Stephen Muecke – författare

Here is a lively, vibrantly illustrated social and cultural history of the Aboriginal Australians, from their origins to the present day. The book explores the spiritual beliefs and Dreamings of the Indigenous people, their complex social structures and relationship with the land, and their struggle to survive the trials of colonization and forced assimilation. It also looks in depth at their massive cultural renaissance over the past four decades, with comprehensive coverage of the way in which Aboriginal art and literature have become flagships for Australian culture.

How might we think and talk about indigenous philosophy? Why has Aboriginal knowledge not been given the status of philosophical knowledge, but treated by whites rather as culture or history? There is a quarrel about whose antiquity is at the foundation of Australian culture, and why contemporary forms of Aboriginality are marginal to Australia's modernity. These are the starting points for the essays contained in Stephen Muecke's original and challenging book.

This volume develops the concepts and methods of Critical Zone Analysis in the South Asia context. Critical Zone Analysis is a new way for the humanities to recompose narratives to do with climate change and other critical environmental problems through literature, the sciences, and science and technology studies. Extending the legacy of Bruno Latour, the diverse contributors in this book demonstrate that scholars of southern Asia have much to offer the environmental humanities during this conjuncture where the modernist conceptual architectures are falling apart under the pressure from threatening future scenarios. Certainties about western versions of progress are challenged in this book not only by material planetary limitations but also by decolonizing assertions about alternative modernities and territorially sustainable ways of life among Indigenous peoples.Part of the Critical Interventions in Theory and Praxis series, this book will be an essential read for scholars and researchers of environmental humanities, climate change, sociology, literature, science, feminism, gender studies, and South Asian studies.

This volume develops the concepts and methods of Critical Zone Analysis in the South Asia context. Critical Zone Analysis is a new way for the humanities to recompose narratives to do with climate change and other critical environmental problems through literature, the sciences, and science and technology studies. Extending the legacy of Bruno Latour, the diverse contributors in this book demonstrate that scholars of southern Asia have much to offer the environmental humanities during this conjuncture where the modernist conceptual architectures are falling apart under the pressure from threatening future scenarios. Certainties about western versions of progress are challenged in this book not only by material planetary limitations but also by decolonizing assertions about alternative modernities and territorially sustainable ways of life among Indigenous peoples.Part of the Critical Interventions in Theory and Praxis series, this book will be an essential read for scholars and researchers of environmental humanities, climate change, sociology, literature, science, feminism, gender studies, and South Asian studies.

As a genre that confounds the distinction between fiction and non-fiction, fictocriticism continues to gain currency. It solves a problem for researchers and writers who do not wish to be held to that somewhat artificial division, and who consider their research methods necessarily to include the stylistic experiments that show their research and thought processes. Research, knowledge of the world, that continues to be ‘written up’, ‘after the fact’ in the usual academic genres, has a tendency to re-inscribe the status quo. The world stays the way it is; change, surprise and experiment elude the writer. Stephen Muecke, one of the originators of fictocritical writing, presents a selection of his best essays in this innovative genre. In doing so he offers a rare and important theorization of the potential of speculative methods across disciplines including Literary Studies, Philosophy, Anthropology, Geography, and Science and Technology Studies.

As a genre that confounds the distinction between fiction and non-fiction, fictocriticism continues to gain currency. It solves a problem for researchers and writers who do not wish to be held to that somewhat artificial division, and who consider their research methods necessarily to include the stylistic experiments that show their research and thought processes. Research, knowledge of the world, that continues to be ‘written up’, ‘after the fact’ in the usual academic genres, has a tendency to re-inscribe the status quo. The world stays the way it is; change, surprise and experiment elude the writer. Stephen Muecke, one of the originators of fictocritical writing, presents a selection of his best essays in this innovative genre. In doing so he offers a rare and important theorization of the potential of speculative methods across disciplines including Literary Studies, Philosophy, Anthropology, Geography, and Science and Technology Studies.

In North-West Australia, between 2009 and 2013, a major Indigenous-environmentalist alliance waged a successful campaign to stop a huge industrial development, a $45 billion liquefied gas plant proposed by Woodside and its partners. The Western Australian government and key Indigenous institutions also pushed hard for this, making the custodians of the Country, the Goolarabooloo, an embattled minority. This experimental ethnography documents the Goolarabooloo’s knowledge of Country, their long history of struggle for survival, and the alliances that formed to support them. Written in a fictocritical style, it introduces a new ‘multirealist’ kind of analysis that focuses on institutions (Indigenous or European), their spheres of influence, and how they organised to stay alive as alliances shifted and changed.

In North-West Australia, between 2009 and 2013, a major Indigenous-environmentalist alliance waged a successful campaign to stop a huge industrial development, a $45 billion liquefied gas plant proposed by Woodside and its partners. The Western Australian government and key Indigenous institutions also pushed hard for this, making the custodians of the Country, the Goolarabooloo, an embattled minority. This experimental ethnography documents the Goolarabooloo’s knowledge of Country, their long history of struggle for survival, and the alliances that formed to support them. Written in a fictocritical style, it introduces a new ‘multirealist’ kind of analysis that focuses on institutions (Indigenous or European), their spheres of influence, and how they organised to stay alive as alliances shifted and changed.

As they set off for Madagascar in 2003, photographer Max Pam and writer Stephen Muecke adopted as their guiding principle the idea of contingency—central to which is the conscious embrace of risk and chance. In doing so, they established a new aesthetic in which image and text are inextricably linked to the notion of possibility. This stunning collection of photos and essays is the result of their vision, collectively illustrating the beauty and wisdom on offer in one of the world’s poorest nations. A contribution to the wave of new ethnography exemplified by Michael Taussig and Kathleen Stewart, these encounters with events, images, and experimental writing dramatize thoughts and feelings in the ongoing construction of place.