Arena Journal articles from January 1 2004

Arena Journal archives from January 1 2004

With sand in their eyes.(Editorial)
January 1, 2004... Within a certain stereotype of development it is somewhat paradoxical that the greatest resource of the Iraqi resistance has been its 'backwardness'. While it has lacked the hi-tech power to kill from a distance, or to call up air strikes...

The end of dissent: counter-terrorism and the politics of repression.(Commentary)
January 1, 2004... 'We have no reason to imagine that things of a serious nature could not occur in Australia. I've said that repeatedly. I hope I'm wrong. I hope it never does happen... But we cannot afford to be complacent.' To say that our Prime Minister,...

War and the future: Iraq one year on.(Commentary)
January 1, 2004... When the US administration first declared the possibility of a preemptive war in Iraq, ostensibly as a response to September 11, the pronouncement seemed both unbelievable and utterly consistent with a certain way of thinking. This dual...

Torture on the road to freedom.(Commentary)
January 1, 2004... Publication of photographs taken by US soldiers of gross ill-treatment of inmates at Abu Ghraib prison raises important questions about the growing use of torture around the world. This is despite the fact that the Convention Against Torture...

Rebranding Australia--in a different light?(Commentary)
January 1, 2004... You feel free in Australia and so you do. There is a great relief in the atmosphere-- A relief from the tension, from pressure, An absence of control or will or form. The skies open above you And the areas open around...

Nation-building and the politics of oil in East Timor.(Commentary)
January 1, 2004... Former capital of Portuguese Timor and of Indonesia's twenty-seventh province, post-independence Dili is a town riven by segregation. The scaling down of the international presence across East Timor has done little to mask many of the most...

'Such a man would find few races hostile': history, fiction and anthropological dialogue in the Melbourne Museum.
January 1, 2004... The recent review of the National Museum of Australia (NMA) addresses the way in which ideas about museums have changed in recent decades. 'The main change,' the review states, 'is towards a conception of a national museum as an institution...

Displaying the Enola Gay, hiding Hiroshima.
January 1, 2004... In 1995, a national, then global furore was whipped up by ideological, cultural and aesthetic conflict over displaying parts and pieces of the then not fully restored Enola Gay. The emblematic components of this B-29 bomber put on display at...

Beyond right and wrong there is a field--I'll meet you there: reconciliation efforts between Israelis and Palestinians.
January 1, 2004... It is not too much to say that the unrelenting media coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian clash which focuses almost exclusively on the bloodshed and carnage has profoundly influenced public opinion regarding the likelihood of peace. The reports...

On Israeli 'Apartheids'.
January 1, 2004... Arising in a variety of contexts in recent years, 'apartheid' has become a common reference point in analyses of developments in Israel-Palestine. The World Conference Against Racism in Durban in September 2001 and the deliberations of the...

Ambiguous nationalism: a reply to Joan Cocks.
January 1, 2004... Misshapen Caliban, come in, come in; Tell me the secrets of your lost Reality, your Pictish origin. White music in the storm is a swan's ghost. Douglas Dunn, 'Sketches', in Dante's Drum-kit, 1993. In Caliban's...

Ironic reversal: writing cultural ambivalence in the works of Franco-Algerian writers.
January 1, 2004... The French experience of multiculturalism differs from that of Australia for many reasons. As Max Silverman has observed, the centralizing, hierarchical nature of French society, in the context of French republicanism, is such that any claims...

The Bible and the Beekeeper's Manual: Raymond Williams and religion.
January 1, 2004... In Politics and Letters Raymond Williams comments, in a symptomatic autobiographical moment, that the only books in his parents' house in Pandy (a home town foregrounded so often in his writings) were the Bible and the Beekeeper's Manual, apart...