The Telos Press Podcast: Stephen Muecke on Belonging in Aboriginal Australia

In today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, David Pan talks with Stephen Muecke about his article “Belonging in Aboriginal Australia: A Political ‘Cosmography,'” from Telos 202 (Spring 2023). An excerpt of the article appears here. In their conversation they discuss how cosmography rather than ethnography allows for a focus on epistemological and ontological pluralism, and what such pluralism means for the essay’s cosmographic analysis; whether ontological pluralism is fundamentally incompatible with monotheistic religion and the institutions that have derived from it; how important for the essay’s analysis is institutional belonging, and whether the centering effect of such belonging could conflict with an ontological pluralism; how Native Title in the Australian legal system is grounded in the idea of genealogy, and whether this orientation undermines or contradict the forms of title and territorial sovereignty documented in Goolarabooloo practices; and the key differences between the Goolarabooloo practices and Yawuru nationalism. If your university has an online subscription to Telos, you can read the full article at the Telos Online website. For non-subscribers, learn how your university can begin a subscription to Telos at our library recommendation page. Print copies of Telos 202 are available for purchase in our online store.

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“Islamo-Leftism” and the French Debate on Terrorism

In the wake of recent killings in Paris and Nice, as well as in Vienna, the debate over “Islamism” has regained prominence in Europe, especially in France. Islamism as a political ideology must of course be rigorously distinguished from Islam, the religion. That conceptual distinction ought to be readily understandable and familiar from previous iterations of responses to terrorism. What however appears to be new in the current French discussion is the perceived linkage between Islamism, terrorist violence, and academic post-colonialism, regarded as providing a justification for the violence. That association is being made at high levels in the Macron government, generating considerable controversy. That is the context for the open letter published in Le Monde, translated below. Do academic ideas have consequences in the world?

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