Working in the Space Between

Stephanie Hemelryk Donald, University of Sydney

Vera Mackie, University of Melbourne

Questions arising from the negotiation of difference are increasingly relevant in all
spheres of contemporary life.1 The processes of globalisation are implicated in the
circulation of finance, capital, commodities, knowledge, information, and cultural
representations, and there are complex circuits for the movement of people associated
with these phenomena. As mobility increases, so encounters with differences of
language, culture, deportment and habitus become more common (Mackie & Stevens, in
press). There are various modes of mobility: permanent migration; temporary sojourns;
tourism; documented and undocumented labour migration; marriage migration; asylum
seeking; and overseas study. In Australia, issues of the negotiation of difference have
often focused on relationships between the descendants of Anglophone settlers/invaders
and newer immigrant communities, or on relationships with indigenous Australians.
Less attention has been paid to the university as a prime site for the negotiation of
difference.

A striking feature of contemporary Australian society, culture and political economy is

the provision of international education, a major driver of the economy and a major
source of foreign exchange. There has been a shift from the scholarship regime of the
Colombo plan (Oakman 2004) to the neo-liberal ‘user-pays’ regime of international

1
We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Australian Research Council Cultural Research Network
(CRN), the Institute for International Studies at the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS), and the
School of Historical Studies at the University of Melbourne, and the encouragement of the CRN Cultural
Literacies Node Convener, Mark Gibson. Particular thanks to Paul Allatson, Editor of PORTAL, for his
engagement with this project throughout, and for his encouragement of this special issue. Thanks also to
the anonymous referees for their constructive comments on the articles in this special issue.

PORTAL Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies, vol. 6, no. 1, January 2009.

‘The Space Between: Languages, Translations and Cultures’: Special Issue edited by Vera Mackie,
Ikuko Nakane, and Emi Otsuji.
ISSN: 1449-2490: http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal
PORTAL is published under the auspices of UTSePress, Sydney, Australia.
Hemelryk Donald and Mackie Working in the Space Between

education in the twenty-first century. Currently well over 100,000 international students
are studying in Australian universities, from undergraduate to postgraduate levels.2 In
2007 James Jupp commented that around 110,000 student visas are issued annually in
Australia, more than the total number for permanent settlement (2007: 204). Thus, for
the current cohort of young Australians and their international student peers (not to
mention academics), universities have the potential to become significant sites for
learning the practices of dealing with difference.3

Several contributors to this special issue focus on the language-learning classroom as

the site for the negotiation of difference in Australia.4 It must be admitted that the
English language still has hegemonic status in language education in Australia, for the
medium of instruction is English (at least at elementary level) and most language
textbooks provide glosses and explanations in English. Nevertheless, the language
classroom potentially enables the relative advantages and disadvantages of students
from English-speaking backgrounds and non-English-speaking backgrounds to be
flattened, or at least their contours may be changed.5 Thus, if the language classroom
does provide a setting for the reflection on, and negotiation of, difference, this is not
simply a matter of learning how to express gratitude in Japanese, or how to refer to a
female professor in French. Rather, and more importantly, the language classroom
provides a space in which the learners’ own assumptions about linguistic and cultural
practices may be de-naturalised. For many learners, the language class is a site for
learning about the multiple dimensions of difference: gender, class and ethnicity, as well
as different varieties of language and its multivalent quotidian uses.

2
In 2003, the AustralianVice-Chancellors’ Committee (now called Universities Australia) reported that
there were 120,522 international students in undergraduate courses, and the total number of international
students in Australian university bachelor, postgraduate coursework, higher degree by research and non-
award courses was 210,307 students. See Universities Australia (2009).
3
The 2009 demonstrations by groups of Indian students about threats to their safety and security in
Australian suburbs have highlighted the responsibilities of host societies that invite large numbers of
international visitors into their midst. See Universities Australia (2009) for responses to this situation.
4
In current terminology, language educators prefer to refer to ‘additional’ languages rather than ‘second
languages’ or ‘foreign languages.’ In Australia, the term ‘Languages other than English’ (LOTE) is also
encountered, but this assumes that most learners have English as a first language. It is even more difficult
to find appropriate terminology in university language classrooms where classes include international
students who may come from diverse linguistic backgrounds, may be proficient in more than one
language, and may have English as an additional language.
5
In the School of Languages and Intercultural Education at Curtin University of Technology, there was
an attempt to capitalise on this diversity by bringing together students in English as a Second Language
programs and students in Asian Language programs for peer mentoring. Each group of students acted as a
resource for their ‘buddies’ in the other program. See Dunworth (2002: 222–28).

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Hemelryk Donald and Mackie Working in the Space Between

In many parts of the world, encounters across linguistic and cultural barriers occur every
day and are taken for granted. In some places there are attempts to codify the terms of
such interaction through explicit policies on language usage. Multiethnic societies such
as Malaysia, Singapore and India have detailed policies to deal with ethnic difference
and diversity. The European Union (EU) has developed as a supra-national organisation
that must operate in many languages; as of 2009, this ‘translates’ into the bureaucratic
convention that the most significant EU documents are made available in each of the
EU’s 23 official languages (Europa 2008). The United Nations also has well-developed
facilities for simultaneous interpreting across the languages of member states.

In the Anglophone settler societies, however, an assumption of English-language

hegemony has papered over the very real linguistic and cultural diversity within the
boundaries of nation-states such as Australia or the USA.6 Australia presents a
conundrum in this respect. Australia is home to a diverse population and has made
pioneering efforts with multilingual broadcasting and such services as the telephone
interpreter service. However, Australian students have been relatively reluctant to
pursue foreign language study.7

There are linguistic and cultural resources in the community that have not been fully
utilised. As Besemeres and Wierzbicka have commented:

Australia is a country rich in languages and rich in bilingual experience. To date, however, this
experience has not been widely shared and a monolingual perspective on the world dominates the
country’s public discourse as well as the private thinking of most Anglo Australians. Bilingual
experience is a resource that until now has hardly been tapped in Australia. (2007: xiv)

The 2006 Census data (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2009) reported that 44 percent of
Australians were either born overseas or had at least one parent born overseas. Of those
born overseas, around a third came from predominantly English-language zones (23. 5
percent came from the UK, 8.8 percent from New Zealand and 2.4 percent from South

6
At one of our workshops, Paul Allatson discussed the 2006 controversy in the USA over a recording of
the US national anthem, the Star Spangled Banner, being translated and sung in Spanish with the title
‘Nuestro Himno,’ or Our Hymn/Anthem (Various Artists 2006). The CD release of the song ignited calls
for English to be formally declared the USA’s national language. However, as Allatson noted, while
many US states can, and have, enshrined English as the official idiom, calls to make English the national
language face numerous legislative obstacles, including the need for a constitutional amendment.
7
Several recent reports have focused on this issue. For example, a 2008 report to the Australian Academy
of the Humanities confirmed that fewer than 10 percent of Australian university students undertake any
study of Languages Other Than English, and that numbers enrolled in language are stagnant despite an
overall increase in numbers of tertiary students (Beginners’ LOTE, 2008: 2). See also the report on Asian
Languages and Studies produced by the Asian Studies Association of Australia (2002).

PORTAL, vol. 6, no. 1, January 2009. 3

Hemelryk Donald and Mackie Working in the Space Between

Africa), suggesting that the majority of the overseas-born come with skills in other
languages. However, 83 percent of Australians say that they speak English at home.
Nevertheless, in Australia there are constant concerns about a language skills shortfall,
and soul-searching about the reluctance of young Australians to study additional
languages.8 The Australian national television channel, the Special Broadcasting
Service (SBS), has served non-English interest groups with news, dramas and feature
films for almost three decades (Ang et al 2008). And, as Andrew Jakubowicz’s web
resource ‘Making Multicultural Australia for the 21st Century’ carefully records,
Australia continues to be a country of change, movement, arrival and return from all
over the world (Making Multicultural Australia 2009). This makes it both surprising and
inevitable that the use of language is hard-won and easily lost in a dominantly English
environment.

All of the contributors to this special issue have reflected on the stakes involved in
negotiating differences in language and culture. In their research and professional
practice they inhabit the ‘space between’: the space between languages, the space
between cultures, and the space between academic disciplines. While many of our
contributors are located in the Australian university system, we also have contributors
from outside that system, as well as contributors who are theorising disparate sites for
the negotiation of difference. The most exciting aspect of the papers presented here is
the ability to move between the spheres of cultural theory and the everyday. Analytical
techniques originally developed for literary and cultural analysis are brought to bear on
the texts and practices of everyday life.

The loci for these investigations include the classroom, the police station, the streets,
local government and the university itself. The practices examined include translating
and interpreting, language teaching, academic writing, literary production and critique,
language planning and small business and shadow economies. The academic disciplines
drawn on include theoretical and applied linguistics, discourse analysis, language
teaching pedagogy, policy studies, cultural studies, literary studies, political science,
gender studies and postcolonial theory.

8
At the time of writing, the most recent contribution to an ongoing media debate about language teaching
and learning in Australia was Sussex (2009).

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Hemelryk Donald and Mackie Working in the Space Between

A major theoretical reference point in this special issue is Homi Bhabha’s notion of the
third space, where a dynamic process of identity formation is possible (1994: 37). As
Bhabha puts it, the third space is an in-between place, an ‘interstitial passage between
fixed identifications [which] opens up the possibility of a cultural hybridity that
entertains difference without an assumed or imposed hierarchy’ (1994: 4). Under
Bhabha’s theorisation, the third space ‘displaces the histories that constitute it, and sets
up new structures of authority, new political initiatives, which are inadequately
understood through received wisdom’ (1990: 211). Bhabha’s theories were originally
developed for the analysis of colonial situations, but are increasingly being applied to
contemporary situations of cultural contact under conditions of inequality. As we shall
see below, linguists and language teachers have also found the notion of a third space to
be a productive one.

Other contributors draw on Mary Louise Pratt’s use of the concept of ‘transculturation.’
Pratt adapted the concept from the writings of the Cuban cultural ethnographer
Fernando Ortiz (1940), who developed the neologism transculturation to describe the
complex cultural interactions between the Spanish- and African-origin communities in
Cuba (Pratt 1991: 523). Pratt also uses the idea of the ‘contact zone—which the
contribution in this issue by Jun Ohashi finds particularly useful—‘to invoke the spatial
and temporal copresence of subjects previously separated by geographic and historical
disjunctures, and whose trajectories now intersect’ (Pratt 1992: 7).

Julia Kristeva’s notion of intertextuality is important to several authors here. Kristeva

characterises textuality as ‘a mosaic of quotations’ (1986: 37), and argues that ‘the final
meaning of (textual) content will be neither original source nor any one of the possible
meanings taken on in the text, but will be, rather, a continuous movement back and forth
in the space between the origin and all the possible connotative meanings’ (1996: 190-
91). This also resonates with Bakhtin’s (1981) theory of dialogism, whereby speakers,
listeners and writers and readers are engaged in a process of negotiation over the
making of meaning. As Celia Thompson explains—in her contribution to this issue—in
reference to Bakhtin’s seminal essay, ‘The Problem of the Text in Linguistics, Philology
and the Human Sciences’ (1986), Bakhtin’s theories are ‘sociohistorically grounded in
the spaces where the boundaries delineating individual ownership of words and ideas
are blurred.’

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Hemelryk Donald and Mackie Working in the Space Between

Some authors use the methodologies of discourse analysis. While Foucault’s (1972)
view of discourse analysis has also been influential in cultural analysis, it is not always
immediately compatible with the kind of analysis undertaken by linguists. As Poynton
and Lee explain, ‘[a] discourse in Foucault’s sense is a body of knowledge, not so much
a matter of language as a discipline … [f]or much of linguistics, on the other hand,
discourse is roughly synonymous with text’ (2000: 6). Fairclough’s view of critical
discourse analysis can provide a bridge between textual analysis, the placing of texts in
their sociocultural context, and Foucauldian discourse analysis. For Fairclough,
‘linguistic phenomena are social phenomena, in that language use is determined by
sociocultural conventions that are underpinned by the power relations underlying the
same conventions. At the same time, language plays a role in constructing, maintaining
and changing sociocultural conventions’ (2001: 19).

Naoki Sakai’s theories of translation provide another important reference point for our
authors. Sakai has referred to the ‘necessity’ and ‘impossibility’ of translation, and
cautions against a naïve view of the possibility of adequate and transparent translation
between languages, preferring to describe the relationship of translations between two
languages as ‘co-figuration’ (2001: x). As he argues:

while social encounter and commodity exchange respectively give rise to demands for
transparency in communication and equivalence in value, they inevitably evoke the
incommensurable in our sociality, and the excessive in equation. Yet the incommensurable and the
excessive cannot be comprehended outside the contexts of contact. (Sakai 2001: ix)

Sakai is alive to the power relationships between languages and even suggests that the
process of translation is one of the very conditions for modernity itself:

Modernity is inconceivable unless there are occasions where many regions, people, industries, and
polities are in contact with one another despite [emphasis in original] geographic, cultural, and
social distances. Modernity, therefore, cannot be considered unless in reference to translation
[emphasis added]. (2001: ix)

With these power relationships in mind, Sakai and colleagues embarked on the
ambitious project of issuing a journal, Traces, that would appear simultaneously in
English, Japanese, Chinese, Korean and German editions, the journal’s remit thus
having the following consequences for potential authors:

to write for Traces is always to address oneself to readers in different languages. When one writes
in one of the languages of the journal, one is simultaneously read in Korean, English, German,
Japanese, one of the languages of China, and still others. Every contributor to this journal is
expected to be fully aware that she or he is writing for and addressing a multilingual audience: just

PORTAL, vol. 6, no. 1, January 2009. 6

Hemelryk Donald and Mackie Working in the Space Between

like a local intellectual under a colonial regime, every contributor is, in a manner of speaking,
expected to speak in a forked tongue. (2001: ix–x)

Sakai’s theories of literary translation and co-figuration shed light on the struggles over
signage in Ashfield, a western suburb of Sydney with a significant Chinese population.
Brett Neilson takes two case studies, from Liverpool Road in Ashfield and Via Sarpi in
Milan, where bilingual signage has been a source of friction.

Behind these controversies is the political economy of mobility in the contemporary

world. It is necessary to understand global processes in order to follow the trajectories
of Chinese migration to Australia and Italy. As Brett Neilson reminds us in his essay in
this special issue, although his investigation is very localised and specific, ‘the issues
regarding dual language signage must thus be analysed with a global regard.’ While
apparently encouraging a recognition of diversity and difference, in these sites the
practices of translation also, however, reinforce the hegemony of two world languages:
Mandarin Chinese and English. The shops and market stalls where encounters between
different peoples take place are, according to Neilson, ‘apart from being a place of
commodity exchange and profit generation, [also] a site of linguistic transactions and
affective relations.’ Neilson links these debates about language to debates about
citizenship, pointing out the paradox of contemporary citizenship: that as citizens we
claim rights which are ‘conceived as universal but also as imposed in a particular,
territorially homogeneous and neutrally bordered, political space.’ Furthermore,
‘debates about citizenship … are focused on universalistic issues such as democracy,
political rights and responsibilities, but now shift to include concerns about culture,
which were formerly confined to the particular.’

Kristeva’s theories of intertextuality and Bakhtin’s notion of the dialogic imagination

help to make sense of neophyte students’ negotiations with academic language and
citation practices. Celia Thompson’s thoughtful essay helps to defuse some of the
anxiety found in prevailing discussions of student plagiarism. The students in
Thompson’s study are working between disciplines, between languages and between
genres. Students taking an Arts degree at an Australian university exist in a
‘transdisciplinary contact zone’ where they must simultaneously learn the practices and
conventions of several different academic disciplines. Following Holton (2000),

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Hemelryk Donald and Mackie Working in the Space Between

Thompson advocates a ‘hybridising rather than homogenising approach to pedagogy.’

She argues that,

it is precisely by learning how to speak through the voices of others that we can begin to articulate
an authoritative position of our own. By engaging with, rather than fearing, intertextual
connections, we can create a dialogic pedagogy for academic writing that enables staff and
students to transcend the notion of plagiarism as simply a lack of ‘academic honesty,’ and advance
our understanding of the politics of text, knowledge and identity formation that characterises the
complexities of the learning and teaching unfolding in today’s university classrooms.

Following Bhabha’s work on the third space and Pratt’s work on transculturation, Jun
Ohashi sees the language classroom as a meeting place. Ohashi traces a shift in the
emphasis of language teaching, whereby the goals ‘have shifted from “communicative
competence,” which aimed at native-level competence, to “intercultural competence,”
which develops a cultural position in order to mediate the learners’ cultures and the
cultures of the target languages.’ Ohashi finds the concept of the ‘contact zone’ to be
‘particularly relevant in Australia, a multicultural society where migration and diaspora
are significant features of the national cultural landscape.’ It is, he argues, ‘a useful
concept for understanding any society where people with different ancestral roots are
living together, and thus negotiating and co-constructing their multicultural identities.’
The contact zone is the place, where, for example, ‘conversationalists negotiate and
develop hybrid cultural forms and identities.’

Ohashi traces the adaptation of Bhabha’s concept of the ‘third space’ by language
educators, such as Pegrum (2008: 137–38), Kramsch (1993) and Crozet, Liddicoat and
Bianco (1993: 13). These authors see the language classroom as a symbolic meeting
place for the exploration of interculturality. Drawing on Liddicoat et al (1999: 181),
Ohashi explains that the ‘notion of the third place where transculturation takes place
helps us move away from the assumption that one language has one culture, and, by
extension, homogeneous and static patterns of behaviour and values. It also challenges
the assumption that where two cultures meet, often in the context of native and non
native speakers’ conversations, the inevitable result will be dissonance, misfit,
miscommunication and conflict.’ Those who have been exposed to contextual
understanding of other cultural ways of communication and world-views, he argues,
have the potential to evolve into interculturally competent communicators who can
embrace differences in cultural orientations and manage interactions with people outside

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Hemelryk Donald and Mackie Working in the Space Between

their cultural boundaries. Ohashi provides pedagogical strategies for achieving these
aims in the classroom as ‘meeting place.’

Emi Otsuji and Chihiro Kinoshita Thomson also see the language classroom as the site
for the negotiation of identities. They ask what it means to promote student identity
construction in another language, and aim for the nurturing of ‘active transcultural
learners.’ Their study necessarily focuses on three aspects of language learning: the
textbook, the teacher and the learner. They are particularly interested in the construction
of gendered identities, and argue that it is not enough simply to analyse textbooks.
Rather, it is necessary to consider how textbooks are used by specific teachers in
specific classroom situations, and how they are received and used by specific students.
They demonstrate that, for students from diverse backgrounds in the Australian
university classroom, learning a language also involves the negotiation of cross-cutting
identities and subject positions with reference to gender, class, ethnicity and language
variety.

Judy Wakabayashi, however, suggests that there are limits to the applicability of the
notion of the ‘third space.’ In her discussion of hon’yaku-chô (a variety of the Japanese
language used for translations) she refers to this variety as ‘the transformative
strangeness within.’ Commenting on the receptivity of the Japanese language, she posits
that ‘This openness toward foreign writing belies the oft-heard criticisms of Japanese
insularity and suggests that at least in linguistic matters the Japanese are receptive to
heterogeneity, even if these imported elements are eventually assimilated and
transformed.’ Wakabayashi argues that hon’yakuchô ‘constitutes a (sub)norm whose
transgressive thrust is not so much to violate Japanese norms as to transform them.’
Translational Japanese, then, ‘is not a space between, but a space within.’ It is a ‘porous
entity whose seepage affects the larger system within which it is located.’

Ikuko Nakane’s research demonstrates the stakes involved in working between

languages. She discusses the role of the interpreter in police interrogations. While
interpreters may in theory be seen as invisible, neutral mediators, in practice this stance
may be difficult to maintain, as is revealed in those cases where communication does
not run smoothly. This has real material effects for suspects in criminal cases. In the so-

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Hemelryk Donald and Mackie Working in the Space Between

called ‘Melbourne case’ for example,9 questions were raised about the role of
interpreting and translating practices in the interrogation and trial of these suspects. In a
profession like translating and interpreting, clear ethical protocols have been developed.
In most spheres of everyday life, however, we are adrift without clear ethical guidelines
for dealing with difference.

The question of ethics also leads us back to questions of citizenship and co-existence
and debates on universalism and particularity. Angela Giovanangeli considers the
question of universalism versus particularity in the French language classroom, pointing
out the gap between official language policy and the classroom, and reminding us that
the French language has disparate varieties from the Metropole to Quebec and New
Caledonia. Like several other authors, Giovanangeli wishes to see the language
classroom as a place in which differences can be negotiated: ‘Teachers may either
contribute to the preservation of normative positions in regard to dominating social
practices, or they may challenge them. In the case of the latter, teachers need to promote
a class environment that encourages a critical and self-reflective discourse for both
students and teachers.’

Cultural production is another important space for the negotiation of difference, and for
finding ways of theorising the space between. Hélène Jaccomard considers a novel by
Didier Coste, called Days in Sydney (2005). This novel is a diglossic text, switching
between two languages, French and English, and without parallel translation. The
potential readers of this novel are a relatively privileged group—those with linguistic
and cultural competence in both English and French. Jaccomard is interested in the
aesthetics of this novel, and its reception in this surprising transcultural contact zone—
bilingual and bicultural individuals in contemporary Sydney. For Jaccomard, this text
‘is a way of exploring the space between aesthetic creation and language, literary
production and reception.’

Such code-switching within one text is relatively unusual in the Australian context, at
least as far as novels are concerned, although there are some examples with parallel

9
The Melbourne case involved some Japanese tourists who were accused and convicted of smuggling
drugs into Australia. Supporters of those convicted allege that there were problems in the interpreting
provided in the case. See Nakamura (2007).

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Hemelryk Donald and Mackie Working in the Space Between

texts in two languages.10 Code-switching between English and Spanish is, however, a
prominent feature of Latina/o cultural production in the USA.11 In this edition of Portal,
we are pleased to include cultural texts, solicited by Portal’s editor-in-chief Paul
Allatson, which feature a complex relationship to linguistic diversity and which
exemplify the theme of ‘working in the space between.’ ‘Diary Inside/Color Local
Crónica’ is an excerpt from Susana Chávez-Silverman’s second book of code-switching
chronicles, Scenes from la cuenca del LA y otros natural disasters, to be published in
2010 by the University of Wisconsin Press. Alejandra Morena and Roberto Milanes’
‘Knowing the Place for the First Time: A Cuban Exile’s Story,’ is an experimental,
personal ethnography that recounts the visits back to Cuba made by a ‘New Zealand’-
resident Cuban, a member of the exiled generation that left the island after the 1959
Revolution. We also have Gabriela Coronado’s ‘Entre Ausencias,’ a letter in Spanish to
the author’s mother about what it has meant to be a Mexican in Australia, relating her
memories, nostalgia and experiences in a new, alien and often incomprehensible
linguistic and cultural environment, one that requires constant translation and generates
constant mistranslations on her part, and on the part of her interlocutors.

The editors and authors of this special issue are also interested in what it means to
inhabit the space between disciplines. The theme of the ‘Space Between’ developed
from a series of roundtable discussions held under the auspices of the Cultural
Literacies Node of the Australian Research Council Cultural Research Network. The
concerns of the Cultural Literacies Node have been described as follows:

This involves understanding the processes through which people make sense of culture through the
specific means and media available to them. It is now a commonplace to argue that we need more
than the traditional forms of literacy: reading and writing. We now need visual literacy and
computer literacy, and the competence to deal with the increasing number of systems which deliver
cultural content to us everyday: the internet, computer games, mobile telephones and so on. The
understanding of these processes is a multidisciplinary project that will involve all the disciplines
involved in the Network.

Mark Gibson, convener of the Cultural Literacies Node of the Network, proposed an
initial discussion on multilingual literacies and cultural studies. A total of three events
were held, two at the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS) and one at the
University of Melbourne, convened by Stephanie Hemelryk Donald and Vera Mackie,

10
See, however, the inclusion of words from other languages in Ania Walwicz’s poetry (1989: 83), and
Sneja Gunew’s discussion of Walwicz’s poetry (1994: 90–92).
11
On the political economy of literary translation in the USA, see Lennon (2008). On code-switching in
Latina/o cultural production, see Allatson (2007: 73).

PORTAL, vol. 6, no. 1, January 2009. 11

Hemelryk Donald and Mackie Working in the Space Between

all supported by the Cultural Literacies Node of the Cultural Research Network. The
initial discussion focused on the following themes:

This forum brings together cultural researchers and those involved in teaching culture through
language, to debate the role of language in literacy as an attribute of international competency.
Presenters will address the role of language in their research, their teaching and more generally in
their engagement with everyday life as Australian academics who support an ethos of
internationalization. The seminar seeks to identify research directions in literacy and cultural
research that speak to the need to identify language-learning and cultural research as
complementary projects.

We were also concerned to examine the Anglocentrism of much research conducted

under the banner of ‘cultural studies’ (see, for example, Sakai 2001: i–x; Chen and Chua
2000: 9). We wished to take up and develop the initiatives of the Cultural Research
Network, building on the work of a growing number of individual researchers and
students whose careers have been centred on the ‘region.’ In December 2007, a
Roundtable on ‘The Cultural Politics of Translation’ was held at UTS. In February 2008
a Workshop on ‘The Space Between: Languages, Cultures, Translation’ took place at
the University of Melbourne. After the final workshop, an open call for papers was
issued, and we were able to add several more papers to the original group for this
special issue.

We are particularly pleased to have these papers published in PORTAL Journal of

Multidisciplinary International Studies. PORTAL has a policy of publishing articles
from diverse disciplines alongside creative writings and artistic works. Portal is also
one of the few international journals that provide a space in which articles and creative
products in English and other languages can, and do, sit side by side.12 This is, therefore,
a very suitable site for reflecting on the spaces between languages, between cultures and
between disciplines.

12
This contrasts, for example, with Traces, for while it publishes editions in several languages, each
translated edition is generally monoglossic.

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Hemelryk Donald and Mackie Working in the Space Between

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