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189: WESTERN CIVILISATION … AND OTHER GOOD IDEAS
ISBN 978-0-9775171-6-9
SUMMER 2007
launched 21 November 2007
The ease with which the rhetoric of progress (democracy, secularism, gender equality, etc.) has been enlisted into the barbarities of the Iraq occupation confirms for many a sense of Western civilisation as entirely oxymoronic.
Yet there’s more to say on the question than this. Though September 11 catapulted Samuel P. Huntington’s slogan about the ‘Clash of Civilisations’ into everyday usage, the notion of a world battle between the West, on one side, and Islam, on the other, obscures the much more important struggles inside these supposedly monolithic blocs.
Overland 189 explores, in various ways, the contradictions of Western society, a civilisation that has both oppressed and liberated, where unimaginable wealth exists side-by-side with cruel poverty and the culture industry simultaneously produces artefacts of stupefying banality and incredible profundity.
In the final Overland lecture for 2007, Ramona Koval discusses the importance of narrative in providing meaning for our lives and our culture.
Liz Conor looks at what the Northern Territory intervention says about both Western and Indigenous civilisations, while Mary-Ellen Stringer describes her own complex navigations between black and white worlds: “I wept and wept, with hope, relief, gratitude and something like wonder. The irony of a white woman at the turn of the century hiding her children with an Indigenous community was not lost on me.”
Kevin Foster re-examines the famous attempt to establish a utopian colony in Paraguay and teases out what it says about Australian then and now.
“Clive Hamilton is perhaps the only prominent political writer in Australia today arguing that there’s something fundamentally wrong with society as a whole,” notes Tom O’Lincoln. “More than that, Hamilton dares to speak of liberation.” O’Lincoln’s article teases out the strengths and weaknesses of Hamilton’s vision of a different world.
Olga Olenich describes the perils and pleasures of instructing the unruly tech kids of class 3F–K. “English! Now there’s a subject you want to be teaching in a flimsy portable classroom stuck out on a dry paddock away from the main buildings like some stinking outhouse.”
Shane Cahill reveals how the Right-wing think-tank the Institute of Public Affairs came under investigation for subversion during the Second World War, while Jeff Sparrow looks at what happens when history becomes a matter of performance
Plus stories from Jennifer Robertson, Kaye Watson and Jeremy Fisher, poetry, reviews and more.
Enquiries to JEFF SPARROW or
KALINDA ASHTON on 03 9919 4163
or email overland@vu.edu.au or jeff.sparrow@vu.edu.a
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