New TfC Publications
Read information here on recent publications by Transforming Cultures members.
2008
Virginia Watson
Mining Australia's Northern Frontier. Government, Development and Indigenous People
(2008) VDM Verlag Dr Muller: Saarbrucken, Germany.
ISBN 978-3-8364-8334-6
Mining Australia's Northern Frontier. Government, Development and Indigenous People makes a unique contribution to the understanding of Australia's frontier history by outlining the different political rationalities that have been used to govern the opposition between the commercial exploitation of Australia's land through mining, and its occupation by the original inhabitants. Successive governments have used different kinds of 'political rationalities' aiming sometimes to 'preserve' the Indigenous people, at other times to 'transform' them. Aborigines could be treated as passive objects of either of these strategies, or as active participants. Drawing on the work of Michel Foucault and his analysis of liberal 'governmentality', the book explains how the recognition of Aboriginal land rights and the construction of Aborigines as 'active' citizens remained caught up in a complex interplay of both preservation and transformation, and how this remains a problematic aspect of the government of Australia's Indigenous population today.
2007
Paul Allatson
Key Terms in Latino/a. Cultural and Literary Studies 
(2007) Blackwell Press, Malden, MA and Oxford
Key Terms in Latino/a. Cultural and Literary Studies is a critical reference for researchers, teachers and students working or interested in the important and developing field of Latino/a cultural studies. Comprised of a glossary of hundreds of terms central to this important field - from "AIDS", "Americanization", "Chicano Movement" and "Cultural Imperialism" to the "Monroe Doctrine", "Rap and Hip Hop", "Transculturation", "Tropicalization" and "Zoot-Suit Riots" - Key Terms is of note for representing the interdisciplinary and international nature of Latino/a studies. The book features an introduction that plots the rise and central critical and political concerns of the field, and locates the field in local, national (US), regional, hemispherical (trans-American) and global settings and histories. The book attends to a diverse array of Latino/a cultural productions and genres (literature, film, performance, folklore, music, testimonial, comics, murals, retablos, and so on) and contains an extensive bibliography of critical and cultural studies about US Latino/as, collectively the USA's largest minority population.
Paul Allatson is Head of European Studies, and a Senior Lecturer in Spanish and US Latino Studies at the Institute for International Studies, UTS. The Latino USA Major that he established, is the first undergraduate and graduate degree program of its type in Australia. He is also the author of Latino Dreams: Transcultural Traffic and the US National Imaginary (2002, Rodopi Press).
Tara Forrest 
The Politics of Imagination: Benjamin, Kracauer, Kluge
(2007) Transcript Verlag, Bielefeld
ISBN: 978-3-89942-681-6
The Politics of Imagination: Benjamin, Kracauer, Kluge explores Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer and Alexander Kluge's analyses of the role that a rejuvenation in the capacity for imagination can play in encouraging us to reconceive the possibilities of the past, the present, and the future outside of the parameters of the status quo. The concept of imagination to which the title of the book refers is not a strictly defined, stable concept, but rather a term which is employed to refer to a capacity that facilitates both an active, creative relationship to one's environment, and a proces of mediation between the outside world and one's own experiences and memories.
Through a detailed analysis of their engagements with subjects that span a broad range of historical and thematic contexts (including topics as diverse as literature, children's play, film, photography, history, and television) the book charts the extent to which the concept of the imagination plays a central role in Benjamin, Kracauer, and Kluge's explorations of a mode of perception and experience which could serve as a catalyst for the creation and sustenance of a desire for a different kind of future.
Tara Forrest lectures in Film and Cultural Studies at UTS.
Link to the publisher for purchasing details here.
Jonathan Paul Marshall 
Living on Cybermind: Categories, Communication and Control
(2007) Peter Lang, New York, USA
ISBN: 978-0-8204-9513-2 (softcover), 978-0-8204-9514-9 (hardcover)
Living on Cybermind: Categories, Communication and Control is an ethnographic investigation of the internet mailing list Cybermind which was founded in 1994 to discuss 'philosophical and psychological implications of subjectivity and cyberspace', and is still active thirteen years later. The book follows members of Cybermind through their daily lives on the List, exploring the ways they look at the world, relate online life to offline life, engage in dispute, build relationships, refer to the body and gender, and construct themselves as having 'community'. It is one of the most comprehensive histories and accounts of an internet group ever published and develops a new theory of the relationship between culture, communication and ongoing disputes involving categorisation. Living on Cybermind also shows how online behaviour is shaped by the organisation of communication, and explores how people deal with the paradoxes in resolving ambiguity and detecting 'authenticity' in a situation in which presence is always on the verge of slipping away.
Jonathan Marshall has recently been awarded an ARC QE II Fellowship to begin a project entitled 'Chaos and Information Technology' based at Transforming Cultures, UTS.
Contact Jon Marshall for further information, or link through to Jon's website.
Denis Byrne
Surface Collection: Archaeological Travels in Southeast Asia
(2007) Alta Mira Press
ISBN: 0-7591-1018-2 / 978-0-7591-1018-2 (paper); 0-7591-1017-4 / 978-0-7591-1017-5 (cloth)
Written as a travelogue, Surface Collection: Archaeological Travels in Southeast Asia tackles the most pressing issues of cultural-heritage management in an engaging and accessible way. In each chapter the author makes the past relevant to the present through his encounters with archaeological sites. While the book's anecdotes are associated primarily with Thailand and Indonesia - from a decaying National Museum in Manila, to the search for traces of the thousands of Communists who were killed after an attempted coup in Bali, to the discovery of a bottle of perfume found among the personal effects of Indonesian ex-president Sukarno - they have broad international interest because of the issues they raise. These archaeological stories, again and again, remind us what history both remembers and conceals.
Denis Byrne is Manager of the Research Section, Cultural Heritage Division, Department of Climate Change (NSW). Denis is a long-standing member of Transforming Cultures.
Download a flier for further information on Surface Collection here.
Paul Gillen & Devleena Ghosh 
Colonialism and Modernity
(2007) UNSW Press, Sydney
ISBN: 978 0 86840 735 7
For five centuries, colonialism and modernity have profoundly shaped the cultures of the world. Colonialism and Modernity traces these interacting long-term historical processes, and the parallel history of anti-colonial movements and ideas. It outlines Europe's rise to global dominance since the 16th century, and the attendant modernity that shaped and defined this rise. It investigates the diasporas created by invasions, slavery, indentured labour and voluntary migration and examines how these processes changed the lives of the colonised, the invaders, and of those who remained in Europe.
Devleena Ghosh is Senior Lecturer in Social Inquiry at UTS.
Contact Devleena Ghosh for further information.
Devleena Ghosh & Stephen Muecke (eds.) 
Cultures of Trade: Indian Ocean Exchanges
(2007) Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Newcastle
ISBN: 1-84718-158-9
The pre-colonial Indian Ocean hosted the first global economy and today that history is repeated in the new markets that have developed in the new post-colonial and globalised era - from spices to television. In narrating the cultures of exchange in the Indian Ocean, the contributors to Cultures of Trade: Indian Ocean Exchanges show how culture adds value to commodities and how cultures of trade created the complex of religions, ethnicities and ways of living in and by the sea that is the Indian Ocean.
Stephen Muecke is Director of Transforming Cultures Research Centre and Professor in Social Inquiry.
Devleena Ghosh is Senior Lecturer in Social Inquiry.
