Progressive culture since 1954
The danger lies in seeing Trump or Brexit as an aberration, rather than a reaction to and by-product of liberalism. The received wisdom is that liberalism is somehow virtuous and inherently good. But this formulation makes it impossible to understand why politicians saying openly fascistic things are garnering wide support in supposedly principled liberal democracies.
There’s a difference between campaigns and campaign tactics: one is a war, and the other a weapon. Their inability to generate an equal amount of protest on both Avid Reader and Allen & Unwin’s Facebook pages shows that MRAs are incapable of campaigns, and will always be outnumbered by the people fighting back.
At the same time, the arts are struggling in an environment of reduced funding, static operating grants and straitened private giving. Institutions work within increasingly fixed parameters: the dimensions of a gallery or a stage; the production requirements of a tour; the marketing schedule of a festival; the presentation slots of a symposium; the artform categories of a funding body. ‘We loved your content!’ enthused a colleague after my talk at their event. ‘That’s not “content”,’ I replied, ‘that’s expertise.’
Whether you’re an emerging writer or you’ve been around the traps for a while now, Overland is sure to have an opportunity for you.
The site’s slick GIFs and lack of advertisements tells visitors that this is Serious Journalism. Why, then, does the investigation rely upon the tired tropes of ‘Reds under the Beds’ and the ‘Yellow Peril’ to sow fear regarding the influence of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in Australia?
To be ‘burnt out’ suggests that one was alight in the first place, when in fact, the six months prior to finally admitting to myself that I was not fit to work were characterised by a marked absence of vitality usually associated with fire. After only four years of teaching, I felt less like a too-short wick end and more like the smoke that trails after: diffuse and aeriform.
An autonomous project of this scale comes with its own particular politics and tensions, of course, as people attempt to build new systems and ways of living and being while opposing outside forces. Finding ways to manage these tensions, and not be overwhelmed by these forces, will be even more critical in the coming months, as the new Macron government sets its sights on resolving the issue of the airport, and by extension, the ZAD.
Grenfell Tower shows that to understand class and power, we have to understand housing, because the question of how and where people live is right at the heart of modern capitalism.
This $20,000 prize encourages artists and writers of fiction, poetry and essays to be part of setting a new agenda for Australia. Winning entries will be published in a special Fair Australia supplement in Overland 229, to be launched in Melbourne in early December. Entry is free.
Women in cinema have had their moments, but it’s mostly white men who are always pushed to the fore. In recent years, though, there has been something of a return to women – a gesture towards a different, perhaps kinder, cinema, and a gesture towards women as a whole (as subjects and audiences).
So how are refugees who have been resettled in the community, as well as those endlessly waiting for their claims to be processed, coping? Can we put these coping mechanisms under the umbrella of ‘resilience’? Wouldn’t this merely provide us shelter from our own affective discomfort? Refugees in precarious conditions are not being served by the discourse of ‘resilience’ that is employed by both sides of politics to sell the idea that certain kinds of migrants are more socially and economically beneficial.
What these examples demonstrate is that, far from reflecting a politically neutral position, the accusation of politicising something is in itself political, a kind of ‘nothing to see here’ that obfuscates rather than clarifies the true nature of the issue at stake. Not unlike ‘political correctness’ – a term that took off at about the same time – its main utility as a pejorative lies in its virtual meaninglessness, giving its users a way of avoiding a problem they’d rather not confront.
What is most alarming, and consistent, about these attacks is the focus that white nationalists and right-wing terrorists place on targeting houses of worship, whether mosques, synagogues, prayer rooms, Sikh temples or Black churches. Hate crimes are, of course, opportunistic, but it is worth examining why places of worship are represented more highly than other public spaces.