“Back in the heartland”: Seamus Heaney's “Route 110” sequence in Human Chain

This essay foregrounds the increasingly significant role translation has played in Seamus Heaney's compositional and creative practices since the 1970s, and how it functions as a means of displacement and route into imagined homecomings. It offers a detailed analysis of the sequence which occupies a central position within Human Chain, in which Heaney HeaneySeamusStations. Belfast: Ulsterman Publications, 1975. [Google Scholar] attends to and seeks to reconcile once more the different “voices of my education”, that of originary familial/parish culture of Mossbawn and Bellaghy, and that acquired at St Columb's College and Queen's University that furnished him with rich linguistic and cultural assets, but sentenced him also to a “migrant solitude” (“The Wanderer”, Stations). “Route 110” illustrates the enduring effects of both bequests, as Heaney takes scenes and motifs from Virgil's Aeneid, Book VI, which details Aeneas' experiences on his descent into the seventieth year, Heaney takes readers with him on a road back to pre-Troubles Northern Ireland in the mid-twentieth century, stopping off initially at Smithfield Market, Belfast, in order to pick up a “used copy” of the Virgil that will become his guide. What he subsequently assembles is an album of snapshots of his youth, part of his legacy to his newly-born granddaughter.     

Fallout from the thunder: poetry and politics in Seamus Heaney's District and Circle

This article examines Heaney's preoccupation in District and Circle (2006) with international political events during this ‘new age of anxiety’, and how he initially approaches these circuitously through a return to originary, boyhood experiences. Such momentous acts as the attacks of 9/ll, the ‘War on Terror’ and the London bombings are filtered through, juxtaposed with and illuminated by episodes both from the ancient past and Heaney's family history. In attendance, as always, throughout the latest volume is the poet's diverse literary ancestry, a reminder of how his work exemplifies core claims made in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919), where Eliot argues that ‘what makes the writer most acutely conscious of his own place in time’ is ‘the historical sense’, ‘a feeling for the whole of literature’ from Homer onwards. Thus, alongside its detailed address to politics and such crucial literary matters as structure, form and metaphor, the essay repeatedly returns to the intertextual ‘presences’ which haunt and animate Heaney's continuing creative project.     

Book reviews

H.E. Chehabi and Alfred Stepan (eds). Politics, Society and Democracy. Boulder: Westview Press, 1995. xxii + 414 pp. $US64.95.

Ronald Rogowski (ed.). Comparative Politics and the International Political Economy Vols I & II. Hants: Edward Elgar, 1995. xxi + 992 pp. £170.00 (cloth).

Martin Wight. International Theory: The Three Traditions. Edited by Gabriele Wight and Brian Porter. London: Leicester University Press, 1994. xxvii + 286 pp. No price given.

Martin Shaw. Global Society and International Relations. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994. vii + 197 pp. £UK39.50 (cloth). £UK11.95 (paper).

Alvin and Heidi Toffler. War and Anti‐War: Survival at the Dawn of the 21st Century. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1993. xiii + 302 pp. $US22.95 (paper).

Coral Bell (ed.). The United Nations and Crisis Management: Six Studies. Canberra: Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, Australian National University, 1994. 144 pp. $17.50 (paper).

Kevin Dements and Christine Wilson (eds). UN Peacekeeping at the Crossroads. Canberra: Peace Research Centre, Australian National University, 1994. xi + 176 pp. $15.00 (paper).

Rosemary Righter. Utopia Lost—The United Nations and World Order. New York: The Twentieth Century Fund Press, 1995. x + 421 pp. $US29.95 (cloth).

Kevin Clements and Robin Ward (eds). Building International Community: Co‐operating for Peace Case Studies. St Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1994. xiv + 354 pp. $19.95 (paper).

International Commission on Peace and Food. Uncommon Opportunities—An Agenda for Peace and Equitable Development. London: Zed Books, 1994. xiii + 210 pp. $19.95 (paper), $55.00 (cloth).

Jonathan Dean. Ending Europe's War: The Continuing Search for Peace and Security. New York: Twentieth Century Fund Press, 1994. xv + 439 pp. $US34.95 (cloth).

G. Wyn Rees (ed.). International Politics in Europe: The New Agenda. London: Routledge, 1993. viii + 191 pp. $32.95 (paper).

Hugh Miall (ed.). Minority Rights in Europe: The Scope for a Transnational Regime. London: Pinter, 1994. 120 pp. No price given.

Geoffrey Ponton. The Soviet Era: Soviet Politics from Lenin to Yeltsin. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1994. viii + 293 pp. $39.95 (paper).

Russell Trood and Deborah McNamara (eds). The Asia‐Australia Survey 1994. South Melbourne: Macmillan, 1994. xi + 340 pp. $79.95 (cloth).

Sheldon W. Simon (ed.). East Asian Security in the Post‐Cold War Era. Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 1993. x + 230 pp. No price given.

Robert S. McNamara (with Brian Van DeMark). In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam. New York: Random House, 1995. xviii + 414 pp. $US27.50 (cloth).

Donald Kirk. Korean Dynasty. Hyundai and Chung Ju Yung. Hong Kong: Asia 2000/Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 1994. 383 pp. $US25.00 (paper), $US65.00 (cloth).

Pradeep Taneja. Hong Kong and Australia: Towards 1997 and Beyond. Australia‐Asia Papers, Number 70. CSAAR, Brisbane: Griffith University, 1994. 40 pp. $8.00.

Ming K. Chan (ed.). Precarious Balance: Hong Kong Between China and Britain 1842–1992. Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 1994. xi + 235 pp. $US22.00 (paper), $US55.00 (cloth).

Shinya Sugiyama and Milagros C. Guerrero (eds). International Commercial Rivalry in Southeast Asia in the Interwar Period. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale Center for International and Area Studies, 1994. ix + 222 pp. No price given.

Sarvepalli Gopal (ed.). Anatomy of a Confrontation: Ayodhya and the Rise of Communal Politics in India. London: Zed Books, 1994. viii + 240 pp. £9.95 (paper), £29.95 (cloth).

Richard Evans. Deng Xiaoping and the Making of Modern China. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1993. x + 339 pp. $39.95 (cloth).

Virginia Matheson Hooker (ed.). Culture and Society in New Order Indonesia. Kuala Lumpur Oxford University Press, 1993. xxiii + 302 pp. $49.95 (cloth).

Howard Dick, James Fox and Jamie Mackie (eds). Balanced Development: East Java in the New Order. Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1993. xxi + 367 pp. $64.95 (cloth).

Young Whan Kihl (ed.). Korea and the World: Beyond the Cold War. Boulder Colorado: Westview Press, 1994. xii + 371 pp. $21.95 (paper), $64.00 (cloth).

Christopher Tremewan. The Political Economy of Social Control in Singapore. New York: St Martin's Press, 1994. 252 pp. $88.00.

Francis T. Seow. To Catch a Tartar: A Dissident in Lee Kuan Yew's Prison. Monograph 42, New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Southeast Asian Studies, 1994. xxxiii + 293 pp. $50.00.

Anthony Milner. The Invention of Politics in Colonial Malaya: Contesting Nationalism and the Expansion of the Public Sphere. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. vii + 328 pp. $75.00 (cloth).

David McKnight. Australia's Spies and Their Secrets. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1994. xvii + 350 pp. $24.95 (paper).

Fiona Capp. Writers Defiled: Security Surveillance of Australian Authors and Intellectuals 1920–1960. Ringwood, Victoria: McPhee Gribble, 1993. 239 pp. No price given.

Errol Hodge. Radio Wars. Truth, Propaganda and the Struggle for Radio Australia. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. 336 pp. $75.00 (cloth), $29.95 (paper).

Joan Beaumont (ed.). Australia's War 1914–18. St. Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1995. xxii + 195 pp. $19.95 (paper).

Peter Jennings. Searching for Insecurity: Why the ‘Secure Australia Project’ is Wrong About Defence. West Perth: Institute of Public Affairs, 1994. vi + 68 pp. $14.00 (paper).

Bjorn Hagelin. Arm in Arm: Swedish‐Australian Military Trade and Cooperation. Canberra: Peace Research Centre Monograph No.15, Australian National University, 1994. x + 164 pp. $15.00.     

Australian political studies and the production of disciplinary innocence

ABSTRACT

While Australian political studies often appears to have neglected engagements with Indigenous peoples and politics, we argue this is not a simple question of omission. In fact, the discipline is deeply implicated in imperial knowledge production and the authorisation of racialised colonial governance. As non-Indigenous scholars working within Australian political studies, in this paper we reflect on our own discipline in light of several decades of critical scholarship, identifying the production of disciplinary innocence through a theoretical and institutional analysis of Australian political studies knowledge practices. We explore this production via canonical knowledges, institutional processes that contain Indigenous people and knowledge to subjects of policy, and the operation of disciplinary divisions which neutralise scholarship on policy and political institutions.     

The politics of repressing environmentalists as agents of foreign influence

Theoretically, this article reveals the long-term risk for local non-governmental organisations (NGOs) of participating in transnational advocacy networks (TANs), accepting money from foreign sources and throwing ‘boomerangs’ internationally—a strategy used by local NGOs to seek international allies to pressure repressive and unresponsive states at home. Focusing primarily on the suppression of environmental NGOs that oppose natural-resource extraction, this article examines three cases—Russia, India and Australia—to illuminate the consequences of this trend for local civil society and TANs. It also documents a global trend towards states depicting local NGOs with international linkages as subversive agents of foreign interests, justifying legal crackdowns and the severing of foreign funding and ties. State framing of NGOs as agents of foreign interests is repressing local environmental activism, depoliticising civil society and weakening international NGO alliances—a conclusion with far-reaching consequences for the future of TANs, local NGOs and environmental activism.     

Student experiences of multidisciplinarity in the undergraduate geography curriculum

This paper explores the student experience of multidisciplinarity within the undergraduate Geography curriculum. It considers the drivers that have underpinned this development before considering the findings of research into student experiences in two universities in the south of England. The results suggest that most students view this development positively and recognize a number of advantages that it brings, citing expanded opportunities for learning, working with people from other disciplines, expansion of perspectives and perceived benefits to employability. However, for a minority this development is more problematic. The research points here to issues with specialist knowledge and disciplinary pedagogies, social issues within the classroom and class organization and some reservations regarding groupwork. The paper concludes with a series of recommendations.