ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the matter of a national curriculum debate, with specific reference to Australia, with a view to exploring some of the interrelationships of curriculum, representation and democracy, as each in its own way "an essentially contestable concept". It seeks to rejuvenate and regenerate consideration of curriculum inquiry as, among other things, a form of cultural politics. The chapter suggests that curriculum is best understood, first and foremost, as inescapably always already political— that there is, in effect, nothing outside 'curriculum as political text'. Even more radically, there are rich possibilities in rethinking curriculum and pedagogy in accordance with 'postmodern' notions of emergence and invention, interruption and design, performance and play. Rhetoric has been described as offering potentially "a metadisciplinary move" in education, as well as politics and literary studies, in effect "refiguring them" and hence having clear implications for curriculum inquiry.
