Given Australia's status as an (unfinished) colonial project of the British Empire, the basic institutions that were installed in its so-called 'empty' landscape derive from a value-laden framework borne out of industrialization, colonialism, the consolidation of the national statist system and democracy - all entities imbued with British Enlightenment principles and thinking. Modernity in Australia has thus been constituted by the importation, assumption and triumph of the Western mind - materially, psychologically, culturally, socio-legally and cartographically. 'Inside Australian Culture: Legacies of Enlightenment Values' offers a critical intervention into the continuing effects of colonization in Australia and the structures it brought, which still inform and dominate its public culture. Through a careful analysis of three disparate but significant moments in Australian history, the authors investigate the way the British Enlightenment continues to dominate contemporary Australian thinking and values. Employing the lens of Indian cultural theorist Ashis Nandy, the authors argue for an Australian public culture that is profoundly conscious of its assumptions, history and limitations.

Breakfast with Evil and Other Risky Ventures is a pre-emptive attempt to bring together the scattered writings of Ashis Nandy over his entire span of writing career and scan those scattered lectures, interviews, and writings including essays and columns for newspapers and journals for an in-depth analytical study. As the author himself explains, these are not his musings on static, time-bound issues, rather they capture how he confronts and negotiates the living past in the political, social, and cultural landscape of South Asia-starting from the manmade famine of 1943 to the Partition and freedom of India and the birth of Pakistan in 1947, the Bangladesh War in 1971, and the protracted civil war in Sri Lanka (1983-2009). The essays, often written as forewords to other scholars' works, straddle languages, systems of knowledge, and forms of voice and silence. Nandy attempts to identify a critical and intellectual strategy for survival in the Third World. He establishes that though a traumatic ambience-marred by aggressive development, instant nationalisms, or the brutalizing spectacles of modern nation-states-numbs one's imagination, it can also lead to new worldviews and multiple creative forms of resistance.

The word barbarian is derived from the Greek term 'barbaroi' - or one who cannot speak Greek. As the Greeks believed that language was the tool of reason, non-Greek speakers, therefore, were considered devoid of the facility to reason or to act according to logic. This concept of barbarism in turn shaped the early anthropological observations of Columbus and the first European visitors to the Americas. Barbaric Others examines the convenient myopia which through the ages has allowed - and continues to allow - the West to see other peoples as 'barbarians', infidels, even savages'. In the book, the authors present a succinct history of racism, xenophobia and the concept of 'otherness' from ancient Greece to the present day. Topics covered include the representation of the other' in mythology, the mediaeval fascination with demons and the idea of the wild man, a critical overview of Columbus and 15th century exploration and the 'other' as colonial subject.

This book deals with an important and too-often ignored area of cultural studies. To examine the enormous industry of Indian popular cinema is to study Indian modernity at its very rawest. The questions and perspectives this book presents provoke a thinking of cinema that is political in the widest sense - from cinemas importance in ideas of nation and national cultural formation to psycho-social perspectives on identity, class and gender.
The contributors deal with a range of themes from the metaphor of the slum as a defining cultural phenomenon to personal reflections on the political meanings and strategies of South Asian film, from Tamil blockbusters to the intrinsic ineffectivity of TV as a propagator of state ideology. Whilst the book is essential reading for students and academics of film, media and of South Asian studies. It will also fascinate anyone with an interest in the genuinely global phenomenon of South Asian cinema.

In this collection of essays, Ashis Nandy uses the metaphor of the future -- imagined utopias, conceptions of cultural possibilities, social critiques of things to come - to redefine the present. Nandy's effort is to demonstrate that, in a world increasingly dominated by a narrow range of ideologies, one must affirm that social ethics and a more humane society can be based on grounds other than those framed for the past 200 years by political and psychological forces that have tried to flatten and homogenize the world and reduce the possibility of diverse futures. Nandy critiques the Enlightenment and the limited ideas of 'reason, ' 'progress' and 'development' given shape in Europe. He insists that we own up to our responsibility for alternative systems of knowledge at points in time 'when human beings turn emancipatory ideas, ideologies, and categories into new tools of violence and oppression.'