Tea Ceremony

Overland, Tea Ceremony Background This short story relates to my research into problematic sites of meaning for hybrid subjectivity. It draws from from Stuart Hall's ideas around the fluidity of cultural identity and contributes to discourses around cultural appropriation, connecting them with class as well as ethnicity. It is a piece of practice-based research. Contribution In his essay, Cultural Identity and Diaspora, Hall writes that cultural identity...is a matter of 'becoming' as well as of 'being'... it belongs to the future as much as to the past...[and is] subject to the continuous play of history, culture and power...undergo[ing] a constant transformation." Contemporary debates around appropriation do not always consider the cultural negotiation required by certain hybrid subjects. Appropriation assumes fixed categories of cultural identity. This creative work experiments with form - the narrative is positioned between the narrative essay and fiction. This story uses a hybridity of form to test the nature of appropriation in the context of social and cultural power. It is a piece of practice-based research. The story draws from lived experience and the methods of story-writing, including reflection, become my methodology for testing the nature of appropriation. Significance Overland is one of Australia's premier literary journals. It publishes fiction, poetry as well as essays. It is a space where academic and intellectual discourse may take different forms, such as the short story. As such, the journal reaches, in part, my own community of practice. Tea Ceremony is published in the print version of the journal.