This volume gathers together research by ten scholars engaging with multicultural discourse in Australia and Germany. The term 'polyculturalism' rather than 'multiculturalism' is employed deliberately to re-open a space in which the workings of discourse on culturally diverse societies, both as archive or practice, and as intervention, can be considered in greater depth. The inter-cultural perspective and wide range of disciplinary affiliations exhibited by the essays in this volume contribute to this goal: whereas the majority of discourse analytical work addresses the diversity of speaking positions, as well as the arbitrariness of ascribed meanings, within a historical framework delimited by national boundaries and disciplinary boundaries, the texts collected here transgress this perspective in working comparatively between Australia and Germany.

This volume gathers together research by ten scholars engaging with multicultural discourse in Australia and Germany. The term ‘polyculturalism’ rather than ‘multiculturalism’ is employed deliberately to re-open a space in which the workings of discourse on culturally diverse societies, both as archive or practice, and as intervention, can be considered in greater depth. The inter-cultural perspective and wide range of disciplinary affiliations exhibited by the essays in this volume contribute to this goal: whereas the majority of discourse analytical work addresses the diversity of speaking positions, as well as the arbitrariness of ascribed meanings, within a historical framework delimited by national boundaries and disciplinary boundaries, the texts collected here transgress this perspective in working comparatively between Australia and Germany.

Too often, existing literature has conflated the discourses that enabled the 'War on Terror', ignoring the contextual specificities of the states that make up the ’Coalition of the Willing’. Australia's 'war on terror' Discourse fills this gap by providing a full and sustained critical analysis of Australian foreign policy discourse along with the theoretical synthesis for a specific model of critical discourse analysis of the subject. The language of then Prime Minister Howard is the primary focus of the book but attention is also paid to the language of key ministers, political opponents and other prominent actors. The voices of those who challenged the dominant discourse are also considered to shed light on the ways in which discourses can be destabilised. Kathleen Gleeson shows how Howard successfully invoked narratives of identity and sovereignty that resonated with his audience and promoted his reworked narrative of Australia whilst facing dissent from many actors who voiced their opposition most successfully when they capitalised on inconsistencies within the discourse.

This volume will be of interest to scholars examining the relationship between culture and identity, concepts of individual and group agency in multicultural settings, and the effect that our globalising world has on regional cultural systems and local communities. From Conflict to Recognition: Moving Multiculturalism Forward grew out of research presented at the 3rd Global Conference of Multiculturalism, Conflict and Belonging held by Inter-Disciplinary.net at Mansfield College, Oxford University in September 2009. The conference provided a platform for researchers from diverse regions of the world and a variety of fields to present their work and engage each other on the major cultural transformations and epistemological shifts occurring in the current global paradigm. A unique aspect of the volume is its dialogic structure: each author refers to the work of other authors in the book; thus forming threads through-out the work, which link what are often perceived as unrelated issues. The volume is comprised of thirteen chapters divided into four thematic sections: Rights, Culture and Recognition; Complex Stories of Identity Formation; The Interweaving of Self and Other – Being and Belonging; and Crossing Boundaries and the Language of the Aesthetic.

This book is about the contemporary picaresque novel. Despite its popularity, the picaresque, unlike the bildungsroman, is still an undertheorized genre, especially for the context of postcolonial literatures. This study considers the picaresque novel’s traditional focus on poverty and deprivation, and argues that its postcolonial versions urge us to conceive of as a more wide-ranging sense of precarity and precariousness. Non-linear biography, episodic style, protean identities, unreliable narratives, and abject landscapes are the social and formal aspects through which this precarity is thematized and performed. A concise analysis of these concepts and phenomena in the picaresque provides the structure for this book. What is especially significant in comparison to other forms of postcolonial (post)modernism is that the picaresque does not offer a general critique of a project of modernity, but through its persistent precarity points to the paradoxical logics of capitalism, which are especially nuanced under the conditions of neo-imperialism and neoliberalism. The book features texts by established postcolonial authors such as Salman Rushdie and V.S. Naipaul, but especially focuses on the more recent proliferation of the genre in works by Aravind Adiga, Mohsin Hamid and Indra Sinha.

This book examines proximity as a benchmarked concept that can be deployed across a range of humanities disciplines to rethink the ways in which existences in the world are always already coexistences – and to parse the heuristic, ethical, epistemological, praxeological consequences of this recognition. The volume: - Brings together diverse theoretical approaches and utilizes a range of methodological instruments – conceptual, textual-analytic (whether in the realm of literary or religious studies, or theology or law), archival, digital, sociological or politological; - Includes empirical case-studies that allow calibrated and scaled exemplifications; - Launches forays onto unexplored conceptual terrain, or call into question hallowed truths of scholarly procedure. The volume will be essential reading for students and early researchers in the social sciences and the humanities.

Until deep into the 20th century, empire remained a source of pride for European states and their politicians. The 21st century, however, has seen the unexpected emergence of certain European states apologising to their former colonies. Analysing apologies from Germany, Belgium, Britain and Italy, this book explores the shifting ways in which these countries represent their colonial pasts and investigates what this reveals about contemporary international politics, particularly relations between (former) coloniser and colonised. It is argued that, far from renouncing colonialism in its entirety, the apologies are replete with discourses that are reminiscent of the core legitimising tenets of empire. Specifically, the book traces how the apologies both illuminate and recycle many of the inequalities, mind-sets and ambivalences that circulated at the height of empire. This book will be of key interest to scholars and students of peace and post-conflict resolution studies, memory studies, colonial studies and postcolonial theory. More broadly, it will be of interest to those studying political science, International Relations, sociology and development.

From Bruce Lee to Samurai Champloo, how Asian fictions fuse with African American creative sensibilities

The documentary My heart of Darkness (Sweden 2011) tells the story of a South-African paratrooper returning to Angola: Facing former enemies, he tries to regain mental health and reconciliation. The film marks the stepping-stone for this volume: The contributions examine different facets like the memory-discourse, genre aspects, the use of music, and authentification processes. Several texts discuss these topics in a more general way including other films. Furthermore, some articles are devoted to the historical context, i.e. the Angolan Civil War and the aftermath of this conflict in the cultural sphere.

This collection focuses on different expeditions and their role in the process of knowledge acquisition from the eighteenth century onwards. It investigates various forms of scientific practice conducted during, after and before expeditions, and it places this discussion into the scientific context of experiments. In treating expeditions as experiments in a heuristic sense, we also propose that the expedition is a variation on the laboratory in which different practices can be conducted and where the transformation of uncertain into certain knowledge is tested. The experimental positioning of the expedition brings together an ensemble of techniques, strategies, material agents and social actors, and illuminates the steps leading from observation to facts and documentation. The chapters show the variety of scientific interests that motivated expeditions with their focus on natural history, geology, ichthyology, botany, zoology, helminthology, speleology, physical anthropology, oceanography, meteorology and magnetism.