Muecke
Biographic Data
| ID | 1370 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Muecke |
| FAMILY NAME | Muecke |
| SIGNATURE | MUECKE |
| AFFILIATIONS | UNSW Sydney |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1634-8637 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 68 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 83 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 68 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1970 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Birch/Muecke/Gibson
Animals Give Us a Body We Didn’t Have
Worlds and Stories
This provocation reviews the growing interest in practices of description in literary, cultural, and environmental studies. It argues that in the environmental humanities the craft of description is essential but somewhat neglected. The multispecies worlds encountered by environmental humanities researchers necessarily have to be well described, not only objectively but also rhetorically, to engage readers. Different kinds of expertise (literary,…
Mapping Shadows of the Bight
In August 2023, a collective of arts and humanities scholars undertook a mobile residency on the Far West Coast of South Australia, along the Great Australian Bight. Moving through deeply storied country that is largely marginal and neglected in the cultural and political imaginary, and negotiating our relation to this displacement as settler-colonial scholars with the privilege of mobility, the residency sought creative and critical approaches t…
Getting closer
I must thank Vanessa Burns and Lara Daley for their thoughtful reviews of The Children's Country. They both have a really good fix on the book that I thought I wrote, with the spirit of Paddy Roe a
Stengers's Whitehead and Field Philosophy
In his lucid introduction, Thomas Lamarre, Stengers's translator, considers this book 'a summation of Stengers's work to date', as she 'relays' Whitehead's thought to grapple with contemporary issues in our 'times of collapse'. In this she is continuing the work of her longer Thinking with Whitehead that did much to relaunch the somewhat forgotten Whitehead, via Europe and back to readers in the anglosphere. This review article takes Stengers's c…
Bruno Latour and Translation
This article argues that the concept of translation is central to the work of Bruno Latour, starting before ANT, with the group working on the sociologie de la traduction at the École des Mines. As one of his translators, I reflect on the extension of his identity via translation, then on the idea of translation as 'political labour' across social discontinuities, including those in colonisation contexts where certain languages can become hegemon…
An Interview with Vinciane Despret
In this interview, Vinciane Despret discusses the importance of Bruno Latour to her work. In particular, she addresses the questions of methodology. She examines why it is necessary to invent a new method for each new object we study and how we can become more attentive as scientists, especially those specialising in ethology, to the ways in which humans and non-humans are interested in each other. Finally, Despret considers how we can inherit fr…
‘Why can't we speak up for ourselves…?’ Water Futures and Ethnographic Provocations
Via a three‐person dialogue, we engage with an inquiry posed for this special issue: ‘What questions are ethnographers asking about water in Australia?’ Canvassing such an inquiry led us to being both provoked and provocateurs, in part by following Luci Pangrazio's (2016) discussion about the value of provocation in the social sciences. Turning from provocation as heuristic tool, we then focus on the iconic Mardoowarra , Fitzroy River in Western …
The Magic of Captain Cook
Lately the two of us have been on the hunt for whitefella dreamings, although they are not hard to find. They are not the kind of Dreaming that Aboriginal people hold for Country, but something else: dreams whitefellas conjure up to make mischief, to claim power and mastery. This article traces Modern Australia back through colonial dreams—ones that were enlivened by the magic of Captain Cook and the tricks he pulled to claim possession over a th…
Belonging in Aboriginal Australia
It is an increasingly accepted protocol to situate oneself discursively in order to approach a set of problems. This protocol, consolidated by Donna Haraway’s famous “situated knowledge,” is also evident in everyday Indigenous Australian practice.1 I begin, therefore, with my long association with the Goolarabooloo community in Broome, North-West Australia, and in particular with Paddy Roe, who started teaching me in the late 1970s. This text att…
Regeneration time
In these regenerative times prompted by the Anthropocene, Aboriginal voices are situated to draw on ancient wisdom for local learning and to share information across the globe as ecological imperative for planetary wellbeing. In this paper, postqualitative research foregrounds the sentient nature of life as ancestral power and brings the vitality of co-becoming as our places into active engagement. It enables coloniality to surface and reveals ho…
Protective Measures
Research Article| March 01 2021 Protective Measures: An Exercise Bruno Latour; Bruno Latour Bruno Latour is a professor at Sciences Po in Paris and has published extensively in the domain of science studies and more generally on the anthropology of modernism. His books include We Have Never Been Modern (1991), Iconoclash (2002), Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy (2004), Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy (20…
Her Biography
If you are driving west from Katherine on Highway 1, headed into the Kimberley in the far northwest of Australia, take time to pause and look south down the Buchanan Highway; that’s the turnoff bef
Ways of life
Aboriginal Heritage Trails are a growing phenomenon in Australia. They come in all shapes and sizes, from mere signage to—in the case of the famous Lurujarri trail out of Broome, Western Australia—a nine-day immersive experience walking the beach with one of the Goolarabooloo family groups. Here people experience the beautiful Indian Ocean coastline, extensive dinosaur footprints, storytelling, and meals of freshly caught fish, mangrove crab, dug…
Teaching the Environmental Humanities
This article provides the first international overview and detailed discussion of teaching in the environmental humanities (EH). It is divided into three parts. The first offers a series of regional overviews: where, when, and how EH teaching is taking place. This part highlights some key regional variability in the uptake of teaching in this area, emphasizing important differences in cultural and pedagogical contexts. The second part is a critic…
Les nouveaux cahiers de doléances
Comment la parole politique peut-elle se remettre en mouvement et composer la chose publique ? Aujourd'hui, des muets s'adressent à des sourds. Le nouveau régime climatique impose de décrire les territoires dont nous dépendons avant de pouvoir débattre
Twentieth Anniversary Colloquium
In November 1991, the Australian Academy of the Humanities held a symposium under the title Beyond the Disciplines: the New Humanities. The symposium set out to explore the ‘battering’ that the traditional humanities had received ‘from radical critiques of their methods and politics’ in the context of the ‘Theory Wars’.1 It did so by bringing together representatives of the ‘New Humanities’ to address six topics
Knowledge Valves. Or, keeping Cultural Studies going
Meaghan
Editorial by Chris Healy, Katrina Schlunke, Prudence Black, Stephen Muecke, and Catherine Driscoll
Politics Now, Now
The essay I want to discuss here was published in the 'pre-global' era. I find it telling that Meaghan's 'Politics Now: Anxieties of a Petit-Bourgeois Intellectual', dated 14 July 1985 in its appearance in The Pirate's Fiancée in 1988, was first published in Intervention in Sydney and shortly afterwards as lead essay in Framework in London: that way people in London would actually be able to read it as well.1 In his introduction, the Framework ed…
Barbara Glowczewski (2015) Totemic Becomings
Earthbound Law
Attachment
An Ecology of Institutions
Bruno Latour’s Inquiry into M odes of Existence followed the work of an “anthropologist of the Moderns” compiling a report on various modes of existence defining Western institutions. This paper argues that this work could continue into the humanities disciplines, focusing on textualism and ”theory” in history and literary studies. Here the work of Ian Hunter on the Kantian philosophical legacy in contemporary theoretical dispositions is aligned …
From ANT to Pragmatism
Bruno Latour and Antoine Hennion have been travelling companions for a long time. In order to discuss concretely the possible relationship between the humanities and Latour’s An Inquiry into Modes of Existence, this article retraces exchanges that actually occurred at the CSI, in a common effort to rebuild links between political, scientific, and artistic representations that had been disconnected by the traditional disciplines. Under the heading…
Lonely representations
(1992). Lonely representations: Aboriginality and cultural studies. Journal of Australian Studies: Vol. 16, Power, Knowledge and Aborigines, pp. 32-44
Motorcycles, Snails, Latour
In a post-critical environment, literary and cultural analysis can find new directions through engagement with 'experiment', 'multirealism' and 'reproduction' as agents 'earn participation' in collectives of humans and non-humans. Collectives of 'partners' are necessary collaborators in the reproduction of cultural forms. This vitalist approach carries an experimental method, an expanded ontological field, and a relational subjectivity, which con…
The Fall
You have invited me to lunch because you want to pick my brains. So we meet at Central, then walk down the road to the Malaya. This is our rst meeting and I immediately nd you attractive. Over curry, which you nd too spicy, you are curious about my name. I say it is of German origin, and means ‘little y’. Because you speak French I can point out that it is a cognate of mouche: ‘My name is Monsieur Mouche.’ And you laugh
A Touching and Contagious Captain Cook
For how long can history, as it is conceived in 'the West', continue to attach itself to an exhausted humanism, where 'man' is central and all the natural and inanimate objects surrounding humans (and linked intimately to human activity) are relegated to the function of support act?This essay argues from anthropological theory that there are fundamentally different sorts of relationships that humans can entertain with non-humans, and that these r…
Attachment
Reinstituting Nature
Translator's introduction\n\nAt the end of July 2014 there was a week-long workshop held at the Ecole des Mines in Paris, Bruno Latour's former work-place. This was a final workshop, convened by Latour's project, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence, which was not only a book, but a website that was an experiment in interactive metaphysics that had been going on for four years. About 30 participants gathered to workshop and rewrite some key contest…
Pigeon the outlaw
The substantive point of this article is to put into print some versions of the story of Jandamarra,2 also called Pigeon, a famous Aboriginal 'outlaw' of the Kimberley district of Western Australia (see Map), who in the 1890s worked as a police tracker, then turned against the police, releasing all their prisoners and fleeing to the Kimberley ranges. He and his followers evaded search patrols for over two years, during which time he led several r…
The Magic of Captain Cook
Lately the two of us have been on the hunt for whitefella dreamings, although they are not hard to find. They are not the kind of Dreaming that Aboriginal people hold for Country, but something else: dreams whitefellas conjure up to make mischief, to claim power and mastery. This article traces Modern Australia back through colonial dreams—ones that were enlivened by the magic of Captain Cook and the tricks he pulled to claim possession over a th…
Protective Measures
Research Article| March 01 2021 Protective Measures: An Exercise Bruno Latour; Bruno Latour Bruno Latour is a professor at Sciences Po in Paris and has published extensively in the domain of science studies and more generally on the anthropology of modernism. His books include We Have Never Been Modern (1991), Iconoclash (2002), Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy (2004), Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy (20…
Ways of life
Aboriginal Heritage Trails are a growing phenomenon in Australia. They come in all shapes and sizes, from mere signage to—in the case of the famous Lurujarri trail out of Broome, Western Australia—a nine-day immersive experience walking the beach with one of the Goolarabooloo family groups. Here people experience the beautiful Indian Ocean coastline, extensive dinosaur footprints, storytelling, and meals of freshly caught fish, mangrove crab, dug…
Les nouveaux cahiers de doléances
Comment la parole politique peut-elle se remettre en mouvement et composer la chose publique ? Aujourd'hui, des muets s'adressent à des sourds. Le nouveau régime climatique impose de décrire les territoires dont nous dépendons avant de pouvoir débattre
Intensifying the tourist experience
An experiment in both form and content, the essay lightly adopts an Australian storytelling style to perform its material as it narrates a road trip across central Australia. Arriving at the Daly Waters Pub in the Northern Territory, the travellers are taken by surprise by the strange décor. It is a place made significant by the multiple ‘authorships’ of hundreds of tourists. Visitors have left not only ID cards, pictures, and signatures, but als…
The writing laboratory
1938 L. MACNEICE Mod. Poetry xi. 200 The communist poet, Maiakovski, established a “word work-shop” ... to supply all revolutionaries with “any quantity of poetry desired.” OED ... to improve one's sty
Visiting Aboriginal Australia
ST EPHE N MUECKE1⁄4 the content of an idea matters a little less than the way it is put into practice. 1 Not enough imagination has gone into the different m odalities of situatedness-indisplacem ent
Mapping Shadows of the Bight
In August 2023, a collective of arts and humanities scholars undertook a mobile residency on the Far West Coast of South Australia, along the Great Australian Bight. Moving through deeply storied country that is largely marginal and neglected in the cultural and political imaginary, and negotiating our relation to this displacement as settler-colonial scholars with the privilege of mobility, the residency sought creative and critical approaches t…
Bruno Latour and Translation
This article argues that the concept of translation is central to the work of Bruno Latour, starting before ANT, with the group working on the sociologie de la traduction at the École des Mines. As one of his translators, I reflect on the extension of his identity via translation, then on the idea of translation as 'political labour' across social discontinuities, including those in colonisation contexts where certain languages can become hegemon…
Her Biography
If you are driving west from Katherine on Highway 1, headed into the Kimberley in the far northwest of Australia, take time to pause and look south down the Buchanan Highway; that’s the turnoff bef
Knowledge Valves. Or, keeping Cultural Studies going
Art as Fiction
A new diplomat has been appointed in the city. His name is Bruno Latour. But why would we need a new diplomat? Because, he claims, we are at war. This war is not physical and it is not between countries: it is metaphysical and it is between domains of action. Each one of these domains of action claims to have a privileged access to Reality as such. Typically, sciences would claim to describe the world, while politics or religion would only be abo…
Materialities of tourism in the twenty-first century
The ‘material turn’, seen across a number of disciplines in recent years, turns, in this issue, towards tourism studies. From its early appearances as ‘thing theory’, marked by Bill Brown’s special edition of Critical Inquiry in the Fall of 2001, it has had renewed impact in the social sciences, even though parts of anthropology would insist that they have always paid profound and detailed attention to ‘material cultures’. What changed, for insta…
Natural Logics of the Indian Ocean
Interdisciplinary approaches to the Indian Ocean are fairly new, and ecological topics in cultural studies more generally are also rare. This paper, then, is an attempt to begin discussion on these two fronts, hoping that further research will be able to document it in more detail. We cast our argument as being both about Indian Ocean stories and a story in itself, and cast it in three parts: the pre-colonial Indian Ocean, the colonial one, and t…
Australian Indigenous Philosophy
In his article "Australian Indigenous Philosophy" Stephen Muecke discusses the fact that neither Australian philosophy nor Indigenous Australian philosophy exists as a field of study. Settler Australians have imported their philosophical traditions and have left it up to other disciplines to undertake the translation work of knowledge in the long-lived Indigenous traditions. Here, anthropology, history, and cultural studies have taken up the chal…
I don't think they invented the wheel
Modernity must have come from the East, surely? When Captain James Cook, in his early modern conveyances, sailed into Botany Bay in 1770, he was the bearer of new technology, ideas of progress, and
Narrative and intervention in aboriginal filmmaking and policy
Response to Marcia Langton, ‘Well, I heard it on the radio and I saw it on the television...’ An Essay for the Australian Film Commission on the politics and aesthetics of filmmaking by and about Aboriginal people and things. Sydney, AFC, 1993, pb 93pp. $14.95
A Touching and Contagious Captain Cook
For how long can history, as it is conceived in 'the West', continue to attach itself to an exhausted humanism, where 'man' is central and all the natural and inanimate objects surrounding humans (and linked intimately to human activity) are relegated to the function of support act?This essay argues from anthropological theory that there are fundamentally different sorts of relationships that humans can entertain with non-humans, and that these r…
The Children's Country
This paper brings a number of post‐structuralist concerns to the analysis of a text in Aboriginal English from Paddy Roe in Broome, Australia. Accordingly the text is reproduced in full as a statement, or set of statements, standing next to the analysis. It deals with issues of Aboriginal land‐rights. The analysis characterises structuralist thought as having a preoccupation with the metaphor of depth in textual analysis, bringing with it the ide…
No road (vague directions for the study of tourism)
The importance of understanding and studying Aboriginal culture is examined, and the conflicting attraction of tourism as a reason to preserve and share this culture is addressed. The author notes that a study of Aboriginal culture as a tourist would not give a deep insight into it; tourism is turning an ancient culture into a farce
Lonely representations
(1992). Lonely representations: Aboriginality and cultural studies. Journal of Australian Studies: Vol. 16, Power, Knowledge and Aborigines, pp. 32-44
Marginality, writing, education
Studying the other
Narrative and intervention in aboriginal filmmaking and policy
Response to Marcia Langton, ‘Well, I heard it on the radio and I saw it on the television...’ An Essay for the Australian Film Commission on the politics and aesthetics of filmmaking by and about Aboriginal people and things. Sydney, AFC, 1993, pb 93pp. $14.95
Cultural Studies and Anthropology
Is an Experimental History Possible? The UTS Review. Cultural Studies and New Writing, vol. 2
‘Better Seats Than They Paid For’
Travelling the Subterranean River of Blood
This article argues for a philosophical and ‘magical’ turn in cultural studies in order to account for multidimensional aspects of rituals which work to reproduce cultures. It is suggested that those Western disciplines which have dominated understandings of Aboriginality in Australia are anthropology, history and literature and that they have done so with two important reifications: the social and the word. A philosophical rereading of a major i…
Visiting Aboriginal Australia
ST EPHE N MUECKE1⁄4 the content of an idea matters a little less than the way it is put into practice. 1 Not enough imagination has gone into the different m odalities of situatedness-indisplacem ent
Multiplying the Means for Indigenous Justice
The Fall
You have invited me to lunch because you want to pick my brains. So we meet at Central, then walk down the road to the Malaya. This is our rst meeting and I immediately nd you attractive. Over curry, which you nd too spicy, you are curious about my name. I say it is of German origin, and means ‘little y’. Because you speak French I can point out that it is a cognate of mouche: ‘My name is Monsieur Mouche.’ And you laugh
Rogue Flows
"Rogue Flows brings together some of the best and most knowledgeable writers on consumption and cultural theory to chart the under-explored field of cultural flows and consumption across different regions in Asia, and the importance of these flows in creating contemporary Asian national identities. It offers innovative possibilities for envisioning how the transfer of popular and consumer culture (such as TV, music, film, advertising and commodit…
I don't think they invented the wheel
Modernity must have come from the East, surely? When Captain James Cook, in his early modern conveyances, sailed into Botany Bay in 1770, he was the bearer of new technology, ideas of progress, and
Contingency theory
Contingency, in its Latin root, is about touching, bordering on, reaching, befalling. In this, its first application as a concept driving new ethnographic practice, it avoids the quasi-scientific tendency to circumscribe a community or body of data. Consistently unsystematic, contingency theory welcomes stray facts, complexity, intuitions, and feelings. In this article the writer visits Madagascar contingently, encountering texts, people, and eve…
Gulaga Story
A ficto-critical essay, this narrative of a journey also presents an argument about time, modernity and indigenous versus colonial perceptions of place. The place in question is Gulaga, Mt. Dromedary, on the South Coast of New South Wales to which the author and his family went on a trip. This is the site on the Australian mainland first sighted and named by Captain Cook's party in 1770. The article performs the idea of multiple travels and stori…
Cultural Studies’ Networking Strategies in the South
In the 1990s I started to take an interest in the networking capacity for Cultural Studies when I saw how Kuan-Hsing Chen set up the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies group, an alternative intellectual knowledge-exchange which now has an eponymous (Taylor and Francis) journal and a vital and well-funded network of scholars working among Taiwan, China, Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, India, Korea, etc. For younger scholars in the humanities, this network h…
What Makes a Carpet Fly? Cultural Studies in the Indian Ocean
This paper aims to open up a cultural studies conversation on the Indian Ocean. Knowledge of the Indian Ocean should be born of the problems encountered in situ, rather than viewed and assessed from afar in erstwhile colonial centres. Networks and institutional links have to be created to sustain an interdisciplinary conversation leading to this decolonisation of knowledge. In investigating the interplay of commerce and culture, this paper abando…
Cultural Science
Should cultural studies defend itself against charges of ‘postmodern cultural relativism’? Does anyone believe that their own culture is ‘just one among many’? If we do not believe that the differences among cultures are just so much dressing up, that the differences are arbitrary, then there must be something at the core that really matters. This core is verging on the absolute, or the sacred; and its passionate defence is at odds with liberal p…
The Sacred in History
The writing laboratory
1938 L. MACNEICE Mod. Poetry xi. 200 The communist poet, Maiakovski, established a “word work-shop” ... to supply all revolutionaries with “any quantity of poetry desired.” OED ... to improve one's sty
A Parisian a to Z
Fabulation
In the 1990s I started to take an interest in the networking capacity for cultural studies when I saw how Kuan-Hsing Chen set up the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Group, an alternative intellectual knowledge exchange which now has an eponymous (Taylor and Francis) journal and a vital and well-funded network of scholars working in Taiwan, China, Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, India, Korea, etc. For younger scholars in the humanities this network has e…
Sociology (47 works) · Art (29 works) · History (28 works) · Political science (28 works) · Philosophy (26 works) · Law (20 works) · History (18 works) · Philosophy (18 works) · Epistemology (17 works) · Law (15 works)