In this provocative study, John Docker takes his readers on an intellectual adventure. The journey includes a guided tour of the history of modernism, consideration of the development of postmodernism, explanation of structuralism and poststructuralism, and discussion of the debates and conflicts around each. It ranges widely, from theoretical discussion to consideration of everything from architecture, television and detective writing to Sydney's monorail. The book engages with some of the most important debates of our time, combining polemical force with intellectual rigor, and reclaims...

Genocide is commonly understood to be a terrible aberration in human behaviour, performed by evil, murderous regimes such as the Nazis and dictators like Suharto and Pinochet. John Docker argues that the roots of genocide go far deeper into human nature than most people realise.
Genocide features widely in the Bible, the literature of ancient Greece and Rome, and debates about the Enlightenment. These texts are studied in depth to trace the origins of violence through time and across civilisations. Developing the groundbreaking work of Raphael Lemkin, who invented the term 'genocide',...

This book presents a rethinking of the world legacy of Mahatma Gandhi in this era of unspeakable global violence. Through interdisciplinary research, key Gandhian concepts are revisited by tracing their genealogies in multiple histories of world contact and by foregrounding their relevance to contemporary struggles to regain the 'humane' in the midst of global conflict. The relevance of Gandhian notions of ahimsa and satyagraha is assessed in the context of contemporary events, when religious fundamentalisms of various kinds are competing with the arrogance and unilateralism of imperial...