A Hungry Public: Stranger Relationality and the Blak Wave

Abstract

Proposing a democratic politics based on a common love of public things currently threatened by neoliberal privatization—from parks and libraries to public broadcasting—Bonnie Honig draws on Hannah Arendt and D. W. Winnicott to envisage a public realm characterised not by identity and exclusion but by collaboration, relationality, creativity, and resilience. This chapter responds to Honig’s proposition that a democratic holding environment enables resilience when it recognises the generative power of public things and allows them to flourish. It asks what factors have enabled a Blak Wave of Indigenous film and television production to flourish in Australia in a decade when public screen culture and public broadcasting have been subject to ideological attacks and regular funding cuts. Drawing on Michael Warner’s concept of stranger relationality, it focuses on performative media texts that address a public hungry to know more about Aboriginal Australia. It identifies modes of resilience in public performances of Aboriginal personhood, and it analyses templates of stranger relationality in The Darkside (Thornton, The politics of public things: Neoliberalism and the routine of privatization. No Foundations 10. http://www.helsinki.fi/nofo/NoFo10HONIG.pdf. Accessed 6 Jan 2015, 2013), an anthology of ghost stories performed by Indigenous and non-Indigenous actors.