Patrick West's Architectures of Occupation in the Australian Short Story cultivates the potential for literary representations of architectural space to contribute to the development of a contemporary politics of Australian post-colonialism. West argues that the predominance of tropes of place within cultural and critical expressions of Australian post-colonialism should be re-balanced through attention to spatial strategies of anti-colonial power. To elaborate the raw material of such strategies, West develops interdisciplinary close readings of keynote stories within three, female-authored, pan-twentieth century, Australian short-story collections: Bush Studies by Barbara Baynton (1902); Kiss on the Lips and Other Stories by Katharine Susannah Prichard (1932); and, White Turtle: A Collection of Short Stories by Merlinda Bobis (1999). The capacity of the short-story form to prompt creative and politically germinal engagements with species of space associated with architecture and buildings is underscored. Relatedly, West argues that the recent resurgence of binary thought--on local, national, and international scales--occasions an approach to the short-story collections shaped by binary relationships like a dichotomy of inside and outside. Concluding his argument, West connects the literary and architectural critiques of the story collections to the wicked problem, linked to ongoing colonial violences, of improving Australian Indigenous housing outcomes. Innovative and interdisciplinary, this book will be of interest to scholars and students of Literary, Architectural and Postcolonial Studies. .

Architectures of Occupation in the Australian Short Story

Literature & Fiction

West, Patrick

History & Criticism

Routledge

The president of Venezuela hatches a plot to increase the value of his oil by destroying or disabling oil production in the Middle East. He has recruited a high ranking Israeli general who is in command of their secret nuclear weapon program. A $100 million bribe has convinced the aging and lonely general to betray his country and provide access to their launch computers. Meanwhile, both the NSA and Mossad have come across intelligence fragments indicating that some Venezuelan high ranking officials may have met with the Israeli general in the Azores. Independently, a CIA agent, Rick Peterson, and a female Mossad agent, Dana Halevy, fly to the Azores to see if they can confirm the meeting and determine its purpose. They eventually encounter each other, team up and start unraveling the plot. It becomes a race against time as they try to uncover the conspiracy piece by piece. Before the Middle East is on fire and embroiled in World War III.

Oil: A Thriller

Genre Fiction

Outskirts Press

Many books have sought to introduce the writings of the infamous and influential philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, but Get Over Yourself puts matters the other way round. Rather than simply explaining his thought, it instead asks: what would Nietzsche make of us? What would he think of our 21st-century, digital age? In our time of identity politics, therapy culture, 'safe spaces', religious fundamentalism, virtue-signalling, Twitterstorms, public emoting, ‘dumbing-down’, digital addiction and the politics of envy, the book introduces Nietzsche by putting the man in our shoes. Get Over Yourself both uses Nietzsche’s philosophy to understand our society, and takes our society to explain his philosophy.

Get Over Yourself: Nietzsche for Our Times (Societas)

Politics & Social Sciences

Philosophy

Societas

The new orthodoxy of multiculturalism decrees that no culture is superior or inferior to another, so it is impossible to say what is truly right and what is wrong. However, cultural relativists sometimes want it both ways. They simultaneously assert that no culture is better than another, but they will happily go on to say that Western culture is actually inferior, and shy away from celebrating it for fear of causing ‘offence’. Multiculturalism is a sign of the counter-Enlightenment times we live in. Since the Holocaust and Hiroshima, the West has lost faith in its capacity to use reason and science to make our world a better place. Because of their perverse self-loathing, many left-liberals lend their tacit or overt support to oppressive cultures that deny equal rights to its population or condone the killing of homosexuals and the virtual enslavement of women. By dwelling on problematic aspects of our history, like slavery and colonialism, the denigrators of the West ignore its rich and admirable tradition of social liberalism that says that individuals should be rendered as much freedom as possible in the private sphere. It is time we cherished the tradition of the Enlightenment, with its aspiration that the prizes of liberty, democracy, color-blindness, equality of opportunity and progress can be shared among all. Western culture has spawned the most open, liberal and progressive societies. Thanks to its enlightenment, it has unshackled itself from oppressive and barbarous regimes, creating states in which universal franchise, free speech and democracy are the norm and the expectation. It is time these values were cherished. It is also time to expose the poverty of multiculturalism.

Poverty of Multiculturalism

Sociology

Civitas/Inst for the Study of

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Books by West, Patrick