%0 Journal Article
%T Editor's welcome, PORTAL, Vol. 4, No. 2, July 2007
%A Paul Allatson
%J PORTAL : Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies
%D 2007
%I 
%X The second issue of PORTAL Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies for 2007 is a special issue with the title Contesting Euro Visions, guest edited by Dimitris Eleftheriotis (University of Glasgow), Murray Pratt (University of Technology Sydney) and Ilaria Vanni, (University of Technology Sydney). As the editors¡¯ opening essay emphasises, this issue is not concerned to perpetuate myths of a Europe united or federated, or even cohered by shared values. Rather, it aims to reclaim something of the conceptual, transcultural and locational uncertainties encoded in the foundation myth of Europe¡¯s origins: Europa¡¯s seduction and abduction by Zeus, disguised as a white bull. As the editors argue, this myth is marked by the physical elusiveness of Europe¡¯s actual location (Homer¡¯s Europa being, for example, Phoenician, in what is now Syria), and also complicated by centuries of amendments and revisions. Thus, by approaching contemporary Europe through the prism of a mutating and unanchored foundational fiction, the editors argue that that fiction ¡®can be used to understand how in Europe particular local histories and local knowledge intersect with global issues, and conversely how what appears to be ¡°European¡± is, in fact, the result of global encounters. Narratives of European values need to be located in this striated space, while friction as an organising metaphor also explains the slippage and relation between the lived, heterogeneous embodiments of contemporary Europe and abstract notions of values.¡¯ The other essays gathered in this special issue endorse this notion of a striated Europe, a shifting space best regarded as a space of friction. I would like to thank all of the authors included in this special issue for their patience, and their support for the Contesting Euro Visions ideal that frames the issue. I would also like to take the opportunity to announce a call for papers for the July 2008 issue of PORTAL, entitled ¡®Italian Cultures: Writing Italian Cultural Studies in the World.¡¯ Full details follow, in both English and Italian, and can be found on the journal¡¯s homepage. Paul Allatson, Chair, PORTAL Editorial Committee Call for Papers ¡®Italian Cultures: Writing Italian Cultural Studies in the World.¡¯ PORTAL Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies is seeking articles for a special issue on Italian cultural studies. It aims at updating existing scholarship and scoping the proliferation of interests in this growing field. It recognizes that cultural studies practitioners write multiple Italies within Italy itself and from provin
%U http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/portal/article/view/582