I hadn’t had a holiday for a year, so after having finished a big research project at the end of June, I eagerly seized a friend’s invitation to go to Sydney for a few days. On our itinerary was seeing Hairspray, a musical my friend is extremely fond of in all its incarnations, but one I hadn’t previously heard much of.

So, on a cold and windswept Saturday night, we ventured out to Star City. And had our hearts well and truly warmed!

My purpose isn’t to write a review of the show. Suffice it to say that it’s wonderful, and you should see it if you have the chance.

What interests me in this post is the cultural politics of Hairspray.

One of its marketing themes, and points of identification, is with 60s nostalgia. That nostalgia (as with all such imaginary clusters of memories) is by necessity a collective re-imagining of what the 60s ‘meant’, whether or not we were around to form our own judgements.

Hairspray, though, is set – deliberately – at a point of change. The scene in Baltimore in June 1962 is one of transformation: of the evolution, or better the revolution, through which the 50s melt into the 60s, with the civil rights struggle as the crucible.

Tracey Turnblad’s teenage desire to dance, and to audition for the Corny Collins show, sets in motion a series of events which sees a slice of the pop cultural scene integrated, accompanied by the full panoply of corrupt politicians, corporate machinations, arrests, protests and conflict.

It’s clever stuff, and immensely enjoyable. It’s also spot on in honing in on how change is driven by an upheaval in everyday life, and social and cultural relations – the quotidian as well as the world-historical. As Emma Goldman famously said, “if I can’t dance, it’s not my revolution”.

Part of the nostalgia, no doubt, is for an era when social change seemed both straightforward and possible.

The stakes on the Hairspray stage are simple: justice figured as equality. And revolution as pushing open a door that’s already ajar.

What’s intriguing about the transposition of the Hairspray story to the Australian context is the way the show appears; the way the colour lines are written on the Antipodean actors’ bodies.

In American productions, one presumes, Little Inez, Motormouth Maybelle, Seaweed J. Stubbs and the aspiring dancers are black – African-American. Just as in Baltimore 1962, it’s a binary racial politics, resolving itself into a fantasy of unity at the end. No doubt, in its American setting, all sorts of images of reconciliation, the intent to recover purpose and clarity in dealing with racial politics, anticipations of Obama’s rhetoric, and much much more could be read into the phantasmatic politics of the Hairspray world.

In Australia, the black characters are played by actors variously of Latin American, Pacific Islander, Indian and African heritage. While the white power structure still presents itself as a unity, the other side of the racial dichotomy is in fact a multiplicity. And it’s a multiplicity (and this, for me, was one source of joy) that looks like what we see on the streets of our CBDs, a visual (and all singing and dancing!) representation of how our country actually increasingly *is*, one that’s all too rare.

But, of course, that raises the thornier issue of how to meld all into one, or whether that is at all desirable.

If it’s better to see globalisation and the post-colonial world as producers of a dichotomy between homogenisation and hybridity than as a one way ‘Westernisation’ (and even if you don’t like seeing it that way, it’s a fact), then you have to also confront the forces which mesh everything together. In Theodor Adorno‘s terms, the processes of societalisation, the means by which the plural and the contingent start to become one.

Like many other things, that can either be a positive or a negative. Hairspray represents its final moment of celebration as mediated by love (Amor Vincit Omnia!) on one hand, and commerce on the other. Harriman F. Spritzer, Corny Collins’ sponsor, comes to realise that integration is good for business.

So what we have is a very liberal narrative of racial politics – with its antecedents stretching back at least as far as Adam Smith and other Enlightenment figures’ celebration of the civilising and pacifying power of truck, trade, and interchange. It’s pretty much how Paul Keating used to justify multiculturalism, and in the clipped coin of today’s debate, how the big business side of the ‘immigration debate’ does its thing.

On the other hand, we might be seeing something like Gudrun Axeli-Knapp’s perception of societalisation – “the increasingly irrational dominance of the general over the particular”. That is to say, a homogenisation of love and the dollar mediating equality, and incorporating difference ever more cleverly and insidiously into one cultural and social field. The culture of capitalism demands that everything be the same, even if the colour palette becomes more diverse.

There is no doubt that in addition to the projection of political power, globalisation entails a mixing of populations, driven both by the redistribution of labour around the world and by a partial equalisation of hierarchy, where traditional and nationally bound attributes of status give way to the liquid equality of wealth.

Social relations are just as important, we must remember. In negotiating the everyday, in forming and sustaining intimate unions, in sharing joy and hope, we become the subjects of our own stories, not just the ones commerce and cultural appropriation write us into.

But, and this is one of the things I liked about thinking about the cultural politics of Hairspray, the actuality of the dancing subjects on the stage suggests something real that subverts the narrative, and maybe, just maybe, acts as a harbinger of a *different* form of *equality*.

In a very real way, that form of equality in difference may have already appeared on the historical horizon.

One thing, though, is for certain: it’s not as simple as the re-imagined 60s might suggest. On the other hand, we might be blind to think that change hasn’t already happened. It’s awaiting its moment for someone to dance the new tune into existence. And that change may surface in our imaginations through dancing rather than through marching in the streets.

The post is partly informed by the insights of the French sociologist Bruno Latour on knowledge and, particularly, by his claim that ‘we have never been modern’. If he’s right, and I think he is, there is no public sphere of reason to which we can unproblematically appeal. Rather, we need to ground our arguments in a sensibility which bridges the culture/nature divide, and to recognise that the only possible response to climate crisis is political. That’s a challenge both for progressives, who seem in many instances to have forgotten cultural politics, and for those who believe that reason will triumph. That’s also a belief – and it’s one that will only come true if it’s fought for.

You can read the post here.

After all the brouhaha about the Katherine Wilson/Keith Windschuttle hoax dies down, I suspect the most lasting insight to be derived from all the kerfuffle is that Wilson’s target had already disappeared into a long twilight of irrelevance. For mine, John Quiggin’s point about the saga is among the most telling – Windschuttle’s own credibility on the issue which has been central to the recent stages of his career – Indigenous history – lies in tatters because of his own inability to substantiate the claims he made many years ago now with further research. The biggest hoax, Quiggin argues, is Windschuttle’s own contribution to “the history wars”.

After a number of folks actually had a look at what’s published on Quadrant’s website these days, it’s painfully obvious that there’s very little credibility there to be undermined. Egregious grammatical errors, bizarre rants with scant evidence of an elementary ability to construct a coherent argument, to be sure.

So the other motto we might draw from the hoax affair is that it’s drawn attention to the absence of both standards and relevance in most of what Quadrant has to offer. Now that the mag, and its writers, no longer have their great patron John Howard sitting in Kirribilli, the phrase “paper tiger” comes to mind. Certainly that appears to be evident from this truly bizarre piece just posted on the magazine’s website by Michael Connor, referencing a comment made here at LP by Pavlov’s Cat – “the Left totalitarianism”, “the Left establishment”, “Hatred blows in from the Left”… etc. Perhaps Connor was rankled by his writing being described as “half crazed”. But what can all this hyperbole and nonsense mean, and does anyone bar Connor and his ilk really care? I think he and the rest of Windy’s wingnut stable’s response to the hoax contains an element of schadenfreude. They’ve been rescued – I strongly suspect temporarily – from their own feelings of relevance deprivation. It might have been better, I think, if the windmills had been allowed to fall over of their own accord, without the need for any tilting at them.

Update: Margaret Simons wraps up the reaction to the hoax at Crikey, and Graham Young provides a publisher’s perspective at On Line Opinion.

In a previous post on expectations of whether an Obama win will reshape politics and end the culture wars, I briefly discussed Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland, which I read recently. The title, incidentally, comes from a passage in a speech by Adlai Stevenson in the 1956 Presidential election, when the Democrats played on Eisenhower’s recent heart attack to stir up fears of Nixon becoming President – convinced as they were that attacking the genial Ike himself would be in vain:

Our nation stands at the fork in the political road. In one direction lies a land of slander and scare; the land of sly innuendo, the poison pen, the anonymous phone call and hustling, pushing, shoving; the land of smash and grab and anything to win. This is Nixonland. America is something different.

Perlstein emphasises the dissonance between Stevenson’s claims to high minded political virtue and his own tactics:

The courtly type, he couldn’t campaign directly against a dying war hero; instead he ran against the man who might replace him. And he did it in a singularly uncourtly fashion. He wrote his friend John Kenneth Galbraith, the (courtly) Harvard economist, “I want you to write the speeches against Nixon. You have no tendency to be fair.” Galbraith acknowledged that as a “noble compliment.”

There isn’t much evidence that Stevenson’s “jeremiads” helped his cause much. His loss to Ike in 56 was comprehensive, and its dimensions were greater than those of his first defeat in 52.

In another excellent book on Nixon, in this case on his various images in the American cultural imagination, David Greenberg emphasises that liberal attacks on the Republican’s devilish character tended to backfire. Nixon’s Shadow highlights the genuineness of the identification between Nixon and many voters, and debunks the claims that such identification was nefariously produced by artifice. Artifice is one of the perennial political arts.

For a whole host of reasons, it’s almost impossible to read about Richard Nixon without thinking of John Howard. Just as Kevin Rudd was wise to avoid trashing Howard personally, and Maxine McKew sensibly realised Howard’s persona did strike a chord with many voters, so too it’s sensible of Barack Obama to take the high road in his campaign this year. Doing so isn’t necessarily incompatible with vigorous rebuttals of slurs and slanders. But again, just as an Obama victory would not end the culture wars or bring a new age of enlightenment to political discourse (though it may make some difference for the better), we shouldn’t overstate the degree to which there may be change that we really can believe in. Culture wars and the politics of personality and identification are particularly suited to Presidential systems, it needs to be remembered, and the fact that Americans are voting for their Head of State as well as their Head of Government powerfully reinforces both the politics of personal narrative and symbolism.

That’s why this point from a symposium organised by Henry Farrell on Nixonland is so important:

This makes it quite clear that a Democratic victory on its own, doesn’t mean much, unless there is a consequent or simultaneous shift in basic assumptions about government and the role of policy. It also presents an interesting way of thinking about the questions that Chris raises below. The ‘circumstances’ that politicians and policy makers face aren’t set in stone – they are the result of politicians’ beliefs and expectations. If Obama wins, as seems very likely, do we (as some libertarians, such as Ilya Somin fear) face a substantial increase in the role of the state, and in the willingness of politicians to use political power to redress economic and social inequalities? Or should we expect a more cautious managerialism? The kinds of factors that Paul highlights suggest that the answer will depend both on the willingness of external groups to push for serious ideological changes, and on the willingness (or lack of same) of Obama and the people around him to use the current crisis as a way to remake basic understandings about the role of government in American society.

I’d recommend going beyond the Crooked Timber post and reading the entire symposium transcript.