Unsteady Belongings: Failures to Mob

An exploration of 'unsteady' cultural belonging.

In ‘Unsteady Belongings: Failures to Mob‘, Justine Shih Pearson presents a number of scenes – including from choreographer Jane McKernan’s Opening and Closing Ceremony, and a flash mob that failed to either ‘flash’ or ‘mob’– to think through occasions of cultural belonging that are partial, incomplete or not quite achieved, under a rubric of ‘unsteady’ belonging. Revisiting Benedict Anderson’s (1983) assertion that nation and nationality are the work of an ‘imagined community’, she reflects on what corporeal mobilisations and moves of the imagination these performances offer us, especially in this renewed age of ‘Team Australia’.