Book Review: UnAustralian Art
Rex Butler and ADS Donaldson, UnAustralian Art: Ten Essays on Transnational Art History (Power, 2022)
Reviewed by Darren Jorgensen
Rex Butler and ADS Donaldson, UnAustralian Art: Ten Essays on Transnational Art History (Power, 2022)
Reviewed by Darren Jorgensen
Contributors: David Roberts, Rob Shields and Nicholas Hardy, Thembisa Waetjen, Johan Trovik, Eduardo Enríquez Arévalo, Lorenzo Veracini and Dan Tout, Loïc Wacquant and Dieter Vandebroeck, Jonathan Fardy, Zeger Polhuijs, and Peter J Verovšek
Nancy Fraser, Cannibal Capitalism: How Our System is Devouring Democracy, Care, and the Planet – and What We Can Do about It (Verso, 2022)
Reviewed by Christopher G. Robbins
by David Roberts
Peter Beilharz captures this ongoing process of exchange, fed by the flow of people, goods, capital and ideas between the old and the new worlds, between metropolitan centre and open frontier in terms of cultural traffic. Cultural traffic in turn can be understood both in the direct and wider sense as translation. As the act of relocation, transformation and recreation, translation epitomizes the idea of supplementarity and in turn the question of identity. In the following, I shall be thinking with and against Peter’s thinking of the Antipodes with the idea of translation in mind.
A Discussion with Alastair Davidson, Andrew Wells, and Peter Beilharz
What’s the fuss about Gramsci? Or, how is Gramsci still relevant today? Gramsci remains an influential, if not auratic figure for marxism, critical theory and cultural studies, including the postcolonial. Ideas like hegemony have become standard, alongside Fordism, historic bloc, interregnum, the Southern Question and so on. Yet our worlds have changed substantially since Gramsci developed this vocabulary in the thirties; and the question of how Gramsci should be situated, Italian or Sardinian, and interwar, may be less exercised.
Jurgen Habermas, A New Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere and Deliberative Politics (Polity, 2023)
Reviewed by Peter Beilharz
Book launch of “Toward the Blues”
Peter’s observation of cultural traffic in 1970s Australia refracted through the prism of a singular cultural artefact: the album Toward the Blues, released by Melbourne blues band Chain in 1971.
Christina Morina, The Invention of Marxism – How An Idea Changed Everything (Oxford University Press, 2023)
Reviewed by Peter Beilharz
The Photographs of Zygmunt Bauman, edited by Peter Beilharz and Janet Wolff (Manchester University Press, 2023)
Reviewed by Eric Ferris
Zygmunt Bauman, My Life in Fragments, edited by Izabela Wagner (Polity, 2023);
Zygmunt Bauman, History and Politics, edited by Mark Davis, Jack Palmer, Dariusz Brzezinski and Tom Campbell (Polity 2023).
Reviewed by Peter Beilharz
by Julian Potter
Thirty years separate Peter and Zygmunt, another thirty separate myself and Peter. These are generational spans, time enough for considerable changes that challenge traditions. Through my story, I would like to suggest that the refounding of intellectual traditions on friendship, instead of, and sometimes in spite of institutions, or enframed goals such as politics, is one of Peter’s gifts to his postmodern students and those who have met him along the way. Another is the vital question for scholarly endeavour: ‘Is it interesting?’ And for me, the love of books.
by Margaret Somers
I fell in love with Peter the first time I met him, at an American Sociological Meeting, sometime in the late 1980s, I think. This was, of course, love Beilharzian-style – not the amorous variety but an intimacy of shared political intellectual practice. The ASA was a fitting place to meet as it was one of Peter’s most fertile sites for his Beilharzian love assignations.
Review Essay: The Posthumous Bauman
By Matt Dawson
2023 saw six new books by, and about Zygmunt Bauman published. 6 years after his death, these texts were part of an emerging body of literature we may call The Posthumous Bauman. I explore the key lessons this literature has offered and suggest there are four key themes: our increased knowledge of Bauman’s life and its link, or not, to his sociology; the role of the hinterland for the sociologist; the increased interest in Bauman’s lifelong sociological project before he came to Leeds; and the differing receptions of Bauman’s work.
by Howard Prosser
This is a tale of friendship. Or, more accurately, it’s a reflection on how a friendship based on a few meetings can amount to a lot. I am sure many of us have had a version of this experience. The friendships made during a stint living elsewhere. Or those incidental meetings and interactions with someone at infrequent events which, though it never quite blossoms into something more, we can still define as friendship.
Chris Finnen Band, Live in Lockdown 2020 (DVD, self produced, 2021)
Reviewed by Peter Beilharz