Australian Public Intellectual [API] Network

Network Scholars

Understanding History as a Rhetorical Strategy: Constructions of Truth and Objectivity in Debates overWindschuttle's Fabrication

Damien W Riggs
The history of Australia’s colonisation continues to be a contested site, wherein narratives of a ‘civilising mission’ challenge narratives of dispossession and genocide. Such struggles over representation demonstrate one of the key questions Keith Jenkins raises in his work on the discipline of history, namely, whose history counts?1 From this perspective, history may be understood not as an ‘objective truth’ arrived at by those who correctly study ‘the facts’ but, rather, as a meaningmaking practice that privileges certain groups of people over ...
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Network Review of Books

The Destruction of Memory: Architecture at War (2006)

Reviewed by Rosemary Hollow in the May 2006 issue.
The destruction of architecture has regrettably become a regular feature of our daily news, even on the front page at times. We have watched the bombing of the sacred Shiite shrine in Iraq, the bulldozing of Palestinian homes along the West Bank, the demolition of the Bamiyan Buddhas, and the repeated televised images of the collapse of the World Trade Centre towers. Death does not always accompany the destruction of architecture, but the effect can still be catastrophic and long term. The dismantling and displacement of a community, the removal of centuries-old places of worship, means the ... read more.

Devotion (2006)

Reviewed by Marion May Campbell in the July 2006 issue.
For this elegantly constructed and potent first novel Ffion Murphy chooses cyberspace and the hospital corridor for the literally haunting narrative front, off-setting the potential claustrophobia of these spaces by broadly brushed estuary and beach vistas around Perth, Western Australia. The suburban gothic opens in elegiac mode with a backlit idyll underscored by dread -- the family picnic at Mt Eliza is disrupted by a visitation and a portent of loss. The pregnant body of the young mother, Veronica Peterson, is the site of contestation: the baby son will be reluctant to be born; the husband ... read more.

Terror, Culture, Politics: Rethinking 9/11 (2006)

Reviewed by Adam Atkinson in the July 2006 issue.
As Sherman and Nardin note in their introduction to Terror, Culture, Politics, of all the rhetorical, jingoistic gestures and formulas to emerge from September 11, the notion most in need of critique is that '9/11 changed everything' (p 4). Implicit, of course, is the question for whom precisely 'everything' has been altered. The United States, certainly, has discovered its vulnerability, and its security fears have impacted on the international community in numerous ways. Further, many of America's allies, including the Howard government, seem determined to follow Bush's lead in justifying a ... read more.

Sharing Spaces: Indigenous and non-Indigenous Responses to Story, Country and Rights (2006)

Reviewed by Linn Miller in the July 2006 issue.
In regard to sharing stories, spaces and belongings, accounts we are accustomed to hearing in Australia--or want to hear--are often misleadingly simple and one-sided. Sharing Spaces not only succeeds in disclosing and exploring the ground--conceptual, geographical, socio-cultural and political--that connects people to place, past to present and indigenous to settler-Australians, it also acknowledges the complexity of the issues it tackles and respects the multiplicity of their phenomenal expression. Most refreshingly, where and when differing perspectives and understandings exist, and are ... read more.

Deconstructing Sport History: A Postmodern Analysis (2006)

Reviewed by David Rowe in the May 2006 issue.
The discipline of history and postmodern thought have rarely been happy travelling companions, not least in the subdiscipline of sport history. Without wishing to caricature the latter, or discount its honourable exceptions, much of it has displayed the 'reconstructionist na�ve empiricism' (p viii) bemoaned by Alun Munslow in the Foreword to this book. In sport history, furthermore, the easily obtained 'facts' of who played, lost and won have tended to be accompanied by nostalgic, romantic celebrations of its object. This is, then, not an intellectual space generally much given to ... read more.

The Ethics of Waste: How we relate to rubbish (2006)

Reviewed by Lisa McDonald in the May 2006 issue.
I am standing in the local supermarket while renovations are made around me. I scan my list. Things have been moved: shelves, boxes, all kinds of items. Entire walls have disappeared. I stare at grime newly exposed which has set into some type of resin. Its crusty heritage contrasts in silent relief the otherwise polished architecture of supermarket things. A woman walks past and traces the direction of my eye. She winks this at me as I catch hers: 'Tsk'. And all this right here in the aisle of bleach, inside the colony of clean. Waste is nothing if not perverse, I think. I've been reading ... read more.

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