The aim of the 2008 Rhizomes IV Conference held at the University of Queensland was to provide an opportunity for scholars working within the Humanities and Social Sciences to engage in an interdisciplinary dialogue on the theme of Power, Violence and Language. It sought to encourage the elaboration of varied perspectives on one or more of these themes from a range of disciplines in order to offer an opportunity for in-depth collective discussion of issues, questions and outlooks.

Such was the aim of the conference and in its execution it must be said that expectations were not left wanting. The range of disciplines which were presented was both extensive and fascinating.

In a hope of avoiding redundancy, rather than outline the papers here, for which I could not do justice to the works within, I would much rather mention some of the people without whom the conference or this Issue could not have been possible.

Firstly, I have to extend my gratitude to Annie Pohlman, without her help and experience there would not have been a Rhizomes Conference in any shape. To the rest of the Organising Committee and to the staff at the School of Languages and Comparative Cultural Studies, a warm thank you for all your help.

Secondly to the editorial board of Crossroads, for their dedicated efforts to bring this Issue forth, especially to Julie Washington, Sheldon Peters and Matt Lamb.

Lastly I have to thank all of those who attended the conference, and the authors who contributed their work to this issue. It was a real pleasure to meet many of you.

Matthew Martinez

Guest Editor

This is the second Special Issue to be published by Crossroads. The twelve articles presented here were generated by the Rhizomes IV Conference held at the University of Queensland from 14th - 15th February 2008 on the theme of Power, Violence and Language.

We are indebted to Matthew Martinez, a co-chair of the conference and former member of the Crossroads Editorial Board, for his work as the Guest Editor for this issue. It takes a great deal of time, effort and dedication to put such a publication together from consulting with the authors to proof reading and formatting final versions. We are sure that readers will enjoy the diversity and scholarship found in this Special Issue.

Julie Washington

Chair of the Editorial Board

In this fifth issue of Crossroads we publish general articles on modern Arabic poetry, the European Constitution, Ricoeur's theory of hermeneutics and Heidegger's philosophy on art. This issue also publishes essays written by those who were awarded places and commendations in the inaugural Annual Crossroads Short Essay Competition. This competition was only open to students at the University of Queensland who had completed at least two subjects in any one of the four disciplines covered by the journal. Our normal reviewing procedure involves a double blind peer review protocol, however for the essay competition entries we used a non-blind peer review process involving all ten of the then Board members, certainly a rigorous procedure in its own right. Judging was a challenging task due to the calibre of the entries. Initially we planned to publish only the top ranked five in each of the two categories - undergraduate and postgraduate - however it was difficult to separate the undergraduate entries and decided to award four commendations, and so we publish eleven short essays in total. The UQ Book Shop kindly donated book vouchers as prizes for first, second and third in each of the two categories.

The statistics show that Crossroads is growing at a dramatic rate. We have reached 8th place on the Google international website out of over 30 million entries; and 3rd on the Australian version of the site out of 390,000 - more than impressive we believe. And although the Australian Research Council ERA rankings have not been finalised, we are currently ranked as a B category journal, and hope this will be confirmed in the near future. We are one of a handful presently to be listed as General Social Sciences and Humanities, interdisciplinary in nature. We have locked in three Special Issues to be published in 2009 - the first in January will consist of articles generated by the Rhizomes conference held at U. Q. earlier this year; in July will be an issue devoted to commentaries on, as well as articles by the Australian philosopher Max Deutscher; and in October one dedicated to commentaries based on the first special issue of works by Luiz Costa Lima. We are also considering another dedicated issue to celebrate landmarks in the history of the University of Queensland, which in 2009 will be celebrating its one hundredth anniversary, and of the state of Queensland itself, which will be celebrating one hundred and fifty years of statehood.

The number of page loads in August was 1,738 and the number of unique visitors was 747. In September they were down a little. However we added visitors from Trinidad and Tobago, the United Arab Emirates, Serbia and Montenegro, the Philippines, Portugal, Uruguay, Turkey and Russia to the already extensive list of countries accessing the website.

We are launching our book mark with this issue, and hopefully some of you will be able to get your hands on one of them. We thank the School of History, Philosophy, Religion and Classics for funding the printing of these and the Short Essay Competition certificates. In particular thanks go to Professor Clive Moore, Helene Marszalek and Ian McKeown.

Helen Farley, Nicola Morecroft and Matthew Martinez have left the Board, and Matthew Lamb is taking a less active role for the time being. We have welcomed Tessa Jones, Sarah Collins and Chad Parkhill to the board in their stead, and the rest of us continue to carry on.

I'd like to thank all the current members of the board and those who have recently left us for all their hard work, particularly in the reading of all the entries in the Short Essay Competition, and the design of the certificates awarded to all participants. And of course our thanks go to all the others who have helped in some way.

And just as importantly I would like to thank all those students brave enough to enter the competition. It is no mean feat to expose oneself to this type of assessment.

We hope you enjoy this issue and are encouraged to submit your articles somewhere in the publishing realm, preferably with Crossroads.

Julie Washington

Chair of the Editorial Board

This year marks the 20th anniversary of the English translation and publication of Control of the Imaginary: reason and imagination in modern times (1988), a groundbreaking work by Brazilian intellectual, Luiz Costa Lima. This should be a cause for celebration - and, in many respects, this Special Issue of Crossroads, bringing together a selection of Costa Lima's work covering the period 1980-2008, is part of this celebration, if not the only one - for the reality is that this book is currently out of print; in fact, of the twenty monographs which Costa Lima has released, since his first publication in 1966 (with Por que literatura), only two have been made available in their entirety in English - the other being The Limits of Voice: Montaigne, Schlegel, Kafka (1996) - while excerpts from two more books - Sociedade e discurso ficcional (1986) and O fingidor e o censor (1988) - are merged together in the English translation, The Dark Side of Reason: Fictionality and Power (1992). As a result, this project has remained largely unknown in the English speaking world. Actually, until only recently, and outside a small circle of colleagues and friends, Costa Lima's work had been largely ignored in his native Brazil.

It would be redundant here to outline in detail the main contours of this project. I refer readers instead to the first piece in this selection - the "Preface" from Control of the Imaginary (1988) - which is perhaps the most succinct formulation of its kind. Appended to this is a Complement to the "Preface" (2008), which Costa Lima has kindly written in English especially for this issue, in which he summarises the most significant points of advancement which the thesis of the control of the imaginary has undergone in the intervening twenty years. Instead, I will try a different tact.

Schlegel, in his Athenaeum Fragments, states: "The best way not be understood or, rather, to be misunderstood, is to use words in their original meanings, especially words from the ancients" (Frag. 19). And it is to Costa Lima's apparent detriment that at the heart of his project is the attempt - perhaps Quixotic - to revivify the originary sense of the ancient notion of mimesis, not as the imitation of the real, but rather as the production of difference within an horizon of similarity. The early Schlegel and the figure of Don Quixote are two of Costa Lima's intellectual antecedents, and it is no coincidence that if one of these figures is historical, the other is. . . fictional. For the flesh and bones of Costa Lima's project, within which the heart of mimesis beats, is concerned with both the understanding of the nature of fiction - both literary and non-literary - and of the processes which place a veto on fiction and domesticate the individual imagination. It is these processes which he refers to as the control of the imaginary. It is a process characterised by the modern reduction of mimesis to imitatio, which reduces, in turn, the imagination to simply a reproductive function. But the consequences of this are far reaching, as many of the pieces which follow will attest.

To explore this thesis, Costa Lima draws on sources from multiple fields of enquiry - such as philosophy, history, sociology, political science, anthropology and literature - and although he ostensibly limits himself to the field of literature, these findings are equally pertinent to each of these other fields. Discussing this breadth of scope, in relation to Costa Lima's initial 'trilogy' of works - which were merged into two books in English, Control of the Imaginary and The Dark Side of Reason - Sérgio Alcides states:

In a statement so simple it can be reduced to eight words - the control of the imaginary by modern reason - Luiz Costa Lima was able to discover much more than an empirical opening for his reflections on mimesis in modernity. His reflections lay the foundation for an entire theory of culture, far broader than the one encompassing the phenomena that can be historically demarcated as literary. One gets the impression that the succession of the 'pictures' in the trilogy could be indefinitely extended and could apply to other areas that are subject to the incidence of the imaginary as well, such as the culture industry, behaviour, politics and even ethics. It is up to other scholars to accept such a challenge, necessarily within an interdisciplinary context.

It is in an effort to take up this challenge that the current Special Issue is directed. To encourage this further we are following this issue in the coming year with another issue, engaging with, responding to, and employing, Costa Lima's work: we thereby call upon our readers to accept this challenge to thought and submit an essay to this ongoing project. A final challenge - which we can only encourage - is for translators and academic publishers to make more of Costa Lima's works available in English translation.

But those who know the area I work in will appreciate that even with this delimitation the domain [of the control of the imaginary] is so wide as to make it almost impossible for a single researcher to cover it. However narrow we wish to make the confines of our chosen field, they are still much too ample for any single individual. But just as the question 'What's the use of so much effort?' leads to discouragement, the question 'What can I do alone?' encourages conformity. One must be rather brash to keep on sailing against the wind.

To facilitate these challenges I have a appended below two bibliographies - the first consists of books, essays and articles by Costa Lima currently available in English (it is from these sources that we extracted some of the pieces published here), and the second consists of the books by Costa Lima currently published in Portuguese.

I would like to thank the Crossroads team for indulging me in this endeavour to bring this important work to a wider audience, especially Sheldon Peters for formatting and uploading all these pieces to the web; to the publishers for kindly allowing us to reproduce some of this work here; to the translators - Paulo Henriques Britto, Sueli Cavendish and Jane Lamb-Ruiz - for providing some of these English translations here for the first time; and especially to Luiz Costa Lima, for providing additional material, and for patiently answering many inane questions from a monolingual Australian.

Enjoy.

Matthew Lamb

Guest Editor

This is the first Special Issue to be published by Crossroads. Special Issues will be those generated by a single conference, event, or author, and will be guest edited. We are privileged to present 16 articles written by the internationally renowned and respected Brazilian philosopher, Luiz Costa Lima. We are indebted to Matthew Lamb, a member of the Editorial Board and the guest editor for this issue, for his vision, powers of persuasion and hard work, in putting this issue together. He has organized publishing permission for those articles previously published in English, and for the translation from Portuguese for those articles previously only published in this language, and for the translation of those that appear in a published format for the very first time. We are proud to be able to present these works to the English speaking public, articles that would otherwise be unavailable to many. We anticipate publishing a follow-on special issue dedicated to responses generated by this edition of the journal in July 2009. We hope you enjoy this very Special Issue.

Julie Washington

Chair of the Editorial Board

This, our third issue, is truly international with contributors from India, Ireland, three from America (Princeton, California and Fordham University in New York), two from Brazil, one from Melbourne and one from our own UQ. Articles range from Jean Paul Sartre, Wittgenstein and Jacques Lacan to Freud, Medieval literature, modern bio ethics and North American Shamanism. We also publish our first book review.

Crossroads continues to maintain its standing on the Google website, currently sitting at 15th from 6.8 million entries on the worldwide site and number 7 from 222,000 on the Australian version of the site. This brings to 6 the number of different ways that Crossroads articles can be accessed, including the link from the School website.

Our techno guru, Sheldon Peters, continues to provide us with graphs detailing numbers of people who access the site and their country of origin. This makes for interesting reading, as the website is being accessed by such countries as the Netherlands, Denmark, Slovakia, Slovenia, Georgia, Sweden, Ireland, India, Singapore and Malaysia, and as we would expect, the UK, Canada, USA, New Zealand, and Australia.

The number of visitors has not dropped below 130 in any one month and has reached as high as 795, averaging out at 240 per month. I do believe these figures tell a tale of success.

The decision has been made to run the Annual Crossroads Short Essay Competition, which will be open to all University of Queensland students with a sound background in any of our four disciplines. Unfortunately this competition will not be open to non-UQ students. The UQ Bookshop will be contributing book vouchers as prizes for the first three essays in each of two categories - undergraduate essays and postgraduate essays. The first five in both categories will be published in a special edition of Crossroads, and thus preserved for all time. All the rules and regulations can be found on the website for those interested in entering the competition. Although, entry is restricted we hope that other institutions will be inspired to run their own competitions - it is surprising what you can achieve and how helpful people can be.

So you can see that we have not been resting on our laurels. We have been exploring all avenues to increase the standing and reputation of what began as a much smaller in house opportunity to publish. We are now establishing a truly international reputation.

Again we have had to say farewell to board members who have moved on and welcomed new ones. This 'new blood' ensures that Crossroads can look forward to an on-going future.

I'd like to thank all the members of the board - Hakan Sandgren our deputy, Helen Farley, Matthew Martinez, Sheldon Peters, Matthew Lamb, and Nicki Morecroft for their sterling efforts. And of course our thanks to all the others who have helped in some way.

Julie Washington

Chair of the Editorial Board

Once again Crossroads has fulfilled the journal's aim to present the reader with a selection of interdisciplinary articles. We were inundated with submissions for our second issue, and are pleased to publish the following articles, which range from the 'scientific' side of Fundamentalism to discussion of Sustainable Water Ethics. We continue to present articles by both undergraduates and postgraduates. Our rigorous blind-reviewing by academics in the relevant fields, has meant that a number of articles had not completed this review process in time for inclusion in this issue. However, articles for Volume 2 are now well in hand.

The Editorial Board express their gratitude to the reviewers who give so freely of their time and expertise allowing authors to refine their work and maintain high standards. Of course we would also like to thank the authors themselves, and all those who have assisted with the publication of this second issue of the journal.

Crossroads itself continues to change and gain recognition. We are now listed in the National Library Catalogue, and the National Bibliographic Database. We are archived by the National Library of Australia's PANDORA site (Australia's Web Archive), for, to quote their correspondence, 'electronic publications of lasting cultural value ... of national significance.' This means that articles will always be accessible. We have reached number 10 on Google under Crossroads. We are listed by Ulrich's Periodicals Directory and are on H-Net, several discussion boards, and we have accessed the mailing list of the English Department at the University of Pennsylvania, which goes to over 10,000 recipients.

In this issue we introduce a new section, In Short, which publishes shorter articles that the Editorial Board deem to be worthy of reaching a wide audience.

The Editorial Board welcomes submissions throughout the year. Please consult the style guide and submit articles, together with an abstract (150-200 words) and biography (between 50-75 words) as a separate file, to crossroads@uq.edu.au. Further details are available on the Submissions page on the website at www.uq.edu.au/crossroads.

It has been a quite a juggling act for all of us, between meetings, study, editing the journal, and sometimes an outside life. Some members of the Board have moved onto another phase in their lives, and others have filled the gaps. All in all we continue to enjoy the experience and we are very happy with the results of our efforts. We hope you will be as well.

Julie Washington

Chair of the Editorial Board

This first issue of Crossroads fulfils the journal's aim to present the reader with an interdisciplinary selection of articles blind-reviewed by academics in the relevant fields. Topics covered range from Biblical and Vedic texts to modern history and philosophy, and shows the diversity of research subjects to be found within the School of History, Philosophy, Religion and Classics. Our contributors range from final stages of undergraduate work to awaiting the results of their PhD submissions.

All reviewers are academics with no current staff affiliations with the University of Queensland. This makes our review process in line with those of general academic journals, giving authors the chance to experience the 'real' world of academic journal publication. The Editorial Board express their gratitude to these reviewers and to all those who have assisted with the publication of this journal.

We would also like to thank the authors who submitted for this initial issue. The Editorial Board welcome submissions throughout the year. Please consult the style guide and submit articles together with an abstract of 150 - 200 words and a biography of between 50 - 75 words to crossroads@uq.edu.au. Further details are available on the submission page on the website.

It has been a long and challenging road which has given all of us experience in areas that have been new to us and we are very happy with the results of our efforts. We hope you will be. We welcome your comments.

Julie Washington

Chair of the Editorial Board