Lewis R. Gordon is one of the most radical and important intellectuals of the past thirty years. Along with his intellectual forbearers Sri Aurobindo, Simone de Beauvoir, Anna Julia Cooper, W. E. B. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, Anténor Firmin, Antonio Gramsci, C. L. R. James, Karl Marx, Keiji Nishitani, Edward Said, Jean-Paul Sartre, and el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz (Malcolm X), among an extraordinary array of thinkers, he has not only given to us new theory and scholarship but also, importantly, like them, he has made the role of public intellectual one that any scholar involved with issues concerning the human condition must set as a commitment.
I argue for a reimagining of performed and colonial language in relation to the body and self in the context of Indigenous and Black Existentialism and other colonised groups. Following Fanon and Foucault, I call for transgressive interrogations of language, race and racism of the materiality of colonisation and how one might, colonised and coloniser, begin/continue to practise freedoms under this ongoing oppressive burden of coloniality.
The figure of Melville's monomaniacal captain, who would subdue all the forces of the world to the exigencies of his tormented mind, and who at any rate drives the living community on board the Pequod into oblivion in his obsessive hunt for "his" white whale, would not appear to be the obvious character to introduce a work of political analysis. But in Bruce Jesson's Only Their Purpose is Mad (1999) – the title is a loose adaptation of a line spoken by Ahab – this classic character makes a striking appearance. In seeing the nineteenth-century Ahab as representative of certain problems in our times, Jesson is as much interested in the role and influence of ideas as he is in examining the political causes of what he sees as New Zealand's on-going social ills. And in using this potently emblematic character from Melville's novel to illustrate his concerns, Jesson refreshes the seemingly outdated notion that literature – and the range of ideas generated therein – allows us revealing glimpses into the complex experience of our lives through altering the perceptual light through which we view our social-historical atmospheres. That Jesson's trenchant analysis is political in content and intent breathes vigour into his methods and prompts us be alert to the changes occurring around us. Looking at contemporary New Zealand in the presence, as it were, of the towering figure Captain Ahab, I found myself thinking more and more of John Mulgan's novel Man Alone and how this too, although aesthetically and stylistically opposite to Melville's massive tome, offers an interesting perspective on the present situation.
Once notorious but now largely forgotten, the political idealist and radical John Baxter Langley was typical of the well-educated and ethical Victorians who struggled to create a fairer, more equal society. Through a long and wide-ranging career of political agitation he was a journalist, editor and owner of several newspapers, was prominent in the call for franchise reform, and opposed religious legislation that prevented Sunday entertainment and education for working men and women. Langley was also integral to the founding of a trade union, campaigned for an end to public executions and built affordable housing in Battersea. Internationally, he condemned the Second Opium War, exposed British brutality in India and worked covertly for Lincoln's administration. He was a fellow-traveller for many other key radicals of the day, while his founding of the 'Church of the Future' garnered the support of Charles Darwin, James Martineau and John Stuart Mill. Through a chronological narrative of Langley's activities, this book provides an overview of many of the most significant political causes of the mid- to late nineteenth century. These include electoral reform, feminism, slavery, racism, trade unionism, workers' rights, the free press, leisure, prostitution, foreign relations and espionage. A neglected but important figure in the history of nineteenth-century radicalism, this work gives John Baxter Langley the attention he deserves and reveals the breadth of his legacy.
Until recently, weather talk was an easy filler for any awkward silence. But tragically for polite conversationalists everywhere, the weather is no longer mundane.Especially in summers like the one we just had in Sydney, weather talk has many of us breaking a surprising sweat — and not only from the heat. With climate change a hot-button issue globally (in spite and even because of its lack of mention in national budgets, or erasure from government websites), talk about the weather now has an unavoidably political tinge.
Composting is a material labor whereby old scraps are transformed—through practices of care and attention—into nutrient-rich new soil. In this provocation, we develop "composting" as a material metaphor to tell a particular story about the environmental humanities. Building on Donna Haraway's work, we insist "it matters what compostables make compost." Our argument is twofold. First, we contend that certain feminist concepts and commitments are foundational to the environmental humanities' contemporary emergence. Second, we advocate for more inclusive feminist composting for the future of our field. We begin with a critical cartography of some of the field's origin stories. While we discover that feminism is named or not named in several different ways, what most interests us here is a particular trend we observe, whereby key feminist scholars or concepts may be mentioned, but their feminist investments are not incorporated as such. Following this cartography, we dig into the stakes of these missed opportunities. A failure to acknowledge the feminist context that grows some of our field's foundational concepts neutralizes their feminist politics and undermines the potential for environmental humanities to build alternative worlds. To conclude, we propose feminist composting as a methodology to be taken up further. We call for an inclusive feminist composting that insists on feminism's imbrication with social justice projects of all kinds, at the same time as we insist that future composting be done with care. Sometimes paying attention to the feminist scraps that feed the pile means responding to feminism's own potential assimilations and disavowals, particularly in relation to decolonization. Like both the energy-saving domestic practice and the earlier social justice struggles that inspire it, composting feminism and environmental humanities involves messy and undervalued work. We maintain, however, that it is a mode of scholarship necessary for growing different kinds of worlds.
Nonviolence is an important element of sustainability for three main reasons. One is that nonviolent actions, including Australia's Franklin River campaign, anti-nuclear blockades at Roxby Downs and Jabiluka, northern NSW old-growth forest blockades, and climate actions against coal seam gas and coal extraction, have long been effectively used by environmentalists, conservationists, and preservationists to protect environments from damage and to advocate for more sustainable societies, institutions, systems, and processes. Nonviolent environmental action has also opposed militarism for a range of reasons, one of which is concern about the large environmental footprint of militarism. The third reason why nonviolence is important for sustainability is because it offers an alternative to militarism as a means of national and regional self-defence and the removal of dictatorships, genocidal regimes, and military juntas. This alternative has much lower environmental, economic, and social costs. The article begins with the introduction and methods sections, introduces the 2030 Agenda of the United Nations and 'sustainability' and defines 'nonviolence' and introduces its connection to sustainability. This is followed by the case studies and a discussion of how these nonviolent actions contributed to environmental sustainability. Militarism and its impacts on the environment are described, and nonviolent defence and regime change are presented as viable and less environmentally-damaging alternatives.
The title of this book translates as A History of Tahiti: from its origins to today. Written entirely in French, it is a compilation of essays by eight teachers and researchers. According to the editor, Éric Conte, this volume was inspired by the absence of a concise up-to-date history book of Tahiti and her islands - and therefore is primarily aimed at an audience of teachers and students, as well as the general public. The book spans around a thousand years of history from the settlement of Tahiti and her islands by ocean-going Polynesians through to 2004 which heralded the beginning of a turbulent political period not included in the book. In this review I have translated the chapter titles into English.
The highly contagious COVID-19 virus has presented particularly difficult public policy challenges. The relatively late emergence of an effective treatments and vaccines, the structural stresses on health care systems, the lockdowns and the economic dislocations, the evident structural inequalities in effected societies, as well as the difficulty of prevention have tested social and political cohesion. Moreover, the intrusive nature of many prophylactic measures have led to individual liberty and human rights concerns. As noted by the Victorian (Australia) Ombudsman Report on the COVID-19 lockdown in Melbourne,we may be tempted, during a crisis, to view human rights as expendable in the pursuit of saving human lives. This thinking can lead to dangerous territory. It is not unlawful to curtail fundamental rights and freedoms when there are compelling reasons for doing so; human rights are inherently and inseparably a consideration of human lives. (5)These difficulties have raised issues about the importance of social or community capital in fighting the pandemic. This article discusses the impacts of social and community capital and other factors on the governmental efforts to combat the spread of infectious disease through the maintenance of social distancing and household 'bubbles'. It argues that the beneficial effects of social and community capital towards fighting the pandemic, such as mutual respect and empathy, which underpins such public health measures as social distancing, the use of personal protective equipment, and lockdowns in the USA, have been undermined as preventive measures because they have been transmogrified to become a salient aspect of the "culture wars" (Peters). In contrast, states that have relatively lower social capital such a China have been able to more effectively arrest transmission of the disease because the government was been able to generate and personify a nationalist response to the virus and thus generate a more robust social consensus regarding the efforts to combat the ...
This article uses the lens of evolutionary economic geography to consider adaptive capacities and forms of social resilience that manifest in rural, primary commodity-dependent regions in the face of structural forces to which such regions seem predisposed. Using a case study of Kangaroo Island, South Australia, the article explores the demographic and social impacts that a sudden and dramatic commodity market collapse in the 1990s had on this rural economy and community and on its regional development. During late 2017 and early 2018, semi-structured interviews were conducted with six representatives of the Kangaroo Island business community, including those from the farm, tourism, and small business sectors (three interviews) and from local government (one interview), as well as with a former rural financial counsellor and the former Commissioner for Kangaroo Island. Although the collapse of the wool market and of a flawed managed investment scheme for agroforestry had dramatically negative impacts on local economic and social systems, the Island's subsequent demographic recovery and Islanders' ongoing commitments to their sporting clubs both point to considerable adaptive capacities and social resilience. The research highlights what can be achieved by people with high levels of place attachment and commitment, as individuals and as collectives also able to draw on support scales beyond the local.
On the 22 December 1849, Bell's Life in Sydney, reported on the arrest of Amelia Beard for the crime of public drunkenness. Described as a "young lady … known to the police as a keen shaver," Constable Halliday, initially "found it necessary to remonstrate with her on the impropriety of her conduct," but when she responded with "a volley of abusive language against him, accompanied with a pantomimic exhibition of talons and legs, which left most remarkable notice of her visitations upon his person," she was promptly arrested and charged with "with being excessively drunk and disorderly in one of the main streets of the metropolis." Beard's arrest for drunkenness was one of thousands made by the New South Wales police that year and she herself was arrested close to a hundred times during her life for minor offences including drunkenness, vagrancy, obscene language, minor assault, receiving stolen goods, robbery, damaging property, and prostitution. But understanding this incident - or the offence of drunkenness in general - as simply a crime fails to do it justice. This kind of policing was merely the formal expression of a much broader contest over public order in which the offence of drunkenness had a symbolic role. As I argue, we can use the concept of deviance to help understand Beard's arrest and read the policing of drunkenness as a crucial form of modern urban social control. This chapter uses the history of a particularly common but often neglected crime - public drunkenness - in a specific jurisdiction and period - mid-nineteenth century New South Wales, c. 1840-1860 - to argue for the critical importance of the concept of deviance to the emerging field of historical criminology. Throughout this period public drunkenness was the most common cause of arrest in New South Wales but notwithstanding its prevalence, only a tiny fraction of those who became publicly drunk were ever arrested, and for most of them their punishment was a small fine. At the same time, drunkenness was an intensely politicised social ...
Requiem for a Beast: A Work for Image, Word and Music by Matt Ottley (2007) is an Australian mixed-media text for young adults that intertwines the myth of Theseus with the story of a boy's coming of age in the Australian Outback. Told through paintings, fragments of graphic novel, diary entry, spoken memories, dreams, and song cycle, it takes young readers into a series of physical, emotional, and historical labyrinths. Physically, the labyrinths appear in the Australian landscape, a place of sweeping beauty but also hot, bare, and threatening (to non-Indigenous people). Emotionally, the labyrinths appear in the boy's backstory: a troubled childhood and a broken relationship with his father. They also appear in the complex history of Australian colonization and the damage done to the Indigenous peoples of the country by colonial settlers and governments. As the boy goes into those labyrinths, he becomes a modern Theseus. He encounters a Minotaur formed by generations of trauma: the trauma visited on the Australian Aborigines and the generational guilt of settlers' descendants. The boy (who as an everyman figure remains unnamed in the book) must face the Minotaur and conquer it in order to begin the process of healing the wounds of the past: his own, his father's, and those of the Aboriginal figures in the book - an elderly Bundjalung woman who was stolen from her parents as a child (through a system of institutionalized racism) and an Aboriginal teenager who was killed in a moment of casual cruelty by a friend of the boy's father. The connected stories of different generations of White and Black Australians interweave with the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur to form a politically charged and deeply felt work, showing the power of young adult fiction to take on difficult subjects and to help young readers negotiate labyrinths of their own.
While the vulnerability of natural resource-dependent rural communities and regions to environmental, technological, and market-based shifts and shocks has long been recognised there has also been recent appreciation of the fact that more remote, non-metropolitan places can and do thrive in neoliberal spaces and times. Drawing on the notion of related variety, itself an offshoot of evolutionary economic geography, this paper examines the factors that best explain the relative robustness and adaptiveness of Kangaroo Island, South Australia, economically, in the face of a severe market and regulatory crisis. Based on semi-structured interviews with local farmers, other representatives of the local business community, and key members of local and State Government and regional development agencies this paper argues that Island producers' dedication to overcome the region's isolation, together with their commitment to quality, niche and value-added products carefully tuned to export markets, has been a key element of this success. Local spillovers within and between sectors and firms sharing cognitive proximity have also been fundamental in fostering production, processing, marketing, and logistics innovations. This case study demonstrates how the local farming sector was brought into a new direct relation with major international markets for food and fibre, based on the Island's developing global reputation for high quality, high value produce. It underscores the capacity of local scale businesses to develop innovative market strategies and to combine efforts in order to form broader networks that 'jumped scale' and ensured their farming business success and, crucially, their ties to the land.
What we wear signals our membership within groups, be theyorganised by gender, class, ethnicity or religion. Simultaneously our clothing signifies hierarchies and power relations that sustain dominant power structures. How we dress is an expression of our identity. For Veblen, how we dress expresses wealth and social stratification. In imitating the fashion of the wealthy, claims Simmel, we seek social equality. For Barthes, clothing is embedded with systems of meaning. For Hebdige, clothing has modalities of meaning depending on the wearer, as do clothes for gender (Davis) and for the body (Entwistle). For Maynard, "dress is a significant material practice we use to signal our cultural boundaries, social separations, continuities and, for the present purposes, political dissidences" (103). Clothing has played a central role in historical and contemporary forms of political dissent.
The material introduced here is a re-working of a chapter from my monograph, Dangerous Memory in Nagasaki: Prayers, Protests and Catholic Survivor Narratives, Routledge (2019), which discusses the symbolism around water and a 'cry for water' in the aftermath of the atomic bombing. Dangerous Memory in Nagasaki is a collective biography of twelve survivors of the Nagasaki atomic bombing, including nine Catholic survivors in which I employ a 'political theology' as framework to interpret the survivor narratives, showing that their memory upholds the historiography of Nagasaki as distinctive from Hiroshima. Survivor testimony subtly subverts the notion that the atomic bombings made Japan a victim, as Catholics were already victims of prejudice and persecutions carried out by the magistrate on behalf of the Tokugawa and Meiji authorities. Their memory is also dangerous to dominant Catholic narratives which argue that the atomic bomb could be understood as providential, and I argue in the book that survivors are angry, dispelling a common perception that Nagasaki Catholics show passivity, exhibiting no sense of resistance, and therefore lack agency.
