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Departure 20: LEELA GANDHI + MICK DOUGLAS

Leela Gandhi is the author of ‘Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-Siecle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship’ and a coeditor of the journal ‘Postcolonial Studies’ who teaches at La Trobe University.
Mick Douglas initiated and hosts the W-11 TRAM project, is the artist/organiser/editor of ‘tramjatra, imagining Melbourne & Kolkata by tramways’ and conductor of the Cultural Transports Unit at RMIT University.

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Listen:

24 March 2007

Is a global rise in the legal and bureaucratic structures shaping life matched by a loss of personal manners and etiquette in interpersonal relationships? Is the maintenance of strangeness between people integral to finding harmony with difference and a civic ethic? Dialogue between these two strangers departs with faith in friendship between foreigners. The conversation unravels the mutually affirming nature of the guest and host relationship and its broader implications. Guests are not simply recipients of hospitality – they also teach their hosts about this relation of hospitality. Leela finds formal etiquette advantageous. Mick advocates for a lack of overly mannered formality in friendships. Their journey arrives at a shared value for surprise in personal and public life: that friendship allows the surprise enabled by not holding a pre-existing agenda. And a surprise came in the form of a monsoon-like downpour on this Melbourne summer afternoon.

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