The name Ex Plus Ultra is a play on the old Roman warning non plus ultra meaning ¡¥nothing further beyond¡¦ found by sailors and navigators at the borders of empire. The warning defines the geographical limits of empire and marks the ¡¥beyond¡¦ as nothingness. It labels that which empire does not know and that where empire does not go as a non-place and non-time. There is nothing further beyond. Here is fiction announcing itself as fact; temptation packaged as prohibition; polemic written as edict. Ex Plus Ultra meaning ¡¥out from further beyond¡¦, although nonsense Latin, is a response and rejoinder to non plus ultra.

Ex Plus Ultra is a journal that encourages work that goes beyond merely unearthing ¡¥colonial¡¦ and ¡¥postcolonial¡¦ worlds and which seeks to contest those very categories. There was no cataclysmic rupture heralding the arrival of the ¡¥post-colonial¡¦ nor was the advent of colonialism defined, uncontested or in some cases even as significant for the colonised as has previously been assumed. The very categories of ¡¥colonial¡¦ and ¡¥postcolonial,¡¦ insofar as they subscribe to linear, progressive time, are themselves imperial legacies. This is a journal committed to thinking of new ways to configure the broad, contradictory and diffuse processes of imperialism. Imperialism should not just refer to British imperialism or its privileged epistemic schemes. Imperialism is less to do with temporality (post or not post) as it is to do with relationships between empires, within empires and the constitution of colonised and colonising subjects.

For the first edition of Ex Plus Ultra we are casting a wide net, inviting creative, scholarly papers of up to 6000 words that are generally concerned with colonial and imperial history and postcolonial theory.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

„X imperial intimacies: exploring the role of emotions, sex and desire in colonial and imperial power.
„X law's empire: exploring the role of law and regulation, both informal and formal, in the imperial project
„X sensing the Other: exploring the imperial reconfiguration of social sensory orders - how was smell, sight, touch, sound etc implicated in and reordered by imperialism?
„X beyond transnationalism: what are the problems with transnational histories? Is there an implicit masculinisation of the global and feminisation of the local? Does a transnational approach simply reinstate the national? Does it forget about the minutiae or the nationless? Is it really new? Are the terms global, supranational or cosmopolitan more useful?

All submissions must conform to Ex Plus Ultra submission guidelines available on request. Please attach any images or photos to be published along with your paper.

The deadline for submissions is October 31 2008, please email all submissions to: The Editors at
explusultra@usyd.edu.au

Ex Plus Ultra is a peer reviewed interdisciplinary journal. The first edition of Ex Plus Ultra will be published April 2009. To contact the current editorial collective please email: explusultra@usyd.edu.au