Editorial

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The Spring issue is comprised of essays submitted in response to an open call for papers. The present issue, "Confrontation, Conflict, and Negotiations of National Space," is of this kind. Each Fall, Xchanges presents a proceedings from the Wayne State University American Studies Program's Y|X Conference, held annually in March. We hope you enjoy this issue of Xchanges and look for the proceedings in the coming months.

Our three authors in Issue 2.2 demonstrate the global constitution of the Xchanges journal and our goal of creating an online space for engaged interdisciplinary exchange. This exchange transgresses physical, intellectual, and generic borders in the interest of opening up a discourse on current issues in literary and cultural studies. The essays in this issue are "The National Encroachment Upon Community Space: Recent Australian Decisions in Indigenous Rights to Natural Resources," by Johanna Gibson, "Exporting the Garden City: Imperial Development and the English Character in John Bull's Other Island," by C. Brook Miller, and "Ireland's Carthaginians and Tragic Heroines," by Astrid Van Weyenberg. The three essays address the theme "Confrontation, Conflict, and Negotiations of National Space" in dynamic ways and ways very different from each other. Yet, by reading the three essays together, strong global concerns regarding the constitution of theorized national identity and legitimate spaces of inclusion in a national ideological consciousness emerge.

Gibson's essay is concerned with indigenous peoples' land rights in Australia and the necessity for the development of concepts "of community beyond the physical attachments to place." Western legal practices, as evidenced throughout Gibson's study, continually oppress indigenous peoples via the hegemonic power of the judicial system and conceptions of legitimate attachment to land and resources. A national identity, particularly identity tied to land, needs to be opened up in an inclusive, indeed community-based, manner. Such a tactic would potentially allow for a degree of self-determination not only in regards to place but more importantly to conceptions of indigenous community identity. As Gibson writes, "the concept of community must be developed beyond a nostalgic or sentimental visualization of the group within a place." For indigenous community rights to emerge, the continued hegemony of Western conceptions of "connection to land" must be reevaluated.

C. Brook Miller also engages questions of national identity as tied to land. Miller discusses George Bernard Shaw's John Bull's Other Island as an "interrogation of English and Irish national stereotypes with a discussion of land development policy in Ireland." Miller shows that John Bull's Other Island is a "deconstruction of a Liberal version of the English 'national character.'" The focus of the play for Miller is the question of land and the relationship of capitalist land development to Irish national identity. Questions of efficiency, tourism, national autonomy versus colonial subjugation, and land use resound throughout Shaw's play; Miller feels that Shaw delivers an incisive discussion of the "Irish question" as vitally linked to land use. Yet, even for Shaw, no "absolute truth claim," as Miller writes, can be proposed because "visions of land development," whether Irish or English, "provide no certain route for Irish independence."

Astrid Van Weyenberg's essay "Ireland's Carthaginians and Tragic Heroines" continues the discussion of Irish theater and Van Weyenberg offers an analysis of three Irish playwrights' attempts to offer a forum, through the Field Day Theater Company, for Irish cultural unification. Van Weyenberg writes that classical frameworks are utilized by contemporary Irish playwrights as analogies for the cultural, and political, situation in present-day Ireland. As Brian Friel's Translations shows, classical references, and the weight of the mythic specter of Rome, Greece, and Carthage, serve as useful modes through which a playwright might reimagine Ireland and its negotiations over national identity, unification, and the history of colonialism. Yet, importantly, the traditional role of Ireland as colonized female site (or body) is disengaged, at least temporarily, in the dramatic space of the theater. This is especially true of Frank McGuinness's Carthaginians. Parodically, in McGuinness's play a Derry mother becomes the figure invested in violence rather than the stereotypical site of conquest or symbol of "sacrificial martyrdom." Rather than concentrating on Aeneas, McGuinness's play concentrates on Dido and reconfigures Dido as a "different kind of 'queen,'" in fact an "energetic and creative gay man" whose role in the play serves to, as Elizabeth Butler Cullingford writes, "[queer] the gendered binary that constructs colonizers as male and colonized as female." Van Weyenberg makes the point clear that not only do such plays posit a cultural unification of Ireland with, at least dramatically, classical lineage and precedent, but this new national space will in fact allow for a female role that defies "conventionally male authority."

We hope you enjoy Issue 2.2 of Xchanges. In the interest of facilitating continued discussion of concepts of national identity and space - and the conflicts and crises that often ensue as a result of negotiations of identity and space - we present these three essays. Space is both physical and conceptual, and conflicting ideologies regarding use of space generate disruptive, often violent, confrontations. Creating opportunities for negotiations of space in text, whether this text is a written law or a performed play, frequently calls for a reevaluation of ideology and the forthright disruption of a hegemonic social order. Disputes over land (and land use) are foundational in the construction of national identity - in Ireland, Australia, the Unites States, and elsewhere. The essays here demonstrate that the "national subject" is physically tied to and defined by the land on which he/she resides, individually and communally. However, the "legitimacy" of national identity (and land) claims is often based on access to text and the continued privileging of certain kinds of text (written) over others (oral).

Please look for Issue 3.1 of Xchanges in the Fall. The issue will be a proceedings from March 2003's Y|X Conference, "Towards the City of our Dreams: Reading the Urban Landscape of Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow," and will be comprised of selected conference papers. The Call for Papers and the theme for the next open issue of Xchanges (Issue 3.2) will be available in November on this website. Thank you for your support of Xchanges and the Y|X project.