'‘Security’ is a multifarious notion. Its connotations bounce off in so many directions. Its implicit meanings and our anxiety about it bubble up from so many layers and recesses in our personal and social being. In the present context of nasty little wars around the globe and in the face of climate change, ‘security’ is now adumbrated in a new academic discipline—‘human security’; security is rapidly being technologised as ‘securitisation’ for states, like Israel and America, with unruly populaces; and everywhere there is a sense of ontological destabilisation—via, on the one hand, terror brought home to the West and, on the other, via capitalism’s own core engine of ‘creative destruction’, at the heart of ‘growth’ and ‘innovation’ and leading us who knows exactly where.' (Editorial introduction)
Contents indexed selectively.
' 'Remember', wrote Peter Carey in his 2003 novel 'My Life as a Fake', 'this is the country of the duck-billed platypus. When you are cut off from the rest of the world, things are bound to develop in interesting ways'. Well, yes, of course 'things' are bound to 'develop'. But what does 'interesting' mean? The arrival on Broadway of the Sydney Theatre Company (STC) adaptation of Anton Chekhov's unnamed and unpublished text as 'The Present' is indeed 'interesting', in the way Peter Carey almost always suggests in his work: 'interesting' in that socially discounted way that reduces culture to its banalities while amplifying a kind of Antipodean inadequacy.' (Publication abstract)
