On the Ground / In the Flux of the World

Arena Quarterly no. 16 carries features on the internal political background to the Ukraine war, the reorientation of China’s economic program, the calamitous history of recent US wars, and an editorial on Gaza. Back home, arguments for the virtues of white civilisation and teaching it are countered in a history of Nordic supremacist and Nazi thinking in the humanities at Melbourne University. At the heart of this edition is a special section on the contemporary self. Featuring five in-depth essays on how the person is shaped today, these reflect on the consequences of the pandemic for families, youth and ‘mental health’; the trauma of Aboriginal youth in Alice Springs; the fate of family therapy; the entwinement of philosophy in the constructed self; and new developments in culture and society that have led to an ungrounding of the self and distinctive forms of despair. Then there’s the Spanish Civil war, cannibal capitalism, East Timor, the work of Alan Garner, and reviews and poetry.