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1. early 14c., ‘great, superior, supreme’, from Old French soverain ‘highest, supreme, chief’, from Vulgar Latin *superanus ‘chief, principal’ (source also of Spanish soberano, Italian soprano), from Latin super ‘over’ 2. of remedies of medicines, ‘potent in high degree’ We talk about sovereignty a lot. We demand it be recognised and we have it on our T-shirts and so forth. But what is it really? If you trace it back far enough you get to a Latin root, super, meaning ‘over’. So sovereignty in the English language really means being on top. Being the one with the power. ‘Highest, supreme or […]

Dang, sorry. This is only available to a Meanjin subscriber. But we can fix that. It’s just $80 for print or $50 for digital. DIGITAL PRINT

Dang, sorry. This is only available to a Meanjin subscriber. But we can fix that. It’s just $80 for print or $50 for digital. DIGITAL PRINT

Dang, sorry. This is only available to a Meanjin subscriber. But we can fix that. It’s just $80 for print or $50 for digital. DIGITAL PRINT

Dang, sorry. This is only available to a Meanjin subscriber. But we can fix that. It’s just $80 for print or $50 for digital. DIGITAL PRINT

Dang, sorry. This is only available to a Meanjin subscriber. But we can fix that. It’s just $80 for print or $50 for digital. DIGITAL PRINT

Tracing the Metaphors of Settler Amnesia   In memory of those who watch and wait Settler societies are inherently unable to reconcile themselves with their beginnings. The settler praxis is defined by endless acts of self-affirming replication and cost-cutting forgetfulness. In the metropole, memorials to empire builders are, of late, battle grounds of memory fought in the press and academe. On the old frontiers the waves of these controversies are only ripples. In the shadowy nave of the old St John’s church at Wilberforce there is an obscure and nameless memorial window that illuminates the inherent flaws in the settler […]

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Lying in bed one evening, a small boy is entranced by a piece of music on the radio. Listening late into the night, he waits to hear the name of the work. He scribbles it down on a piece of paper—a jumble of misspellings—and takes it to a music shop in the city. The recording is Götterdämmerung. In the late 1960s, the same boy, now 12 years old, buys a book on Greek sculpture with money that he has earned working in a milk bar in an outer-eastern suburb of Melbourne. The child grows up to make dramatic images of […]

A primer on non-binary actualities and individualism Down Under In the early 1990s, ‘transgender’ was repurposed by various groups of transsexuals in the US to basically include anyone whose gender expression was non-conforming with society’s expectations. —b. binaohan, decolonizing trans/gender 101 I sat in a courtyard talking with a friend, a heater crackling somewhere to our upper right, the flame stark against my cheek. The chatter before it was otherwise mundane, but it was there, in a split second of revelation amid the same conversation, that the tiny breakthrough suddenly came: ‘Masculinity is so much more rigid,’ she offered. ‘There […]