Is there anything left to say about Hollywood? Thomas Elsaesser’s monumental compilation of twenty-three densely argued essays written during the last four decades, The Persistence of Hollywood, provides a straightforward, at times overwhelming answer: Yes. Elsaesser’s summary work also makes a strong argument for a lifelong engagement with Hollywood that stretches from the development and ‘genius’ of what is now commonly called the classical studio era to the contemporary blockbuster and its attendant practices of truly globalised film-making. Elsaesser’s pithy title refers to both his own continuing interest in Hollywood past and present and the remarkable ‘persistence’ and longevity of this profoundly dominant film-making system. The range of Elsaesser’s enquiry and his command of the various strands of film theory that have emerged since the 1960s are often breathtaking, and clearly illustrate the author’s importance to the field, particularly as a barometer or synthesiser of dominant and fashionable ideas and critical approaches.

The familiar triumvirate of globalisation, advanced technology and consumerism has altered feminist, activist and subcultural practices so dramatically that their originators have trouble recognising them, and academics are racing to keep up. Next Wave Cultures acknowledges and embraces these upheavals in women’s social and political action. Anita Harris has selected a motley group of eleven essays that cover a diverse range of lifestyles, identities, communities and activities.

Written by Marnie Hughes-Warrington, of Macquarie University, this is essentially a text for both students and teachers studying ‘historiography’, which, according to my dictionary, is writing about history, rather than historians ‘making’ history, as is sometimes said here. Enthusiasm for the first edition of Fifty Key Thinkers on History (2000) has brought forth this new edition and shifted its emphasis more towards ‘historiography’. Indeed, a new introduction – ‘What Is Historiography?’ – suggests four different approaches to the subject.

The title of Richard J. Lane’s guidebook contains a small allusion to the changes that have occurred in literary studies over the past half-century. There was a time when universities trained critics; these days, everyone is a theorist.

The intrinsic quality of a state is, in the final instance, determined by that which guarantees its claim to authority. In the case of Indonesia, such guarantee is its military, the Tentara Nasional Indonesia (TNI), while the rebellious, resource-rich province of Aceh has arguably been the site of its most concerted effort. At a time when Western political leaders and most Indonesia scholars champion Indonesia’s procedural democracy, despite a reduced political capacity, the TNI structurally remains the institution that it was. As a result, studying the role of the TNI in Aceh reveals critical insights into continuing aspects of the Indonesian state.

Through the significant cultural presence of Heart of Darkness, I am regularly confronted with the work of Joseph Conrad in my everyday life: an elephant in Disney’s Tarzan exclaims ‘the horror’ at the sight of a human camp; a young man reads the novella on a ship bound for Skull Island in the latest King Kong; and, during the fortnight while I am writing this review, Radio National is broadcasting a serialised reading of the novella each afternoon. In Postcolonial Conrad: Paradoxes of Empire, Terry Collits wonders ‘how … we may read and understand Conrad nowadays’. With so many cultural claims to just one Conradian text, such a question is timely.

Australians have been experiencing ‘intensified globalisation’ in the last twenty years. That is, our political leaders, ‘under the sway of neo-liberal ideology’, have made decisions that have ‘intensified’ the ‘widening, deepening and speeding up of worldwide inter- connectedness in all aspects of contemporary social life’ (David Held). They have curbed the influence of arbitration and promoted enterprise bargaining and individual contracts. They have deregulated banking and capital flows, and reduced tariff protection. They have made the tax system less progressive. They have reduced spending on social welfare. And they have privatised and corporatised many government services and utilities. Moran, preoccupied with political economy, tends to take as given the technological features of ‘intensified globalisation’ (the indexer saw no reason to include ‘computer’, ‘telephone’ or ‘Internet’). His sense of globalisation resembles Paul Kelly’s account of the dissolution of the Australian Settlement. With Australians becoming more ethnically diverse and less economically secure, there are ‘feelings of vulnerability and disorientation among the populace’.

Multiculturalism has been in a state of political and theoretical decline for more than a decade. Sneja Gunew’s latest book addresses this loss of political commitment and theoretical engagement with one of the most challenging issues of contemporary society. Her effort to reposition the debate is based on the belief that it is necessary to establish new comparative studies of multiculturalism. In the past, multiculturalism was trapped within a national discourse on identity and rights. This tended to confine debate to pragmatic accounts of social policy, folkloric versions of culture and the classic liberal definition of citizenship. Gunew argues that this approach is inadequate given the global flows and transnational links of diasporic communities. Today, multiculturalism needs to be grasped as a process that is both situated in a specific setting and connected to broader forces. In the context of globalisation, the understanding of multiculturalism requires a more complex model of cultural dynamics and social agency.

Frank Coaldrake was a significant figure in the history of the Anglican Church in Australia: a founding member of the National Union of Australian University Students; active in the Student Christian Movement; a member of the Bush Brotherhood, which ministered to indigenous Australians in outback Queensland; active in the Brotherhood of St Lawrence in Depression-era Melbourne; President of the Federal Pacifist Council of Australia; a missionary to Japan in the early post-World War II years; Chair of the Australian Board of Missions (ABM) from 1956; and elected as Archbishop of Brisbane in 1970, but tragically passing away before effectively taking up this office.

The privileges of artistic ambiguity have been stretched a little by the publishers in choosing such a broad subtitle for this work. So, as the author does, let’s clarify what Erotic Ambiguities is about: ‘While focusing on the female body in art, this book considers the way in which visual art produced by women was informed by feminism.’ This statement, as it turns out, is also not entirely true, as some works by male artists are discussed and the author does not limit herself to literal depictions of the human form. Furthermore, feminism is acknowledged as too loose a term and McDonald clarifies her territory by adding ‘contemporary feminism is a coalition of various conflicting feminisms that are neither co-existive nor independent’.