Arena Journal articles from September 2006

Arena Journal archives from September 2006

Do we expect too much from politics?(Editorial)
September 22, 2006... In the last issue of Arena Journal we published a collection of pieces on utopia. At the least, utopian thought means keeping the possibility of a different future open. Far from implying the pursuit of a pre-ordained plan that sees everything...

Australia's legal response to terrorism: where will it end?
September 22, 2006... Up until September 11 2001, Australia had no national laws on terrorism. Political violence was dealt with by the ordinary criminal law. Since then we have passed a litany of new anti-terror laws. (1) In an era punctuated by terrorist...

The Armenian genocide: the moral necessity of remembering.
September 22, 2006... I say to you--he who does not know the truth is merely a fool. But he who knows it, and calls it a lie, is a criminal. Bertolt Brecht, Life of Galileo, Scene 9. On 24 April 2005, Armenians at home and in the diaspora commemorated the...

Donald F. Thomson: scholar, farmer, advocate ...(Images of Aboriginality)
September 22, 2006... In The Savage Mind Claude Levi-Strauss pays tribute to the wide interdisciplinary range of an Australian anthropologist. One 'begins to wish,' he reflects there, 'that every ethnologist was also a mineralogist, a botanist, a zoologist and even...

Mabo in a world perspective: recognizing aboriginal title.(Images of Aboriginality)
September 22, 2006... Peter H. Russell's recent book Recognizing Aboriginal Title: The Mabo Case and Indigenous Resistance to English Settler Colonialism has been a long time coming, but it has been well worth the wait. (1) I met Peter Russell in the mid-1990s when...

Seeing eye to eye: photography and the return of the native in aboriginal Australia.(Images of Aboriginality)
September 22, 2006... When I worked as a curator in the Indigenous Cultures Program at Melbourne Museum in the late 1990s, a number of my colleagues worked on a massive photographic exhibition which was later installed as part of an exhibition called 'Koori Voices'....

Destitute discourses: the art of orchestrating fear and fantasy in photographs of homeless people.
September 22, 2006... During the late 1970s the streets of major cities in Western Europe, the United States, Great Britain and Australia swelled with new populations of homeless people. (1) Identified contributing factors included the effects of economic downturn...

The asphyxia of the image: terror, surveillance and the children overboard affair.
September 22, 2006... Introduction A boat is in peril at sea. So begins many a saga of heroism and rescue, and of tragedy and death. In early October of 2001, just such a saga played out in the waters to the north of Australia, an event which had (and continues...

Time and space, calendars and maps: constituting social being.
September 22, 2006... The god associated with time was a blood-thirsty savage. Kronos, son of Uranus (Sky) and Gaia (Earth), castrated his father to become ruler of the universe during the first Golden Age of humanity. This was the age before humans lived in...

Leo Strauss: the sphinx's secret? Or how we learnt to stop worrying and believe through the 'Hoi Poloi'.(Biography)
September 22, 2006... Just who was Leo Strauss anyway? Is there any chance that he will be born posthumously as himself? A different self than he seemed? Lawrence Lampert, Leo Strauss and Nietzsche. (1) When Zarathrustra was thirty years old, he left his...

Solipsism as cultural condition: some recent Irish examples.
September 22, 2006... In his recent book, After Theory, Terry Eagleton provides a running critique of the dominant neo-liberal understanding of the self. Considering the image of the 'self-willed' individual, he reveals a self-defeating contradiction: To...