Convincing Ground

"Convincing Ground" pulses with love of country. In this powerful, lyrical and passionate new work Bruce Pascoe asks us to fully acknowledge our past and the way those actions continue to influence our nation today, both physically and intellectually. The book resonates with ongoing debates about identity, dispossession, memory and community. Pascoe draws on the past through a critical examination of major historical works and witness accounts and finds uncanny parallels between the techniques and language used there to today's national political stage. He has written the book for all Australians, as an antidote to the great Australian inability to deal respectfully with the nation's constructed Indigenous past. For Pascoe, the Australian character was not forged at Gallipoli, Eureka and the back of Bourke, but in the furnace of Murdering Flat, Convincing Ground and Werribee. He knows we can't reverse the past, but believes we can bring in our soul from the fog of delusion. Pascoe proposes a way forward, beyond shady intellectual argument and immature nationalism, with our strengths enhanced and our weaknesses acknowledged and addressed.

In The Fictions of Translation, emerging and seasoned scholars from a range of cultures bring fresh perspectives to bear on the age-old practice of translation. The current movement of people, knowledge and goods around the world has made intercultural communication both prevalent and indispensable. Consequently, the translator has become a more prominent figure and translation an increasingly present theme in works of literature. Embedding translation in a fictional setting and considering its most extreme forms – pseudotranslation or self-translation, for example – are fruitful ways of conceptualizing the act of translating and extending the boundaries of translation studies. Taken together, the various translational fictions examined in this collection yield new insights into questions of displacement, migration and hybridity, all characteristic of the modern world. The Fictions of Translation will thus be of interest to practising translators, students and scholars of translation and literary studies, as well as a more general readership.

This book applies a novel conflict-based approach to the notions of ‘idea’, ‘concept’, ‘invention’ and ‘immateriality’ in the legal regime of intellectual property rights by turning to the adversarial legal practices in which they occur. In doing so, it provides extensive ethnographies of the courts and law firms, and tackles classical questions in legal doctrine about the immaterial nature of intellectual property rights from a thoroughly new perspective.