The Changing Space and Speed of Dissident Politics

Introduction -

    Woe to us!  Hail to us!  Globalisation Has Arrived...

    The contraction of distances had become a strategic reality, said the French philosopher and urbanist Paul Virilio twenty years ago (1977:131).  the corresponding negation of space, he emphasised, carries with it incalculable economics and political consequences.  Virilio's observation are more pertinent than ever at the turn of the new millennium.  We are, in many ways, witnessing a revolution in global relations, comparable to the fundamental impact of changing mass transportation in the nineteenth century and means of telecommunication in the twentieth.  We are ....

Indigenous People and Politics at the Millennium

Introduction -

    Indigenous-European relations of the past millennium have a clear but grim shape.  Only in the last decades have "first world" countries like Australia shown any promise that the new millennium will be any better.  Meanwhile, global market appetites threaten indigenous peoples and population growth repeats our patterns of direct and indirect dispossession.  The patterns and prospects are outlined below.

"Here's Lookin' at You": Video Surveillance and the Interpellated Body

Introduction -

    The image started out from hundreds of newspapers around the world: two children and a toddler walking through a shopping mall, one of the older toddler boys holding the toddler's hand.  Captured on security video, the boys could have been the toddler's brothers, escorting him back to his guardian, or giving a hassled parent a few minute respite.  But the truth was altogether more chilling; the toddler was two year old Liverpool boy, James Bulger, and the older boys, then aged 10, were convicted of abducted and murder (Young 1996:89).  As shocking as this crime was, it is not my intention in this article to discuss the issue of juvenile crime.  Instead ....

The "Battle of Seattle" Globalisation and its Discontents

Introduction -

    The concept "globalisation" has for some time had a healthy life in academic circles.  Disciplines such as sociology, education, cultural studies, economics, political science and geography have all generated their fair share of textbooks and scholarly articles on the subject.  But more recently the term is frequently found in newspaper, television talk show and popular books on business management and global economic forecasting.  It also turns up in the speeches of politicians of every political shade, from Labor Party pundits such as Mark Latham and the free-market rhetoric of John Howard's Liberal Party, to down-home red-neckery of Pauline Hanson's One Nation.  Anxious governments also spend sums ....

The Beach: A Tale of Two Freedoms

Introduction -

    Approaching the Beach

    This essay is a reading of Alex Garland's 1996 novel, The Beach.  It also charts the making of a file (based on the novel) in Thailand, the place where the story is set.  The essay is also a tale of two freedoms: 'negative' freedom and 'positive' freedom.  The Beach and the way it was made into file, show how longstanding and potentially problematic western cultural values with regard to freedom become manifest in both cultural and economic practices today.  It is not that culture doesn't change, but that, as time 'moves on' we bring certain key cultural values with us and adapt and apply them to cultural practises in new ways.  Ultimately, the appeal to deeply enculturated values of negative freedom in the case of The Beach, is complicit with the continuation Western colonialism in current-day forms