The celebration of a Northrop Frye centennial cannot but be bittersweet, given the circumstances surrounding the literary humanities in the twentyfirst century. Everywhere, it seems, the areas of scholarly inquiry that Frye cherished are under attack at colleges and universities, by politicians eager to belittle what they consider impractical or irrelevant fields of study, by corporate interests aiming to maximize one sort of profitability, and by underfunded administrations desperate to balance budgets. The discipline to which Frye devoted so much loving labor, comparative literature, has been among those hardest hit by the prevailing movements to restrict or eliminate academic programs in the humanities. The University of Toronto’s 2010 decision to close the Centre for Comparative Literature, of which Frye was founding director, is perhaps symbolic of this larger pattern. Happily, that decision was reversed, at least temporarily, which may be a hopeful sign. In 2011, what Slavoj Žižek has referred to as “the year of dreaming dangerously,” an apparently utopian spirit animated a number of protests against perceived social, political, and economic injustices. Arguably, the resistance to the closure of comparative literature programs belongs in the same category with such movements as Occupy Wall Street or student protests in Quebec, California, and elsewhere. For, as Frye’s work makes clear, if only in sometimes subtle ways, the utopian impulse animates the study of literature.

In this chapter, I want to examine this aspect of Frye’s work by looking at his slender yet powerful 1964 book, The Educated Imagination, in the context of a critique of advanced industrial society associated with the Frankfurt School of Social Research, and particularly with the critical theory of Herbert Marcuse. A literary theorist perhaps best known for his analysis of the Bible’s “great code” and a Marxist philosopher and sociologist make for admittedly strange bedfellows, and yet both thinkers call attention to the need for a literary and aesthetic education as a means of combatting the alienated, almost mechanistic, “one-dimensional” condition in which members of modern, Western societies find themselves. Although both Frye and Marcuse were addressing the social and spiritual crises of the 1950s and 1960s, their work retains value today. Recent threats to programs in higher education, along with the worldwide financial crisis and the generalized anxieties that have accompanied it, have sparked spirited protests around the globe.

To a hammer, every problem might look like a nail. But who wields the hammer, with what motivating interest and application of craft determines the finish. If international broadcasting is the tool, expectations of its utility and operating principles may strain against one another subject to the varying biases of party politics and ostensible national interest, hard power realpolitik, government-aligned diplomacy, commerce and journalism. Operationally, an international broadcaster occupies a grey zone between practices of overt propaganda and ‘persuasive communication associated with “soft power”’ (Wright, Scott & Bunce 2020, p. 2). So an evaluation of the Australian experience must be set in context of the wider relations of power in which media are situated (Curran 2003, p. 222; Iyengar 1994). This chapter therefore serves as a cross-disciplinary bridging device and conceptual foundation for reappraising international broadcasting in statecraft.

Media and the Creation of ‘Virtual Space’

Those ‘who do not have a presence in the media do not exist in the public mind’, writes Manuel Castells (2013, p. 194). Political actors needing to accomplish things that require public visibility will always turn to the media (Dahlgren 2009, p. 35). Globally, the vast majority of foreign citizens learn about foreign affairs from news media (Golan, Manor & Arceneaux 2019, p. 3) rather than from other forms of outreach (Nye 1990). US studies found that international news coverage had a direct influence on public opinion (McNelly & Izcaray 1986; Salwen & Matera 1992; Semetko et al. 1992; Wanta & Hu 1993). They identified a general but not perfect correlation between the tone of media coverage and public perceptions – especially when the tone was negative. Other research reaffirms that the frequency with which news media cover particular issues can influence significantly what issues the audience perceives to be the most important within a society (Wanta & Alkazemi 2018). From Australia, the task of an international broadcaster communicating for influence involves the added complexity of reaching across unlike sociolinguistic, cultural and political realms in the Indo-Pacific.

An obvious precondition of influence is that the media organisation – the international broadcaster – must function as a ‘transmission belt’ of information resources (Ohnesorge 2019, p. 91). Reaching out from the broadcaster’s home jurisdiction to engage foreign publics and individuals, it must have the technical capacity and demonstrate the communicative values that attract audiences.

On its February 10, 2010 broadcast, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart opened with a satirical monologue in which Stewart explored the possible slogans that a “fake news” program on the Comedy Central television network might use in covering the day’s leading story, a massive snowstorm blanketing the eastern seaboard of the United States. Employing what should be recognized as nonsense words appropriate to such a venue (and, by contrast, words that should be entirely inappropriate for “real news” programs), Stewart begins to introduce the terms Snowmageddon, Snowpocalypse, and eventually Snowtorious B.I.G., only to be cut off each time by clips of other mainstream network news shows—on CNN, NBC, and MSNBC—using those very words. A mock-chagrined Stewart bemoans the fact that mainstream news channels (the “big boys”), with their greater financial and meteorological resources, have usurped what should have been the birthright of comedy writers on The Daily Show.

The humor in this bit, as with similar segments on almost every other episode of the program, derives from the powerful critique of the mainstream media: What is funny about the piece is not so much The Daily Show’s own writing or comedian Jon Stewart’s performance (although these certainly enhance the experience), but rather that the so-called “real news” programs are so ridiculous. To use phrases like Snowmageddon or Snowpocalypse in a serious news broadcast, with real news to cover, should be viewed as unprofessional, if not shameful. But, far from it, such silliness had by now the actual stuff of mainstream television news. Stewart’s fake news is funny because of its trenchant exposure of just how silly real news actually is. As Jeffrey P. Jones has put it, “As a parody of television news shows, it skewers the absurdity and contradictions that pass for ‘news’.” The key point is not that satirical, fake news is taken as seriously as real news (although hard evidence, as well as hue and cry, suggest it is), but that all “news” has become transformed into entertainment-television that no longer bears much, if any, relation to the “real.”

In the past 40 years, many scholars have debated the extent to which European literary, cultural and scientific traditions have been shaped by a rich history of encounter between Europe and the Ottoman-Arab region. In most of these studies, two methodological paradigms framed almost all scholarly engagements with the politics of encounter. The first paradigm I wish to call ‘the hegemony paradigm’. This paradigm is shaped by a postcolonial reading of European literary and philosophical heritage of the past three hundred years. Informed by Edward Said’s Orientalism, which was first published in 1978, the scholarship in this paradigm has shown how many nineteenth- and twentieth-century European representations of the Orient shaped and were shaped by a systemic discourse of power and knowledge, what Said called ‘the enormously systematic discipline by which European culture was able to manage-and even produce-the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively during the post-Enlightenment period’ (Said 2003: 3). The second one I wish to call ‘the displacement paradigm’. Informed by eminent anthropological and sociological works, such as those by Claude Lévi-Strauss (1955) and Clifford James Geertz (1997), studies in this paradigm showed how the act of ‘speaking’ about different cultures constitutes opportunities for negotiating and rethinking dominant debates in one’s own culture. Both paradigms differ on the question of agency, that is, the author, according to the first paradigm, speaks for the Other, whereas he or she, according to the second paradigm, uses the Other in an effort to speak to and on behalf of one’s own culture. Despite the difference in the said approaches, both show how the Other embodies the values and manners which the Self wishes to negate about its own culture: despotism, religious excesses, misogyny and intol-erant attitudes towards minorities. Despite their difference, both paradigms capture the moral tensions involving living in a world teeming with diverse cultural and value systems.

Scholars such as Billie Melman (1992 , 2002), Gerald MacLean (2004), Geoffrey Nash (2005) and recently Katrina O’Loughlin (2018), among others, have complicated these paradigms by demonstrating how European writings about the Ottoman-Arab East revealed complex and diverse cross-cultural attitudes, showing how complex notions of class, gender and nation shaped and were shaped by encounters.

Having established the function and properties of international broadcasting as discursive power, I propose a framework for evaluating its functions, performance and efficacy as a practice of statecraft. A broadcaster’s performance evaluation commonly will include measures of its efficiency and its effectiveness. The question of efficiency is how it applies available resources to fulfil its purpose – for example, the average cost per hour of production, compared with its peers. Efficiency metrics are likely to be of interest mainly to the broadcaster and its state funder. Of more direct relevance to issues of purpose and application here is the degree of effectiveness demonstrated by the broadcaster in attracting and engaging its target audiences in political communication. I argue that the means of ‘power conversion’ (Lee 2011; Nye 2011) remains the central issue when considering the role of international broadcasting and other instruments of statecraft available to a middle or regional power such as Australia. As a democratic exception among the predominance of illiberal states across the Indo-Pacific region, Australia’s challenge is to achieve and maintain ideational relevance through meaningful discourse and exchanges with foreign publics of strategic interest.

The evaluative framework described in this chapter acknowledges but does not rely on ambiguous notions of soft power attraction; rather it considers soft power ‘resources’ (note Nye 1990, 2009, 2011) to be national attributes that constitute a reputational milieu from which foreign policymakers can draw. It does not assume that the ‘universal’ values of the US-led international order are universally lauded, let alone upheld. The framework is more informed by processes of public/audience engagement and discourse power as exercised through agenda-setting, framing and the modelling of norms and values. I emphasise several critical arguments about the role and efficacy of multi-platform international broadcasting. The practice of international broadcasting may be deployed for benign or hostile purposes. At once, it is instrumental and normative as it frames both strategic narratives and the espoused or tacit values of the host state. The properties are affective insofar as the broadcaster must demonstrate appeal and relevance to its target audiences to provide the arena for persuasive communication.

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is perhaps the most famous, most beloved, and most controversial novel featuring a prominent Black character and written by a white author. Extremely popular in its own day and in the decades that followed, Mark Twain’s novel became one of the most holy of the canonical texts of American literature once mid-twentieth-century critics discovered in it the key to the American experience and an uplifting illustration of the American spirit. When the influential critic Lionel Trilling, in The Liberal Imagination, asserted that Huck Finn and Jim formed a “community of saints,” he effectively established the novel as national monument. However, the eupeptic effect of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn on the body politic is not as indisputable as many of its apologists would have it, and during the last forty years controversies have arisen over use of the novel in the classroom, particularly given the frequent appearance in the book of a well-known, and offensive, racial epithet. The story is presented as a meandering and quixotic tale of a poor, white boy and his boon companion, a runaway slave, as they make their way down river, deeper and deeper into the slave-holding South, until they reach a problematic but seemingly happy ending, in which the adventures come to an abrupt end with Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn playing a dangerous game with Jim. It is then discovered that, unbeknownst to both Huck and his companion, Jim had already been set free, and so he was not a runaway slave after all, at which point Jim almost disappears from the text entirely. Twain’s Mississippi River odyssey, with its local color and vaudevillestyled humor, is narrated by Huck himself, who manages to refer to Jim and to all African Americans by one of the most offensive terms in the modern English language, and he does so over two hundred times in a relatively short book. For many readers, particularly in a classroom setting, the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is therefore a work that causes embarrassment, pain, and resentment. As a hypercanonized text, one that has been frequently included as required reading not only in college courses, but also in high school and even earlier, Twain’s 1884–85 novel continues to be a crucial site for discussions of race in the United States today.

With the publication of Donald Campbell’s A Journey Overland to India Partly by a Route Never Gone Before by Any European (1795), British travels along and travel writings about Middle Eastern routes to India had come a long way. Campbell’s travel book was the first of its kind which described an overland journey to India that included a passage through the Low Countries (Holland, Germany and Austria). Almost all travellers who travelled to India overland avoided this route; they preferred the sea route which included a stop en route to the Italian port of Venice; this route was popular because it was quicker, less expensive and offered travellers opportunities to see the architecture, museums and churches of Italy. But there is another reason which makes Campbell’s book different from all previous accounts about the overland routes to India. Campbell, like Irwin, was little concerned about confirming or falsifying what previous travellers and historians mentioned about the region. Rather he was mostly interested in describing his own personal experiences abroad. And while doing so, he, unlike what we saw in Chapter five, received positive reviews in the British press. The Analytical Review recalled the names of some travellers who previously described a large portion of the land in which Campbell travelled, but ‘[c]circumstances may, however, occur’, the paper added, which ‘render personal adventures of a traveller going this route very interesting, and afford much entertainment’ (1796: 355). With the publication of Campbell’s account, travel books had already become less burdened with the question of truth: Campbell wrote his book with the sole purpose of entertaining and enlightening his children. But the book was immensely political: it expressed personal – sometimes contrarian – opinions about some pressing political and social issues of the day.Once it was published, the book enjoyed a huge popularity; two editions appeared between 1795 and 1796.

The 1950 U.S. Senate race in North Carolina was fiercely contested, featuring what even then was understood by many to be the opposed ideological trajectories of Southern politics: that of a seemingly progressive, “New South,” characterized by its support for modernization, industry, and above all civil rights (or, at least, improvements to a system of racial inequality) on the on hand, and that of a profoundly conservative tradition resistant to such change, particularly with respect to civil rights, on the other. The unelected incumbent, appointed by the governor after the death of Senator J. Melville Broughton a year earlier, Frank Porter Graham was notoriously progressive, the former president of the University of North Carolina and a proponent of desegregation. The challenger was Willis Smith, mentor to later longtime conservative senator Jesse Helms, who was himself an active campaigner for Smith in this race. At the time, this election was viewed as a turning point in North Carolinian, and perhaps even Southern, politics, so starkly was the ideological division drawn. The primary election—this being 1950, the Democratic primary was, in effect, the election, since no Republican nominee could possibly offer meaningful competition in November—was remarkably vitriolic, as Smith’s supporters played on the fears of bigots at every turn. (For example, one widely disseminated pro-Smith flyer announced “Frank Graham Favors Mingling of the Races.”) On May 26, a Graham supporter, the idealistic young major of Fayetteville took to the airwaves to castigate the Smith campaign for its repulsive rhetoric and divisive tactics, inveighing:

Decades before “dog-whistle politics” become a de facto political strategy throughout the South (and elsewhere, of course), J. O. Tally Jr. lamented the motives, and no doubt the effectiveness, of such an approach, which had made this the “most bitter, most unethical in North Carolina’s modern history.”

Introduction

As I have briefly noted in the introduction, my discussions in this book might interest readers who work on Animal Studies and Asian Studies. Although the “animal turn” did not appear first in Asian Studies, it seems that this turn has arrived in the contemporary scholarship of Asian Studies. More books and articles on animals in Asia have become available gradually from time to time in the past decade. Beyond America and Europe, more publications in Asia also pay attention to animal studies. At least two journals in Taiwan and mainland China, such as Cheng Kung Journal of Historical Studies 成大歷史學報 and the World History Review 世界歷史評論, organized special issues on animal history. Other special issues on posthuman history also published several articles on animal history. In addition, a publisher in Shanghai is planning a book series on animal history for the first time in the Chinese-language scholarly community. In the meantime, it is equally astonishing to witness the growing interest in Asian Studies in the field of Animal Studies. For instance, the animals and religion group within the American Academy of Religion strongly promoted panels and papers on animals and Asian religions at almost every annual conference. My observations from these conferences suggest that numerous scholars in religious studies have realized that Asian traditions played vital roles in understanding the sophisticated relationships between animals and humans and their implications for shaping our history and future shared with animals. Various animal studies networks in America, Asia, and other parts of the world often included papers and presentations on animals in Asian religions and history or literature.

As a concluding section, this chapter offers my critical assessment of a batch of important publications that have greatly enriched contemporary scholarship in animal studies and Asian studies. These publications particularly illustrate that animal studies is a transdisciplinary trend in Asian Studies that has crossed the traditional boundaries among the studies of history, literature, and religions. I have selected six representative publications to evaluate how the authors combine both new approaches in animal studies and traditional methods of textual analysis and close reading to reveal multiple facets of the cultural, medical, symbolic, and spiritual roles and functions of animals in traditional and contemporary religious, literary, and historical cultures in Asia.

Introduction

In the historical context of ancient China, there was no single text solely devoted to zoomancy, if we understand zoomancy, or divination by animals, as a method of prediction by observing animal behaviors. As a prevalent divination technique in premodern China, zoomancy was popular among both elite and lower classes. However, it was not the primary technique utilized by the royal diviners (taibu 太卜) who served in the court to assist the rulers in making decisions on political and military affairs. It was more common in random events when the elite and lower classes observed phenomena and then associated those phenomena with unusual animal behaviors. The authority of interpreting these unusual animal behaviors did not necessarily reside with professional diviners who held appointments in the court, but rather with any civil and military officials who might know about zoomancy. In other words, unlike oracle bone divination, zoomancy was not professionalized or monopolized by professional diviners in ancient China.

The philosophical and intellectual foundation of zoomancy was correlative thinking, which refers to the ancient belief that natural phenomena were associated with human behaviors and social events. For example, rulers believed that their statecraft and governance were connected with the movements of the cosmos, including various natural phenomena and animal behaviors. If their governance was virtuous, there would be auspicious signs from natural phenomena, and animals would respond with certain behaviors as a verification. If a ruler was about to die or a regime was about to fall, there were bad omens from nature, including unusual animal behaviors.

Zoomancy in China has a long history, which can be traced back to the Spring and Autumn period (771–476 BCE), at the latest. According to Zuo Qiuming’s 左丘明 (556–451 BCE) alleged fourth century BCE Zuo’s Commentary on the Spring and Autumn Annals (Chunqiu Zuozhuan 春秋左傳), in 555 BCE, during a war between the states of Jin 晉 and Qi 齊, Shi Kuang 師曠 (ca. 572–532), a talented musician who served the Marquis of Jin 晉侯, heard the joyful sound of birds and told the Marquis that this sort of sound indicated the withdrawal of the Qi troops.

It seems strange to put it this way, but had Edward W. Said been a Marxist, he would have been one of the most important Marxist critics of his era. In his writings and interviews, he made it clear that he was not a Marxist, and he frequently criticized both existing communism and Marxist literary criticism. And yet, as any reader of his vast and variegated corpus readily discovers, Said’s thought and work is thoroughly infused with Marxist theory, critical practice, and general discourse. His most admired predecessors in literary history include a number of writers who are either self-described Marxists or sympathetic fellow travelers, and his heroes include major figures from a recognizable tradition of Western Marxism, including, notably, Karl Marx himself. Indeed, Said’s writings are filled with references to a veritable who’s who of twentieth-century Marxist cultural critique. And although Said never identified himself or his work as Marxist, many Marxist critics of his own generation and since, not only those engaged in postcolonial studies but also those working in other areas of literary and cultural criticism, have found his work to be valuable to their own. Said’s work thus resonates with Marxism in fruitful ways, and such resonance is worth examining more closely in our present moment of neoliberalism and globalization when critics are struggling to come to terms with the state of humanistic inquiry. Said’s “oppositional criticism,” as he preferred to call it, along with Marxist theory and criticism, remains well suited to analyzing our present situation. The elective affinities between Said’s positions and Marxism suggest productive avenues for critical theory today.

This essay examines Said’s anti-Marxism in the broader context of his distinctively spatial approach to literature and culture, which is tied, in large part, to his affinities toward Marxist theory. While Said does not embrace Marxism as an ideology, methodology, or epistemology, he derives much of the force of his critical investigations and discoveries from a Marxist tradition, drawing inspiration from, for example, Jean-Paul Sartre’s committed aesthetics and politics, Georg Lukács’s narrative theory, Antonio Gramsci’s notions of hegemony and the function of intellectuals, the Frankfurt School’s critique of everyday life, and Raymond Williams’s cultural studies. Understanding Said’s spatially oriented criticism helps to square the circle of his ambiguous relationship with Marxism and locate his quasi-Marxist theory amid his broader sense of oppositional criticism as well as his humanism and democratic criticism more generally.

Introduction

The journey from home to school is one of the most frequent commutes in kids’ life, starting as soon as four years old in many countries. Accordingly, much research has been done in the past decades, addressing various dimensions of these journeys, from pedestrian injuries, to the preferred mode of transportation and their related physical (in)activity, to pollution exposure on the way. Using a case study in Québec, a province of Canada, this chapter aims to better understand the impacts of an active transportation initiative – the Canadian Cancer Society’s (CCS) walking school bus (WSB) programme on families’ daily mobility. The chapter is divided in four parts. The first two look at the literature on the decline of active transportation to school and initiatives to reverse it, including WSB programmes around the western world. The third part presents the results from the case study, while the last section briefly introduces a few insights related to this significant topic: the journey to school as a third space.

The Decline of Active Transportation to School

Although the potential benefits associated with using non-motorised modes of transportation for travel to and from school, walking to school has declined since the 1970s, especially in western countries. In the United States, from 1969 to 2009, the percentage of trips walked or biked to school dropped from 41% to 13% according to the National Personal Transportation Survey data (McDonald et al. 2011). In Toronto, the most populated city in Canada, the walking mode share for school trips declined from 53% to 43% between 1986 and 2006 for children between 11 and 13 years (Buliung et al. 2009). Similar trends were observed in Sydney, Australia, where 58% of younger children (5–9 years old) walked to school in 1971, a proportion reduced to 26% in the 1999–2003 Household Travel Survey (van der Ploeg et al. 2008). More recently, a study in four European territories (Czech Republic, Norway, Scotland and Wales) found stable rates of active transport (walking, biking) to school between 2006 and 2018, a reassuring trend despite variations between countries (55% to 30% on average) (Haug et al. 2021).

Introduction

School routes are paths where children learn, gain independence, forge their identity and interact with other beings – be they human or non-human. Many aspects that determine this journey are of social and cultural nature. But the spatial shaping of the way to school can also prove very significant.

When it comes to the formalisation of school routes in urban environments, attention is generally focused on guaranteeing children’s safety from traffic, at a planning level. This chapter argues that many design aspects also need to be considered to contribute to making this journey not only safe but also enriching and playful. Should the school journey be considered as ‘a third place’ (Oldenburg 1989/1999), it needs to be carefully conceived in its smallest details.

Through decisions regarding metrics, spatial divisions, paving, vegetation, lighting features, urban furniture, building entrances and ground floors, private property edges, city spatial designers – mainly architects, landscape architects and urban designers – can have a radical impact on the way children, and people in general, might experience these routes. Whether conscious or unconscious, every design decision will have a direct effect on future appropriation, by supporting (or impeding) some activities.

Rather than promoting specific solutions, design toolkits or absolute answers, this chapter is an invitation for practitioners to question their design decisions, through the lens of child friendliness and more specifically along the concept of ‘learning on the way’. Admittedly, it is rather explorative than assertive.

The first two parts of the chapter focus on what it is like to walk to school in (European) cities and what can be ‘learned on the way’. The focus then shifts to how design can contribute to enhancing this journey. Four main elements upon which designers have an influence – ground, artefacts, natural features, edges – are discussed. Finally, three principles – polyvalent, equivocal and ordinary designs – are introduced to help designers reflect on the effects of their interventions in terms of autonomous and informal learning on the way to school.