Peter Beilharz Visit to EMU
It’s a Long Way from Melbourne to Michigan: Models of Modernity?
On October 21, 2024, The Workshop had the pleasure of hosting Dr. Peter Beilharz for a thought-provoking lecture titled It’s a Long Way from Melbourne to Michigan: Models of Modernity?, exploring the cultural and historical intersections between the United States and Australia.
The event description was as follows: It’s a long way... ten thousand miles, actually. A bit too far to drive. Yet the USA and Australia are also intimates, sharing a cultural universe, or parallel models of modernity. Americanism became the global dominant of the twentieth century. Bauman called it Solid Modernity. Its core was Fordism. As there are different models of modernity, or multiple modernities, so there are multiple fordisms.
Melbourne and Michigan mirror each other and the fields of modernity and modernism. Viewed in the shadow of Detroit, Australia may appear as a lazy Fordism; an agricultural Fordsonism, or even as Holdenism, sponsored by the iconic local vehicle build via GM from 1948.
Let’s take a tour. Our road trip itinerary has five main stops with a series of visuals which seek to connect the personal, or autobiographical, to the cultural and historical.
Peter Beilharz is Professor of Critical Theory at Sichuan University in China. He has held chairs at
Curtin, at the Bauman Institute at Leeds and STIAS in South Africa, is Fellow in Cultural Sociology at Yale, and was Professor of Australian Studies, Harvard. He was Professor of Sociology at La Trobe for many years, and remains Emeritus there. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Social Sciences. All this began with high school teaching.
He founded the journal Thesis Eleven in 1980, and now acts as its Founding Editor. He was
director of the Thesis Eleven Centre 2004-12. For a glimpse, see his Festschrift, Thesis Eleven #179, 2023; or his webpage, https://peterbeilharz.squarespace.com
He has published 32 books and hundreds of papers and reviews. Monographs include Trotsky, Trotskyism and the Transition to Socialism (1987), Labour's Utopias – Bolshevism, Fabianism, Social Democracy (1992), Transforming Labor (1994), Postmodern Socialism (1994), Imagining the Antipodes (1997), Zygmunt Bauman (2000), Intimacy in Postmodern Times (2020), and Chain's Toward the Blues (2023).
