certain racialised values might gather power as popula cultural texts travel between different national contexts. This is to focus on th relationship between those ideas and things that circulate most easily withii globalisation and those that seem to remain stubbornly confined to their domésti contexts. Animated sitcoms are massively popular in Australia; many of m students (most of whom are under 25) are able to recite whole passages of dialogu from them. In spite of the popularity of these shows and media discussions abou the appeal of 'politically incorrect humour' which has attended this popularit (Anderson 2005), serious debates raging in America, and more recently in Canada about gambling's role in facilitating Indigenous economic development an< self-governance are virtually inaudible here. My concern is that, at a momen when radical neo-liberal solutions to Indigenous poverty and disadvantage ar increasingly prominent topics of political and news discourses in Australia, th depiction of Indian casinos as the epitome of inauthenticity in Family Guy, Sout Park and The Simpsons makes serious discussion of the relationship between whit possession, Indigenous sovereignty and gambling less likely. Since 1988, the year in which two centuries of uninvited British presence wa variously celebrated and protested by non-Indigenous and Indigenous peopl across Australia, Indigenous people in the USA have been enabled through th part five EMPIRE AND GLOBALISATION Indian Gaming Regulatory Act (IGRA) to own and operate gambling venues on reserves. Rather than representing the fulfilment of 'tribal sovereignty', however, this right is the product of a compromise negotiated with state and federal governments after the IGRA was passed, and it has played a part in making several impoverished reservation communities financially viable (Light & Rand 2005: 9). In some cases, Indian gaming businesses have generated such significant economic and cultural resources that established gambling moguls such as Donald Trump have protested themselves to be the, 'victims' of Indian casino interests (2005: 105). The situation in Australia could jnot be more different. In contrast to America where 200 tribes own and operate 3 $3 gaming establishments (see Light & Rand 2005), as the most impoverished community in Australia, Indigenous people seem to have everything to lose from the expansion of legal gambling forms under current constitutional arrangements and taxation regimes and almost nothing to gain unless they are in a financial position to become owners of gaming businesses as private individuals. . Whereas the ownership of gambling businesses as a major economic resource has been viewed by members of firsts nations in North America as one vehicle through which enduring aspirations! jto self-governance are being realised, the value of self-governance for Indigenous Australians itself came under sustained political and ideological attack over, the period of the Howard government. Private home ownership was promoted as a solution to the problems experienced by Indigenous people living in public housing in remote communities, and Shared Responsibility Agreements that made welfare contingent on behavioral change were implemented. These Agreements were implemented as a weapon of 'tough love' designed to break a cycle of a 'culture of welfare dependence'. The idea that gambling might be anything but a vehicle for dysfunctional behaviours in Indigenous communities has almost never been mooted within public debates on Indigenous policy. Much more corijimon are statements such as the following by Noel Pearson, lawyer, Indigenous jspokesperson and head of the Cape York Institute, who enjoyed support from;ithe Howard government, supporting the banning of welfare payments to parents in Indigenous communities 'who use it on the pokies ór use it down at the tavern'.4 Perhaps the best way of illustrating the comparative position of Indigenous people in Australia and America in relation to gambling is to invoke the figure of the 'house'. Gambling businesses áre premised on the fact that 'the house' always has the edge on the gamblers who play against it and hope to win. Colonial processes driven by the prerqgative of white possession have enabled non-Indigenous interests to acquire more than a 'house edge' against Indigenous claims to a share of national resources.!That the gap in life expectancy between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people has narrowed to seven years in the USA and Canada5 (seventeen years in Australia), both of which recognise limited rights to self-governance from which collective ownership of legal gambling enterprises flows, is worth considering in the current context of legalised gambling in Australia chapter thirteei WHAT'S SO FUNNY ABOUT INDIAN CASINOS? where one poker machine is valued at around $227 000 or the price of the averag suburban family home (Courier-Mail, 4 August 2006). While the global gamblin boom persists and continues to generate revenue through online ventures an intra- and international cultural tourism, Indigenous ownership of the house wi bring collective benefits not available to individual gamblers who would attemr. to beat casinos and other legal gambling businesses at their own games. I have brought critical race and whiteness theory to bear on popular cultur; representations of Indigenous gambling produced in a nation with close cultura economic and military ties to this one. In the absence of research on the wa Australians interpret such representations I can only end with the followir -speculation: it is possible that the pleasures we might experience in consumiri representations of Indian gaming in American animated sitcoms have their soun less in their subversive challenge to political correctness than in their parod: representations of what Moreton-Robinson describes as 'the possessive investmei in patriarchal white sovereignty'. I will end this chapter with two questions: Do v\ laugh at Indian casinos because allowing Indigenous people to own and opera-legal gambling businesses marks the limit of what white people will collectively d to redress the living legacies of colonial dispossession in Australia? And is laughfc about this limit the only thing we can do about these legacies? key readings Hage, Ghassan 1998. White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultui Society. Sydney: Pluto Press. Harris, Cheryl 1993. 'Whiteness as Property/ Harvard Law Review 106(8): 1707. Moreton-Robinson, Aileen 2007. 'Writing Off Indigenous Sovereignty: The Discour of Security and Patriarchal White Sovereignty.' In Sovereign Subjects. Sydney: All« & Unwin. notes 1 , 6 July 2007. 2 , 12 April 20C 3 , 12 April 2007. 4 , 22 July 200 5