John Docker
Biographic Data
| ID | 3687722 |
|---|---|
| NAME | John Docker |
| GIVEN NAMES | John |
| FAMILY NAME | Docker |
| SIGNATURE | DOCKER J |
| AFFILIATIONS | The University of Sydney |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 42 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 37 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 41 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1972 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
The Power of Palestinian Poetry
Reclaiming History from the Settler Coloniser: A Meditation on Nur Masalha's Palestine across Millennia: A History of Literacy, Learning and Educational Revolutions
In this wonderful book, Nur Masalha challenges and transforms world history, as did his earlier Palestine: A Four Thousand Year History (2018). In this meditation I recount some of Nur Masalha's argument — not all, given the extraordinary richness of the material he has uncovered, described, and analysed — but also offer my own reflections prompted by his book. As Masalha relates in his introduction, the work is a passionate response to Zionism's…
Reconceptualising Settler-Colonialism and Genocide with Special Reference to Palestine, Sri Lanka and Australia: Reflections on Damien Short's Redefining Genocide: Settler Colonialism, Social Death an…
Genocide studies are at a cross-road. In June 2016, the International Network of Genocide Scholars, sponsor of the Journal of Genocide Research, imperilled the future of genocide studies by aligning itself with Zionist Israel, which many scholars consider to be a genocidal settler-colonial perpetrator state. Almost at the same time, Damien Short's important intervention Redefining Genocide was published, suggesting new directions for genocide stu…
Stuart Hall and Cultural Studies, circa 1983
Stuart Hall sought to internationalise theoretical debates and to create Cultural Studies as interdisciplinary. We chart his theoretical journey through a detailed examination of a series of lectures delivered in 1983 and now published for the first time. In these lectures, he discusses theorists such as E.P. Thompson, Raymond Williams, Louis Althusser, Levi Strauss and Antonio Gramsci, and explores the relationship between ideas and social struc…
Places Lived: An Ego-Histoiriste and Jurisographer Discuss Living with Law in Sydney
The following essays, by John Docker and myself, were delivered on the final panel of the ‘Lives Lived with Law’ symposium, held at the Melbourne Law School in December 2014. The panel was called ‘Places Lived’, and our purpose was to reflect together on how intellectual traditions are inherited and inhabited in a place. The essays were written and presented as they are published here, commencing with this short introduction. We wanted to stage i…
Of Pearls and Coral: Jurisography and Ego History
In this talk I’d like to create a conversation between what Ann Genovese and Shaun McVeigh (2015) felicitously call ‘jurisography’, which is, we might say, just beginning its intellectual journey as a concept of great fertility and possibility, and what the French historiographer Pierre Nora (2001) refers to as ego-histoire, or ego history, which is now becoming an international intellectual movement. As will become clear, ego history is not simp…
Christina Petterson, The Missionary, the Catechist and the Hunter: Foucault, Protestantism, and Colonialism
Stuart Hall: Reflections, Memories, Appreciations
Stuart Hall was many things: public intellectual, academic leader, writer, editor, teacher, political activist, family man and friend. We write here of the two aspects we knew personally, writer and friend. Like so many of us engaged in the early formation of cultural and media studies, we both read and were seriously influenced by his work. John discussed Stuart Hall's work extensively in his PhD thesis on Australian literature of the 1890s in i…
Nakba Memoricide: Genocide Studies and the Zionist/Israeli Genocide of Palestine
This essay furthers the debate on the Palestinian case as it relates to Genocide Studies, questioning the lack of substantive discussion of this case to date in traditional Genocide Studies fora. It reemphasises the importance of the settler-colonial dimension to Zionist settlement in Palestine, which, it argues, has so far not been explored sufficiently. The paper suggests that the ‘Nakba’ of 1948, which was based on appropriation of the land of…
A plethora of intentions: Genocide, settler colonialism and historical consciousness in Australia and Britain
This article examines the implications for contemporary historical consciousness in Australia and Britain of the Tasmanian genocide, the destruction of the indigenous nations of the island by British colonisation in the early nineteenth century and the subsequent removal of the survivors to Flinders Island, where most died. The article explores the culture of denial that attempts to deflect the challenge of genocide scholar Tony Barta, that Austr…
Instrumentalising the Holocaust: Israel, Settler-Colonialism, Genocide (Creating a Conversation between Raphaël Lemkin and Ilan Pappé)
With the appearance in 2010 of an essay by Martin Shaw, ‘Palestine in an International Historical Perspective on Genocide’, Holy Land Studies has taken the hermeneutic initiative in bringing together into the one field of analysis two areas that have usually been kept separate, genocide studies and studies of the history of Palestine-Israel. In an important challenge to contemporary scholarship, Shaw makes a cogent critique of the notion of ‘ethn…
Storm Troopers of empire: Historical representation in Breaker Morant, Naguib Mahfouz’s Palace Walk and other war histories
In the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, Australian soldiers actively cooperated with a worldwide British imperial order that vigorously and violently denied the rights of small nations to be independent. In terms of military history, the essay will focus on Australian mounted troops in the South African or Boer War, the Light Horse in Palestine and Egypt and Australian soldiers during the Easter Rising in Ireland. It reflects …
Introduction – Genocide: Definitions, Questions, Settler-Colonies
Genocide is a composite of different acts of persecution or destruction
Passionate Histories: Myth, memory and Indigenous Australia
This book examines the emotional engagements of both Indigenous and Non-Indigenous people with Indigenous history. The contributors are a mix of Indigenous and Non-Indigenous scholars, who in different ways examine how the past lives on in the present, as myth, memory, and history
Raphaël Lemkin, creator of the concept of genocide: A World History Perspective
concept of genocide: a world history perspective 1
Recasting Sally Morgan’s My Place: The Fictionality of Identity and the Phenomenology of the Converso
Aboriginality', therefore, is a field of intersubjectivity in that it is remade over and over again in a process of dialogue, of imagination, of representation and interpretation. Both Aboriginal and non Aboriginal people create Aboriginalities'
Time, Eternity, Truth and Death: History is Allegory
Transnational Ties: Australian Lives in the World
Australian lives are intricately enmeshed with the world, bound by ties of allegiance and affinity, intellect and imagination. In Transnational Ties: Australian Lives in the World, an eclectic mix of scholars-historians, literary critics, and museologists-trace the flow of people that helped shape Australia's distinctive character and the flow of ideas that connected
An Early Holocaust Novel: White’s Riders in the Chariot , a Critique
Patrick White’s novel Riders in the Chariot (1961) can be regarded as a contribution to Holocaust literature, broadly defined. The novel features as one of its main characters Mordecai Himmelfarb, a Holocaust survivor, who makes his way from Germany, via Palestine, to Australia. In a comparison with Joyce’s Ulysses, with its anti-essentialising construction of the complex consciousness of Bloom, Riders in the Chariot is revealed to be essentialis…
Cosmopolitan Conversations: Settler Societies, Education and Decolonisation
In 1967, as the June Arab-Israeli war was ending, Maxime Rodinson, the noted French Jewish scholar of Islam and the Middle East (who died in 2004), published a remarkable essay 'Israel: A Colonial-Settler State?' as a supplement to a special number of Sartre's Les Temps Modernes.With characteristic intellectual power, clarity, and wit, Rodinson convincingly argued that Israel can be defi ned as a settler-colonial state established 'on Palestinian…
Books
Civil Rights: How Indigenous Australians Won Formal Equality. By John Chesterman. Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 2005. Pp. 357. $22.95 paper. Dance Hall and Picture Palace: Sydney's Romance with Modernity. By Jill Julius Matthews. Sydney: Currency Press, 2005. Pp. 342. $32.95 paper. Conciliation, Compulsion, Conversion: British Attitudes to Indigenous Peoples 1763–1814. By Merete Falck Borch. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004. Pp. 320. US$43 pap…
Is History Fiction
Re-‘Femminising’ Diaspora: Contemporary Jewish Cultural Studies and Post-Zionism
This essay creates a conversation between diaspora theory, the New Jewish Cultural Studies, post-Zionism, and colonialism. In this conversation, I focus on Jonathan Boyarin and Daniel Boyarin's Powers of Diaspora (2002), new thinking about Josephus, the myth of Masada, and rabbinic Judaism in antiquity, and on Ephraim Nimni's collection The Challenge of Post-Zionism (2003). The essay discusses the question of gender in Zionist mythology. It also …
The Challenge of Post-Zionism: Review
The Challenge of Post-Zionism: Review John Docker (bio) Review of: Ephraim Nimni, ed., The Challenge of Post-Zionism: Alternatives to Israeli Fundamentalist Politics (Zed Books, London and New York, 2003). (This review is dedicated to the memory of Edward W. Said, who died 24 September 2003) For political theory exploring how always-unsettled settler-colonial societies contemplate and rework and reinterpret their creation stories, Ephraim Nimni’s…
Introduction: Benjamin and Bakhtin-Vision and Visuality
Introduction: Benjamin and Bakhtin—Vision and Visuality ]ohn Docker Subhash ]aireth This is the second of two volumes of essays that arose from the international symposium, "Adventures of Dialogue: Bakhtin and Benjamin," staged at the Humanities Research Centre, Australian National University, Canberra, in June 2001. Where the first volume, "Benjamin and Bakhtin—New Approaches, New Contexts," focused on a wide range of topics that might reveal ne…
Transnational Ties: Australian Lives in the World
Australian lives are intricately enmeshed with the world, bound by ties of allegiance and affinity, intellect and imagination. In Transnational Ties: Australian Lives in the World, an eclectic mix of scholars-historians, literary critics, and museologists-trace the flow of people that helped shape Australia's distinctive character and the flow of ideas that connected
Introduction – Genocide: Definitions, Questions, Settler-Colonies
Genocide is a composite of different acts of persecution or destruction
A plethora of intentions: Genocide, settler colonialism and historical consciousness in Australia and Britain
This article examines the implications for contemporary historical consciousness in Australia and Britain of the Tasmanian genocide, the destruction of the indigenous nations of the island by British colonisation in the early nineteenth century and the subsequent removal of the survivors to Flinders Island, where most died. The article explores the culture of denial that attempts to deflect the challenge of genocide scholar Tony Barta, that Austr…
Introduction: Benjamin and Bakhtin-Vision and Visuality
Introduction: Benjamin and Bakhtin—Vision and Visuality ]ohn Docker Subhash ]aireth This is the second of two volumes of essays that arose from the international symposium, "Adventures of Dialogue: Bakhtin and Benjamin," staged at the Humanities Research Centre, Australian National University, Canberra, in June 2001. Where the first volume, "Benjamin and Bakhtin—New Approaches, New Contexts," focused on a wide range of topics that might reveal ne…
Puritanic rationalism: John Berger's ways of seeing and media and culture studies
(1989). Puritanic rationalism: John Berger's ways of seeing and media and culture studies. Continuum: Vol. 2, No. 2, pp. 77-95
Passionate Histories: Myth, memory and Indigenous Australia
This book examines the emotional engagements of both Indigenous and Non-Indigenous people with Indigenous history. The contributors are a mix of Indigenous and Non-Indigenous scholars, who in different ways examine how the past lives on in the present, as myth, memory, and history
Raphaël Lemkin, creator of the concept of genocide: A World History Perspective
concept of genocide: a world history perspective 1
The two histories: Metaphor in English Historiographical writing
In postmodernist theory, historical writing has become an important object of reflection and concern. Recent work emphasizes histories as texts, as literary artefacts created by historians within linguistic, institutional and cultural conventions. In this essay, we investigate the uses of metaphor in a particular English tradition of reflection on history, historical truth and the writing of history. We develop literary critical analysis of metap…
In defence of popular TV: Carnivalesque V. left pessimism
(1988). In defence of popular TV: Carnivalesque V. left pessimism. Continuum: Vol. 1, No. 2, pp. 83-99
Norman Lindsay’s ‘Creative Effort’: Manifesto for an Urban Intelligentsia
Discusses Lindsayâ s aesthetic theories, mainly in his crucial work Creative Effort, and suggests why these ideas were influential on a long list of other poets such as McCrae, Slessor, and FitzGerald
Sydney intellectual history and Sydney libertarianism
Norman Lindsay’s ‘Creative Effort’: Manifesto for an Urban Intelligentsia
Discusses Lindsayâ s aesthetic theories, mainly in his crucial work Creative Effort, and suggests why these ideas were influential on a long list of other poets such as McCrae, Slessor, and FitzGerald
Manning Clark's Henry Lawson
Notes and Discussion
In defence of popular TV: Carnivalesque V. left pessimism
(1988). In defence of popular TV: Carnivalesque V. left pessimism. Continuum: Vol. 1, No. 2, pp. 83-99
Puritanic rationalism: John Berger's ways of seeing and media and culture studies
(1989). Puritanic rationalism: John Berger's ways of seeing and media and culture studies. Continuum: Vol. 2, No. 2, pp. 77-95
Popular romance in the postmodern age. And an unknown Australian author
Puritanic Rationalism: John Berger's Ways of Seeing and Media and Culture Studies
1989). Puritanic rationalism: John Berger's ways of seeing and media and culture studies. Continuum: Vol. 2, No. 2, pp. 77-95
The Nervous Nineties: Australian Cultural Life in the 1890s
A cultural history of Australia during the 1890s with emphasis on the remarkable creativity of the period in stories, novels, paintings, design, journalism, intellectual and political movements
Rethinking postcolonialism and multiculturalism in the Fin de Siècle
The article argues that terms like ‘postcolonialism’ and ‘multiculturalism’ can be totalizing and themselves elide difference. In terms of recent argument in cultural studies in Australia, approaches drawn from postcolonialism referring to Orientalism and race have been contentiously applied to multicultural discourse referring to migration and ethnicity. In such discourse there is a ruling binary distinction between the migrant and Australian so…
Rethinking postcolonialism and multiculturalism in the fin de siècle
The article argues that terms like ‘postcolonialism’ and ‘multiculturalism’ can be totalizing and themselves elide difference. In terms of recent argument in cultural studies in Australia, approaches drawn from postcolonialism referring to Orientalism and race have been contentiously applied to multicultural discourse referring to migration and ethnicity. In such discourse there is a ruling binary distinction between the migrant and Australian so…
Postmodernism and Popular Culture: A Cultural History
The two histories: Metaphor in English Historiographical writing
In postmodernist theory, historical writing has become an important object of reflection and concern. Recent work emphasizes histories as texts, as literary artefacts created by historians within linguistic, institutional and cultural conventions. In this essay, we investigate the uses of metaphor in a particular English tradition of reflection on history, historical truth and the writing of history. We develop literary critical analysis of metap…
Race, colour and identity in Australia and New Zealand
This fascinating collection of essays asks key questions not only for the future of settler colonial societies like Australia and New Zealand, but also for the future of humanity. The essays trace the relationships between indigenous and non-indigenous peoples and the divisions between immigrants of European, Asian and Pacific origin
Introduction: Benjamin and Bakhtin: New Approaches, New Contexts
Introduction: Benjamin and Bakhtin: New Approaches, New Contexts ]ohn Docker Subhash ]aireth These essays arose from an international symposium "Adventures of Dialogue : Bakhtin and Benjamin" staged at the Humanities Research Centre, Australian National University, Canberra, in June 2001. We formed the idea to hold a conference, as the twentieth century ended and the new millennium ushered itself in, on two of modernity's greatest literary and ph…
Introduction: Benjamin and Bakhtin-Vision and Visuality
Introduction: Benjamin and Bakhtin—Vision and Visuality ]ohn Docker Subhash ]aireth This is the second of two volumes of essays that arose from the international symposium, "Adventures of Dialogue: Bakhtin and Benjamin," staged at the Humanities Research Centre, Australian National University, Canberra, in June 2001. Where the first volume, "Benjamin and Bakhtin—New Approaches, New Contexts," focused on a wide range of topics that might reveal ne…
The Enlightenment and Genocide
The Enlightenment and Genocide ]ohn Docker . . . with the Enlightenment came the enthronement of me new deity, that of Nature, together with the legitimation of science as its only orthodox cult, and of scientists as its prophets and priests. Everything, in principle, had been opened to objective inquiry; everything could, in principle, be known—reliably and truly. —Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust Genocide has two phases: one, destruc…
The enlightenment, genocide, postmodernity
(2003). The enlightenment, genocide, postmodernity. Journal of Genocide Research: Vol. 5, No. 3, pp. 339-360
The Challenge of Post-Zionism: Review
The Challenge of Post-Zionism: Review John Docker (bio) Review of: Ephraim Nimni, ed., The Challenge of Post-Zionism: Alternatives to Israeli Fundamentalist Politics (Zed Books, London and New York, 2003). (This review is dedicated to the memory of Edward W. Said, who died 24 September 2003) For political theory exploring how always-unsettled settler-colonial societies contemplate and rework and reinterpret their creation stories, Ephraim Nimni’s…
Re-‘Femminising’ Diaspora: Contemporary Jewish Cultural Studies and Post-Zionism
This essay creates a conversation between diaspora theory, the New Jewish Cultural Studies, post-Zionism, and colonialism. In this conversation, I focus on Jonathan Boyarin and Daniel Boyarin's Powers of Diaspora (2002), new thinking about Josephus, the myth of Masada, and rabbinic Judaism in antiquity, and on Ephraim Nimni's collection The Challenge of Post-Zionism (2003). The essay discusses the question of gender in Zionist mythology. It also …
Cosmopolitan Conversations: Settler Societies, Education and Decolonisation
In 1967, as the June Arab-Israeli war was ending, Maxime Rodinson, the noted French Jewish scholar of Islam and the Middle East (who died in 2004), published a remarkable essay 'Israel: A Colonial-Settler State?' as a supplement to a special number of Sartre's Les Temps Modernes.With characteristic intellectual power, clarity, and wit, Rodinson convincingly argued that Israel can be defi ned as a settler-colonial state established 'on Palestinian…
Books
Civil Rights: How Indigenous Australians Won Formal Equality. By John Chesterman. Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 2005. Pp. 357. $22.95 paper. Dance Hall and Picture Palace: Sydney's Romance with Modernity. By Jill Julius Matthews. Sydney: Currency Press, 2005. Pp. 342. $32.95 paper. Conciliation, Compulsion, Conversion: British Attitudes to Indigenous Peoples 1763–1814. By Merete Falck Borch. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004. Pp. 320. US$43 pap…
Is History Fiction
An Early Holocaust Novel: White’s Riders in the Chariot , a Critique
Patrick White’s novel Riders in the Chariot (1961) can be regarded as a contribution to Holocaust literature, broadly defined. The novel features as one of its main characters Mordecai Himmelfarb, a Holocaust survivor, who makes his way from Germany, via Palestine, to Australia. In a comparison with Joyce’s Ulysses, with its anti-essentialising construction of the complex consciousness of Bloom, Riders in the Chariot is revealed to be essentialis…
Transnational Ties: Australian Lives in the World
Australian lives are intricately enmeshed with the world, bound by ties of allegiance and affinity, intellect and imagination. In Transnational Ties: Australian Lives in the World, an eclectic mix of scholars-historians, literary critics, and museologists-trace the flow of people that helped shape Australia's distinctive character and the flow of ideas that connected
Sociology (29 works) · History (27 works) · Philosophy (20 works) · Art (19 works) · Political science (19 works) · Law (18 works) · History (15 works) · Philosophy (12 works) · Aesthetics (11 works) · Australian History and Society (11 works)