Imagined Destinies

Australians once believed that the Aboriginals were doomed to extinction. This study explores the origins and the gradual demise of the doomed race theory, seeking to show that white perceptions of Australia's indigenous people were shaped by Enlightenment, Darwinian and other European concepts.

Book Summary Dreams, Imagination, & Destiny, A Poetic Journey, is a far-reaching anthology of poetic thought. Lisa Moreno takes her readers on an odyssey through many poetic paradigms. Her first section, Thought Provoking, takes the reader through poetic waters that challenges the reader to think about the world of fantastic possibilities. From Mental Highway to Undisclosed Invasion, you will be held in deep thought and suspense. Her second section, Beyond Space and Time, is simply that. You'll be in a time machine going back to the beginning or continuum of eternity through poetic doorways. You'll go into the farthest reaches of space where time is of no consequence. Timing's Will and Eternity's Door are poems that will ask the reader to stop and ponder concepts generally perceived as beyond scope. What's a book of poetry without a little Humor & Farce? There's a laugh tucked away in each of the poems presented in this section. I'm Still a Size 6 and Smooth and Shiny are two poems that many people can relate to. These poems are intended to have us all laugh at our own distortions and illusions. Primal Instinct is a section that moves the reader into the jungle of sensual cravings. Humanity has animalistic elements to its makeup and enjoys natural hungers. You'll move through the corridors of temptation, lust, and bodily greed. Naked Thirst and Rapture are two poems that will parch the mouth. The next section, Inner Knowing, sweeps you into a vortex of your primordial self and ushers visions of angels and shadows. Proud Tree of Life, Journey and Dancing Angels are just a few of the poems that are food for thought in this section. The Spirit Within, mixes inner convictions and the spirit world. The Source of Life, Your Wish Come True, and Tired of it All play to the inner spirit. Last, but not least, is the section entitled Dissolving Walls. Poignant poetry dealing with racism, bigotry, and poverty are dealt with here. "We, way too often, ignore the lost, downtrodden, homeless people walking our streets." "Inner city gangs have members barely old enough to know any better brandishing dangerous weapons." As well, wars have defined history as being waged primarily over religious conflicts." 1939, Colorblind, Murder in the Street, and Life on Skid Row are some of the wrenching and moving poems in this section. It is the author's attempt to assuage the hatred, anger, and ignorance that divides people. "Dissolving Walls needs to be understood else civilization, as we know it, will just be another chapter in the book of humanity."

Manifest and Other Destinies critiques Manifest Destiny?s exclusive claim as an explanatory national story in order to rethink the meaning and boundaries of the West and of the United States? national identity. Stephanie LeMenager considers the American West before it became a trusted symbol of U.S. national character or a distinct literary region in the later nineteenth century, back when the West was undeniably many wests, defined by international economic networks linking diverse territories and peoples from the Caribbean to the Pacific coast. Many nineteenth-century novelists, explorers, ideologues, and humorists imagined the United States? destiny in what now seem unfamiliar terms, conceiving of geopolitical configurations or possible worlds at odds with the land hunger and ?providential? mission most clearly associated with Manifest Destiny. Manifest and Other Destinies draws from an archive of this literature and rhetoric to offer a creative rereading of national and regional borders. LeMenager addresses both canonical and lesser-known U.S. writers who shared an interest in western environments that resisted settlement, including deserts, rivers, and oceans, and who used these challenging places to invent a postwestern cultural criticism in the nineteenth century. Le Menager highlights the doubts and self-reckonings that developed alongside expansionist fervor and predicted contemporary concerns about the loss of cultural and human values to an emerging global order. In Manifest and Other Destinies, the American West offers the United States its first encounter with worlds at once local and international, worlds that, as time has proven, could never be entirely subordinated to the nation?s imperial desire.

Skin Deep looks at the preoccupations of European-Australians in their encounters with Aboriginal women and the tropes, types, and perceptions that seeped into everyday settler-colonial thinking. Early erroneous and uninformed accounts of Aboriginal women and culture were repeated throughout various print forms and imagery, both in Australia and in Europe, with names, dates, and locations erased so that individual women came to be anonymized as 'gins' and 'lubras.' The book identifies and traces the various tropes used to typecast Aboriginal women, contributing to their lasting hold on the colonial imagination even after conflicting records emerged. The colonial archive itself, consisting largely of accounts by white men, is critiqued in the book. Construction of Aboriginal women's gender and sexuality was a form of colonial control, and Skin Deep shows how the industrialization of print was critical to this control, emerging as it did alongside colonial expansion. For nearly all settlers, typecasting Aboriginal women through name-calling and repetition of tropes sufficed to evoke an understanding that was surface-based and half-knowing: only skin deep. *** "Impressively researched, written, organized and presented...highly recommended for community and academic library Aboriginal Studies, Women's Studies, Australian Studies, and Colonial History reference collections." --Midwest Book Review, MBR Bookwatch: October 2016, Helen's Bookshelf [Subject: Cultural History, Aboriginal Studies, Women's Studies, Australian Studies, Colonial Studies]

A portrait of Martin Heidegger as a man and a philosopher In this biography of Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), now available in English, historian Guillaume Payen synthesizes the connections between the German philosopher’s life and work. Critically, but without polemics, he creates a portrait of Heidegger in his time, using all available sources—lectures, letters, and the notorious “black notebooks.” Payen chronicles Heidegger’s “changing destinies”: after the First World War, an uncompromising Catholicism gave way to a vigorous striving for a philosophical revolution—fertile ground for National Socialism. The book reflects a life of light and shadow. Heidegger was a great philosopher and teacher who cultivated friendships and love affairs with Jews but also was an anti-Semitic nationalist who lamented the “Judaization of German intellectual life.&rdquo

The treatment of cultural colonial objects is one of the most debated questions of our time. Calls for a new international cultural order go back to decolonization. However, for decades, the issue has been treated as a matter of comity or been reduced to a Shakespearean dilemma: to return or not to return. Confronting Colonial Objects seeks to go beyond these classic dichotomies and argues that contemporary practices are at a tipping point. The book shows that cultural takings were material to the colonial project throughout different periods and went far beyond looting. It presents micro histories and object biographies to trace recurring justifications and contestations of takings and returns while outlining the complicity of anthropology, racial science, and professional networks that enabled colonial collecting. The book demonstrates the dual role of law and cultural heritage regulation in facilitating colonial injustices and mobilizing resistance thereto. Drawing on the interplay between justice, ethics, and human rights, Stahn develops principles of relational cultural justice. He challenges the argument that takings were acceptable according to the standards of the time and outlines how future engagement requires a re-invention of knowledge systems and relations towards objects, including new forms of consent, provenance research, and partnership, and a re-thinking of the role of museums themselves. Following the life story and transformation of cultural objects, this book provides a fresh perspective on international law and colonial history that appeals to audiences across a variety of disciplines. This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read on the Oxford Academic platform and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.