A Toplitology of mourning

In this essay, I stage a reading of a suburban, diasporic site of mourning, the Pedavoli shrine, in terms of its political resonances and effects. Taking my cue from Derrida's work on mourning, I argue that the Pedavoli shrine must be read as site that places in crisis a series of binary oppositions that accrue around questions of diasporic, self-representation and ongoing assimilative regimes of power: private/public, kitsch/art, person/political, guest/host. In the process, I map the diasporic practices of memory in terms of their spatialised transpositions and their contestations of dominant uses of suburban space in the contemporary Australian context.