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Keywords: Mythology

  • AUSTRALIA

    White defensiveness in Morrison's Cook gaffe

    • Rachel Woodlock
    • 24 January 2019
    13 Comments

    What do Indigenous and Muslim Australians have in common? They are the foil against which normative White Australian identity is contrasted. The latest group to join them are African migrants, subject of a new campaign of fear. Because the stories we tell ourselves can change, one day there might be one that honours all of us.

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  • ECONOMICS

    We need to redefine exclusion

    • John Falzon
    • 21 January 2019
    22 Comments

    Inequality is not an aberration that comes with neoliberalism. It is the foundation of neoliberalism, along with its partners in social crime: patriarchy and colonisation. As Sharan Burrow, the Australian General Secretary of the ITUC, puts it so poignantly: 'We live in a fragmented world.' The excluded form the majority across the globe.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The trouble with JK Rowling

    • Eleanor Harrison-Dengate
    • 26 November 2018
    5 Comments

    This is the first time so many characters with major screen time have been from diverse backgrounds in a Harry Potter film. But it’s not enough to just plonk them into an already bursting script.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Karl Marx would find no home in modern China

    • Mark Hearn
    • 21 May 2018
    15 Comments

    On recent the bicentenary of Marx's birth, Chinese President Xi Jinping declared that the Communist Party 'has combined the fundamental principles of Marxism with the reality of China's reform and opening up'. In reality China's economic system bears no resemblance to the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism advocated by Marx.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Parliamentary troll alert

    • Brian Matthews
    • 23 March 2018
    4 Comments

    In Iceland, the most recent 'troll alert' was only 50 years or so ago, and belief in the mythological troll dies hard. What is interesting to consider regarding the revenant troll of the internet age is where they are congregated. Michaelia Cash's recent outburst suggest we might look no further than our Federal Parliament.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    At St Brendan's

    • Grant Fraser
    • 15 January 2018
    7 Comments

    On days like this, with blisters of tar already softening on the road, the nuns would curdle in the heat, shifting their stays by habit; sometimes, a bead of sweat would tempt their brows. Cooped in our desks, we steered our wilful pens over acreages of white pages.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Existentialism and sexism in Blade Runner's future

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 11 October 2017
    3 Comments

    So considerable are its strengths that Blade Runner 2049 is a future classic, to be discussed and dissected for decades. That it will become so while blithely reinforcing the primacy of the white male gaze in popular culture is to be regretted.

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  • MEDIA

    Storming the pixels: New frontiers of race activism

    • Tseen Khoo
    • 05 September 2017
    5 Comments

    There's storming the barricades, and there's storming the pixels. Critical race activism in the 21st century can take on fascinating forms. A great recent example of this is the destruction of Confederate monuments in the United States, and the debates and actions surrounding these events. They generated larger conversations about culture wars and re-ignited the cycle of argument around historical authenticity, heroism and - dare anyone say it these days? - truth.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Citizenship changes make a new enemy of the migrant

    • Catherine Marshall
    • 24 April 2017
    16 Comments

    Australia has long had a successful migration program, and the country's economic success is proof of this. So when Turnbull calls a press conference to impart the news that 'membership of the Australian family is a privilege and should be afforded to those who support our values, respect our laws and want to work hard by integrating and contributing to an even better Australia', he is making a redundant point. The vast majority of migrants and new citizens already do this.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Washed in Thomas Becket's blood

    • Earl Livings
    • 06 February 2017
    4 Comments

    Narrow, pointed arch entrance, low vaulted ceiling, stone and wood panelling - here four murderers walked over 800 years ago to rid their king of a meddlesome priest. Amidst singing and candlelight at Vespers, Thomas Becket stood at the Cathedral altar, knowing the armoured knights were coming: 'Here I am, not a traitor of the King, but a priest. Why do you seek me?' After their clamouring and brandishing of hatchets and axe, he knew his fate, bent his head in submission.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    New nationalist myths entrench white denial

    • William Scates Frances
    • 11 May 2016
    13 Comments

    Dismantling white myths about history is a positive step, a potential pin in an ethnic nationalism which lingers here. Yet these posters pop up often not in bastions of that denial, but rather on walls across Western Sydney, in suburbs whose demographics hardly tell tales of fortresses of white privilege. It seems that, less than a project to dismantle white myths about history, the popularity of these stories is more an attempt to bring non-white Australians into a new myth in the making.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Modern Islamophobia echoes murderous anti-Semitism

    • Jeff Sparrow
    • 30 October 2015
    7 Comments

    Invoking Joseph Conrad's story about seagoing doppelgangers, 'The Secret Sharer', Edward Said identified Islamophobia as anti-Semitism's respectable twin. Indeed Israeli PM Netanyahu's description of the Mufti urging Hitler onto greater evil contains an echo of the old anti-Semitic canard of Jews as shadowy manipulators. This trope is central to the infamous Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, was a key element in Goebbels' propaganda campaigns, and is now central to contemporary Islamophobia.

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