REGISTRO INTERPRETATIVO

Thinking with this biological concept focuses on movement, changing position and penetrability. It is the movement of water molecules passing through tiny holes or small particles moving through a synthetic material that has a passage in it. Furthermore, a semi- permeable membrane only allows certain types of particles to move through it under certain

conditions. For instance, particles can move fast, slowly or even remainstatic on each side of

the membrane depending on concentration, pressure and temperature at any given time (Lopes, Ibaseta & Guichardon, 2016; Waugh & Grant, 2010). When particles or water molecules move from a region of higher concentration to a lower concentration through a semi-permeable membrane, osmosis takes place. When particles move from a region of higher to lower concentration and continue until the substance becomes uniform, then diffusion is said to have taken place.

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Fig. 15: Diagram showing cell membrane29 _{and permeability}

Semi-permeable membrane

Closed ion channel Permeable membrane [space]

Movement of ions

Accessed space

Impermeable membrane /[space]

Permeable membrane

Cell membrane

Semi-permeable membrane/[space]

To understand how African Australians, negotiate identity and belonging within contested spaces such as Australia, this study explores the role of an excitable cell membrane in

generating signals. Cell30, the smallest organic unit of life employed charged particles or

molecules in building a passage across the cell membrane. Ion or particle channels are pores [space] that allow certain charged particles to cross the membrane. However, to cross the cell

29 _{The cell membrane is a thin flexible layer around the cells of all living things [including plant and animal cell].}

It is sometime referred to plasma membrane or cytoplasmic membrane. The basic job is to separate the inside of cells from the outside. The diagram in Fig 15 is my idea but built on Waugh, A., & Grant, A. (2010). Ross & Wilson anatomy and physiology in health and illness E-Book. Churchill Livingstone: Elsevier.

30 _{Cell in Biology is the basic and smallest structural, functional and biological unit of all living organisms. As}

infinitesimal as cell could be, they can replicate independently, and they are often called the “building blocks of life” (Waugh & Grant, 2010).

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membrane, different orientations occur whenever the cell membrane regulates what can cross the membrane and what stays on only one side, making it a selectively permeable membrane. In a situation where the ions interact, the side chain in the pore [space] will have been charged, and this is called electrochemical exclusion, indicating that the channel pore is charge-specific. There is another situation called size exclusion, which is a principle of selectively allowing ions or charged particle through a channel based on their relative size and orientation. Some charged particles cannot pass through the pore [space] without assistance, while other charged particles can go through unaided because they possess active transport pumps with action potential. In addition, the electrical state of the cell membrane can have several variations called membrane potential. A potential is a distribution of charge across the cell membrane, which can be measured in millivolts (mV). However, a [slight] difference in charge occurs right at the membrane surface, both internally and externally. It is the difference in this very limited region that has all the power in neurons and muscle cells to generate electrical signals including action potentials.

In this analogy, the ions or particles could represent the African Australians. The diagram above simply represents the possible experience of the participants. The Australian society is largely fraught by division and acceptance under certain conditions, a situation which either permit un/restricted movement and expression from the young people. The diagram showing permeability of ions in cell membrane could account for the condition through which the young people negotiate their identities and impermeable space that is hinged on the notion of exclusion. Furthermore, just as some charged ions/particles cannot pass through the pore without assistance, so are some of the participants in need of aid to access and negotiate their identity and belonging in Australia.

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Interstitial space is an in-between space that re-introduces new cultural possibilities. From this in-between space, individual experience metamorphoses, through a combination of past and present experience, into hybrid identity. It is through the hybrid identity or “mixed-ness” that individual such as former African refugees reconstruct their identity, establish connection and introduce newness into the fragmented world. Little is known about the action potentials of African Australian who fall within this interstice.

Bhabha (2012) took this concept further and argued that it is in the emergence of the interstices, which is otherwise known as the overlap and zone of displacement that the articulation of cultural differences takes place. In other words, through the articulation of cultural differences, individuals’ institutional location and collective experiences of nationness, (nationality), community interest, and cultural value are negotiated. For building a connection through culture in virtual space, I turned to André Malraux, a French art historian, philosopher and cultural politician who believes that the transformation of a work of art changes based on the meaning given to it in a museum, and that inclusive notion of art comes with everyday issues or experiences.

In raising this idea, it becomes irresistible to consider practical issues such as liminal space, the workings of the interstitial space (a space between the past and present), ambivalence and entanglement of matter and meaning. For instance, Malraux suggests that the diverse nature of

artistic practices, works and styles are without limitsof meaning once exhibited in a museum

(Battro, 2010), such that it is difficult to put every single artistic work into a single museum. Thus, Malraux came up with a dialogue of art history to take place within the musée imaginaire, the imaginary museum or ‘the museum without walls’. Focusing on this terminology, it means if ideal dialogue or conversation about cultural connection must take place between the society,

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such as Australia and the participants of this study, then it must take place within and beyond the musée imaginaire, an ideal compilation of lived experiences.

The concept of third space emanates from hybridity theory, which refers to combination or mixture. The idea of this third space establishes that individual draws on numerous resources of identifiable cultural viewpoints to make a meaning of their world, a concept that constitutes their identity. Bhabha’s (2012) writings about hybridity offer some possible avenues to disrupt essentialist thinking regarding national imaginings and national narratives, but also points to a way that can explain, or articulate, multicultural amalgamation. The “social articulation of difference by the minority [African Australian] is … complex” (Bhabha, 2012, p. 3). So, too,

is the re/construction and negotiation of cultural practices within the interstice, seeking to

sanction and authenticate cultural hybridities that take place during historical transformations.

It is within the interstitial space that historical transformation of cultural hybridities takes

place, especially the articulation of such culture and the act of negotiating the emerging difference. Bhabha argues that these differences “can be re-inscribed through the conditions of

contingency and contradictoriness that attend to the lives…”(2012, p. 3) of the former refugees

or through questioning the national habitus. The re-inscription of these differences by the

African Australians is an alley through which negotiation of identity and sense of belonging in Australia is evaluated.

In other word, just as “habitus is an enigmatic concept” (Maton, 2014, p. 48), which is neither a result of free will, nor predetermined experience that is decided by structures, so is the interstitial space. It is created by some form of interaction between the two ideological position of the past and present experiences, and it is envisioned to go beyond binaries that shape ways of experiencing and living the social world. This means that each encountered experience is both revelatory and inexplicable for the young people. But remains a sociological scaffolding

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on which the subsequent experience can be built. Significantly, this experience is an on-going encounter, and one that never resolve the ways of seeing the social world.

The lived experience and process of getting to Australia assists in understanding how these students are shaped and what this means for educational success. This is because, arguably, these students inhabit three spaces. The first of these is the domestic field that includes the family and community. Second is the field of public engagement including school and other forms of public participation such as sporting groups or clubs. Finally, a third space the young people occupy that is a hybridised one. This investigation will bring to fore cultural identity issues for these students. Bhabha’s idea of ‘border-line’, which could be argued as the difficulty of handling increasing levels of cultural complexity, the doubts, and concern that often accompanies, is explained by the conception of the ‘third space’. This will assist in the knowledge of how cultural complexities influence the identity construction or formation and the re-negotiation that accompany such complexity.

Walder (2011) expounded on the postcolonial identities that are entangled and appear threatened. Residual colonial anxieties continue to shape and question individual personalities involved in the conflict associated with the global movements of people (refugees) and it results in a ripple effect. Critically, I recalibrated the question put forward by Hall and Du Gay (1996), which underscores the significance of the essay, which explores questions of cultural identity. There has been a discursive eruption in recent years around the concept of “identity and/or belonging” because it has been subjected to a searching critique. The question generated is whether these concerns puts identity under erasure or not.

The question “who am I?” assisted this study in constructively and audibly describing cultural identity and its contexts. The early 21st century saw a paradigm shift in the struggle for identity and recognition with the challenge of the hegemonic socio-economic politics of greed, leading

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to increased injustice while the inequality gap remained the status quo. However, beyond the status quo and for the microcosm of this thesis, I will dwell on how the forces of the outside shape the inside, because the experience of the emerging artists is a prototype of conflictual relationship, always in the middle ground of difference.

In conclusion, this section has employed Bhabha’s concepts and theory to investigate the eclectic nature of the young peoples’ cultural identity within the interstices. In their negotiation of cultural difference, reconstruction of identity by making connection to the nation (Australia)

emerged as an indispensable pathway to establishing newness. The connection, however,

occurs through an interstitial space or what I called a permeable space and it is from such

spaces that the African Australians negotiate cultural difference.