...ethnicized hierarchies. In Australia, where post-war immigration policies have produced a citizenry that, proportionally, constitutes one of the largest migrant populations in the world, the maintenance of the political and discursive dominance of the successors of a British settler culture necessitates a constant reworking of the way the nation is imagined. In this context there exists the potential for resignifying practices to emerge which realise different forms of identification, belonging and new political subjects. Here, I intend to examine three feature length documentaries, which have been made with the support of Australian funding bodies over the course of the last decade. These films are all directed by and take as their object individuals who are located on the unstable ground between cultures. Indeed, in each case the directors themselves can be positioned as members of diasporic communities in Australia. Tom Zubrycki's film Homelands (1993), Exile in Sarajevo (1997), directed by Tahir Cambis and Alma Sahbaz, and A Wedding in Ramallah (2002), by Sherine Salama are three award winning documentaries that are concerned with the interrelation of discourses of diaspora and war.

While there are a number of different reasons why individuals and families set off from their homes to establish themselves elsewhere, violent ethnic and political conflict in the homeland, and the hardships brought by war, is often a factor in the movements of population flows. The individuals that people these documentaries come into view through their relationship with the experiences and discourses of war. The project of retelling these conflicts, through the prism of the personal or experiential, as these films do, necessarily brings to bear the frequent disjunctures between official or totalising historical narratives and personal fragmented histories. Just as the symbolism of history is important in times of war, so too are gendered metaphors and their relationship to the mobilisation of nationalist and ethnic ideologies. I intend to explore what kind of subjects, principally what kind of gendered subjects, are articulated in these films. This also necessarily involves questioning the sites from which these subjects speak and these sites are often those manifest as the interstitial spaces that are intimately bound up with the discourses of war; between official history and personal memory, between the public and the private sphere and between the privileging and the disarticulation of national identities. My aim is to question how subjectivity locates itself within these texts, not only in terms of an explicit self-narration within the documentaries, but also in terms of the manner in which these narratives, through modes of documentary enunciation, respond to the demands of identity construction and historical representation.

As texts that engage with the problematic of diaspora the documentaries lend themselves to the refiguring of structures of history, nationhood and subjectivity. Avtar Brah describes a similar potentiality through her use of "diaspora space" as a conceptual category. For Brah this space is the fertile territory across which fields of power intersect:

It is where multiple subject positions are juxtaposed, contested, proclaimed or disavowed ... The concept of diaspora space references the global condition of 'culture as a site of 'travel' which seriously problematizes the subject position of the 'native.' Diaspora space is the point at which boundaries of inclusion and exclusion, of belonging and otherness, of 'us' and 'them,' are contested. (Cartographies 208)

Central to this category is the notion of travel, both metaphorical and actual. The effects of travel and the stories told about journeying are integral to formations of diaspora. The physical and psychical movement between two or more cultures frequently brings into focus tensions of exile and diaspora while also, as Brah notes, drawing attention to questions of location and hybridity. In the three films focused on for this article travel is central both as a device that structures the documentary narrative, and as way of narrating intercultural subjectivities.

DIASPORIC SUBJECTIVITIES

While they may contest established boundaries, I recognise these three films, however provisionally, as particular kinds of Australian texts that reference the specificity of Australian multiculturalism and filmic history. In this respect they negotiate the construction of otherness in ways that depart from previous intercultural narratives of travel within Australian cinema. There has been significant critical debate around films, both fiction and non-fiction, that have been concerned with investigating and representing the cultures that constitute Australia's near neighbours. (1) This debate has questioned the way these representations symptomatically produce an "other" against which a version of "self," or a unified and centred Australian identity, can be constructed. This was often apparent as an essentializing process that served to assert Australia's discursive dominance. The Asia-Pacific region has functioned not only as an object against which collective Australian identity has been delineated and maintained but also as a locus of anxiety about the vulnerability and legitimacy of Australia's national and ethnic boundaries.

The films I am concerned with here, however, are marked by the vicissitudes of a later time and can be aligned with the same processes of nation formation that Graeme Turner describes in relation to the critical scholarship of 1990s Australia. In this respect he observes "a multiplication, not a fragmentation of identity; it was inclusive rather than divisive" (414). Turner is pinpointing a period in the cultural imaginary when multiculturalism was coming to fruition in many spheres in a manner that "provisionalized the construction of national identities" (414), rather than functioning to unify or homogenise them. Yet, he also theorises that since 1996 the attack on multiculturalism from the conservative political arena has seen a gradual redefinition in the politics of identity. This process, accelerated by the global climate and narratives of national security since the events of September 11, has seen a shift towards a newly homogenised, singular nationalism that deems diverse and unassimilated cultural influences as threatening and subversive. While the textual landscape that accompanies this conservative shift is currently in the making, Homelands, Exile in Sarajevo and A Wedding in Ramallah betray a cultural expressiveness that lends itself to the narratives of the time. Spanning the last decade, from 1993 to 2002, these diasporic documentaries can be symptomatically located as bearing the sentiments of the social debate, and its residue, that characterised the 1990s.

If, in the epoch preceding the one described by Turner, outward lookingness was structured by a kind of regionalism, the three documentaries I am concerned with here shift the focus from the Asia-Pacific region to that of Europe, the Middle East and Central America. This represents a move away from defining Australia through its colonial history as a distinct and bounded white settler society in the South-Pacific. Moreover, instead of a unified singular culture, these texts focus on particular subjectivities...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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