AustLit

'I am a cultural historian, which I feel gives me a licence to wander. Over the decades I have been interested in literary and cultural theory, popular culture, postmodernism and poststructuralism, monotheism and polytheism, diaspora, historiography, Jewish identity, and Gandhian non-violence. I have always written personally, mixing theory and analysis with life stories and family history, and am currently writing an ego-histoire, Growing Up Communist and Jewish in Bondi: Memoir of a non-Australian Australian. Since the mid-1980s, I have written critiques of Zionist nationalism and settler colonialism, and reflected on partition in Palestine and India, and Martin Buber’s idea of a bi-national Palestine. I have devoted the last several years to genocide and massacre studies, exploring Raphaël Lemkin’s suggestion in his originating definition in 1944 that genocide is constitutively linked to settler colonialism (Docker 2008a, 2012b). My most recent books are The Origins of Violence: Religion, History and Genocide (Docker 2008b) and (with Ann Curthoys), Is History Fiction? (Docker & Curthoys 2006).'  (Introduction)