Subtexts Australian rabble-rouser Clive Hamilton comes to the Lensic
A rabble-rouser for the 21st century: Clive Hamilton
Clive Hamilton, one of Australia’s best known public intellectuals and a professor of public ethics at Charles Sturt University, has been sounding the alarm bell for many years about a wide variety of subjects. His most recent book, Silent Invasion: China’s Influence
in Australia (Hardie Grant, 2018), was so controversial that three publishers backed out of releasing it out of fear of reprisal from the Chinese government. Silent Invasion details Hamilton’s investigation of what he believes to be Communist China’s infiltration of Australian politics, real estate, agriculture, universities, and unions. Australian media has criticized his approach as potentially oppressive of Chinese living in Australia. “He wants to ban organisations ... such as the Chinese Students and Scholars Associations, and reject ... residency applications from anyone who participates in ‘patriotic agitation’ while studying here,” writes David Brophy of Australian Book Review. “By Hamilton’s broad definitions of pro-People’s Republic of China activism, this would cast
suspicion on anyone who has ever cheered for a visiting politician from Beijing or been snapped glad-handing the local PRC consul. If implemented, Hamilton’s residency blacklist would license a form of red-baiting far more intense than any Cold War snooping in Australia’s Chinatowns.”
In 2017’s Defiant Earth: The Fate of Humans in the
Anthropocene (Polity), Hamilton excoriates academics in the humanities and social sciences for their denial of earth science and their “humans-only” absorption “in representations of reality derived from media, encouraging us to view the ecological crisis as a spectacle that takes place outside the bubble of our existence.”
Hamilton’s earlier works include What Do We Want? The Story of Protest in Australia (National Library of Australia, 2016) and Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth About Climate Change (Routledge, 2010). Hamilton discusses his work with Indiana University religious studies professor Lisa Sideris, author of Consecrating Science: Wonder, Knowledge, and the Natural World (University of California Press, 2017), as part of the Lannan Foundation’s In Pursuit of Cultural Freedom series at 7 p.m. Wednesday, May 2, at the Lensic Performing Arts Center (211 W. San Francisco St.). Tickets are $8 ($5 for students and seniors), ticketssantafe.org.
— Jennifer Levin