James Donald

• UNSW Sydney

This is a publication of the Q&A session that followed Quentin Skin­ner's lecture. He was asked to reflect on variations of dependence (as an alternative to using a general notion of dependence); to comment on the application of his (positive) notion of freedom to cases where the outcome of the struggle for freedom is a different kind of unfreedom;...

The idea of jazz modernism has two dimensions. The first is the acknowledgement that musicians such as Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Fats Waller deserve recognition for developing jazz into a modernist art music, comparable within its own genre to the innovations of modernists in other fields and media: "To call Armstrong, Waller, et al., 'm...

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This article stages a dialogue between cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism in order to think through what is at stake in demands that universities should produce graduates who are sensitive to social diversity and attuned to the contemporary realities of globalisation. The argument is that, although ‘graduate attributes’ are no doubt an effective...

For many years, the film Borderline, made in 1930, was a largely inaccessible object of scholarly fascination, with copies locked away in a few archives around the world and seldom screened in public. For historians of avant-garde and experimental film-making, it represented a last, forlorn hurrah from the modernism of the 1920s, which had hoped th...

The borderline has the air of a place where the uncanny belongs: an intermediate and uneasy zone between different states, a no-man’s-land both politically and existentially. The spatial metaphor does not altogether fit, however, at least not in thinking about Freud’s 1919 essay on ‘The “Uncanny”’. In good Kantian fashion, Freud’s aim there is to d...

Is it wise to structure critical discussion of the media around a normative ideal of publicness? This article suggests some potential problems by re-examining Kant’s conception of the public use of reason, primarily as articulated in his newspaper article, “An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?” (1784). Kant’s account of the enthusiasm...

An engaging look at the cultural legacy of the twentieth-century city and how it affects our ideas of community and democracy. Paris, Berlin, London, Singapore, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles--these define "the city" in the world's consciousness. James Donald takes us on a psychic journey to these places that have inspired artists, writers, archite...

This book is reviewed as an example of the manner in which cultural critique approaches the question of the formation and regulation of personal capacities and conducts. Despite its sophistication and power, it is argued that the dialectical character of this critique leaves it incapable of interrogating its two central objects: subjectivity and go...

The particular clashes and skirmishes of the ‘Great Debate’ may be over now, but it’s hard not to hear that the education system is still ‘in crisis’. The administrative machinery of funding, examinations and school government is being stripped down and reassembled. The Tory Right still raises the occasional brouhaha about ‘standards’. Battered gro...

When I was invited to organise and chair a series of talks on psychoanalysis and cultural theory at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, my first reaction was to reach for my address book and suggest better qualified alternatives. Then I hesitated. After all, wasn’t the folk hero of this Thatcherite age the ill-starred brickie Yosser Hughe...

The transactions between the social and the psychical, between history and the unconscious, remain one of the most tantalising enigmas in the human sciences. In the past, the competing explanations offered by psychoanalysis and by cultural studies have led to mutual incomprehension, uncritical partisanship or outright rejection. The contributors to...

The agenda of the Education Reform Act (1988) and the White Paper Broadcasting in the '90s: Competition, Choice and Quality is to reorganise the way that the social goods of education and broadcasting are dis tributed, and so to change the ways in which govemment/citizen relations are instituted and regulated. Much of the opposition to these change...

In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the conjunction of fairly widespread literacy with a new radical political discourse produced a powerful cultural movement in England. In responding to it, the ruling bloc devised new modes of ideological intervention that had significant effects on the shape of the emerging state apparatus. By the time th...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Open University, 1989.