Meaghan Morris

Transnational imagination in action cinema: Hong Kong and the making of a global popular culture

Taking action cinema as an example, this paper outlines a historical approach to the transnational study of globally popular cultural forms. Action cinema has long had a complex economy in which Hollywood not only trades stars, styles and narratives with the hybrid culture of Hong Kong cinema itself, but draws on a vast ‘direct to tape’ industry significantly based in East Asia. The paper outlines a Hong Kong‐based approach to two earlier phases in the history of action: the ‘international co‐production’ as an industrially innovative form (1973–85), and the golden age of the ‘direct to tape’ industry enabled by the rapid spread of video technology (1985–93). Focusing on the latter, it suggests that the global uptake by filmmakers of a ‘contact’ narrative and an ethic of emulation taken from Hong Kong cinema allowed direct‐to‐video action to address issues of social class in emotionally complex ways.

Transnational Glamour, National Allure: Community, Change and Cliché in Baz Luhrmann’s Australia

The first time I saw Baz Luhrmann’s Australia I laughed till I cried. To be exact, I cried laughing at dinner after watching the film with a group of old friends at an inner suburban cinema in Sydney. During the screening itself I laughed and I cried. As so often in the movies, our laughter was public and my tears were private, left to dry on my face lest the dabbing of a tissue or an audible gulp should give my emotion away. The theatre was packed that night with a raucously critical audience groaning at the dialogue, hooting at moments of high melodrama (especially Jack Thompson’s convulsive death by stampeding cattle) and cracking jokes at travesties of history perceived on screen. After the World War II ‘bombing of Darwin’ sequence a fictitious 1941 land invasion of ‘Mission Island’ (Bathurst Island) by Japanese troops had people around me in stitches; when a closing title declared that the government ‘officially abandoned the assimilation policy for indigenous Australians in the Northern Territory in 1973’, one wag called out: ‘at the end of the Japanese Occupation!’. The communal wave of hilarity swept on through a riotous dinner with people enacting their favourite worst scenes and improvising new ones, remaking the film like children playing charades. We did this for hours. It was a wonderful night and in the midst of it my ambivalence about the film that had brought us together dissolved into admiration for its bonding and stirring power as a cinematic event.

INTRODUCTION: Gender, modernity and media in the Asia-Pacific

This collection of essays began from a symposium on ‘Gender and Modernity in the Asia-Pacific’ hosted by the Gender and Modernity Research Group at the University of Sydney. Our aim for that symposium was to bring together in Australia researchers working on issues in and around the Asia-Pacific region in Cultural Studies, and related fields, in order to think about how the intersection of the terms gender and modernity might provide a shared basis for exploring relations between that region’s disparate cultural locations, practices and identities. In particular, working together from Sydney with one of us also based in Hong Kong, we were interested in how this conceptual intersection affords a view of an ‘Asia-Pacific’ region in which Australia is vitally involved and not just an institutional platform for analysis from the geopolitical border of that region. It also seemed to us that focusing on the Asia-Pacific from a Cultural Studies point of view might offer something important to Western English-language scholarship on gender and modernity. Such scholarship tends to be dominated by historical analysis in which modernity is a long view of now irreversible change and discussions of the gender of modernity belong to historical analysis of changes wrought in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and/or by a spatializing EuroAmerican field synchronically centred on the pre-eminent importance of transAtlantic exchanges. In this context, a conjunction of ‘gender and modernity’ and ‘the Asia-Pacific’ foregrounds transnational currents and cross-cultural dialogues that are not only historical but also insistently present tense. What we did not expect was the thematic consistencies that emerged. This collection does not represent all the papers presented at that symposium, but rather a selection highlighting several key themes. The first is the role of popular media in negotiating the ongoing and changing internal tensions of modernity, not only for the nation-states that regulate, frame, import, export and often fund discrete media industries (Chua and Iwabuchi 2008, Gokulsing and Dissanayake 2009, Siriyuvasak 2010, Chua 2012), sometimes as part of a project of ‘policing . . . cultural distinctiveness’ (Domı́nguez and Wu 1998, p. 3), but above all for the everyday lives of people as cultural participants. In this

Turning up to Play: : ‘GT’ and the modern game

Reviewing the ‘all-round’ nature of Graeme Turners academic practice and its impact on the development of Cultural Studies in Australia since the 1980s, this introductory article explores the relationship between Turners institutional effectiveness and the mode of creativity fostered by the game of Rugby League.

Media and popular modernism around the Pacific War: An inter-Asian story:

Across much of the Asia-Pacific today, the smart phone, the tablet and the laptop or home personal computer are vying with the humble TV set not only to promote new models of lifestyle and to distribute communal and national stories but also to circulate other people’s stories and ways of life, complicating notions of heritage and cultural affinity. The proliferation of media technologies and their rapid spread across populations hitherto remote from or hostile to each other has transformed the conditions for the practice as well as the study of memory in this region as elsewhere. Yet, there are precedents for these developments; ‘new waves’ of media culture responded to technological change, colonial conflict, war, revolution and the growing influence of Hollywood across the Asia-Pacific region after the Pacific War. In Australia, one such ‘wave’ was a boom in travel writing from the 1930s to the 1950s, and another was the ‘new Australian cinema’ of the 1970s and early 1980s. Drawing on work in progress about Ernestine Hill, a mid-twentieth-century writer preoccupied with technology, this article suggests that asking how ‘old’ media have circulated ‘new’ memories of community in the past also opens up a way of situating old Australian national stories in a regional frame today.

INTRODUCTION: Transnationalism and Cultural Studies

This issue of Cultural Studies developed out of a double panel session on ‘Transnationalism and Cultural Studies’ organized by Handel Kashope Wright for the Association for Cultural Studies (ACS) Crossroads conference held at Istanbul Bilgi University, Turkey, on 20 23 July 2006. Transnationalism itself was at the heart of the Istanbul conference process, not simply as a research object or topic but as an intellectual project and thus a series of practical problems and questions in and for our work in Cultural Studies. The 2006 gathering was the sixth in a series of international Crossroads conferences initiated 10 years earlier in Tampere, Finland, with the aim of providing Cultural Studies scholars worldwide with an opportunity to meet and to build a community. In fulfilment of two of the key aims of the Tampere initiative, the Istanbul gathering was the first to be held fully under the auspices of the now fully constituted ACS, and it was also the first Crossroads to be held beyond the Northern European and North American centres of ‘academic English’ Cultural Studies. With more than 600 scholars from many nations gathering in that ancient and contemporary meeting place which is the city of Istanbul (despite, as it happened, the outbreak of war in Lebanon in that same week), it was to be expected that many papers would explore the resonance in different contexts of such terms as ‘international’, ‘regional’, ‘global’ and ‘transnational’, and that energies and desires corresponding to all of these terms, and to ‘city’, ‘community’, and ‘nation’ as well, would circulate at crossroads and around Istanbul. For the organizers (including both of this issue’s editors, who were then members of the ACS Board), an additional series of practical issues revolved around the problem of how to ensure that a Cultural Studies association might sponsor the kind of ‘crossroads’ where people coming from all over the world could feel welcome to raise questions, and to debate them transnationally with strangers, in relative emotional safety. One of the best-known models for an international academic ‘association’ seemed clearly inadequate for this task. We can call it a North Atlantic model, although it is widely used in many countries today wherever the English language is a scholarly lingua franca. In this model scholars from several countries may be present, although those based in the ‘host’ national academic system are usually in the majority, but community is forged by a dominant

Teaching versus research? Cultural studies and the new class politics in knowledge

Abstract Reflecting on a personal experience of ‘pre‐professional’ university education and reluctant engagement with Cultural Studies as an academic project, this article examines the now ambiguous role of undergraduate education under neo‐liberal management regimes. Arguing that a ‘new class politics in knowledge’ is emerging with the transnational policy‐sharing and international student exchange schemes with which diverse governmental cultures are responding to globalization, Morris suggests that the undergraduate classroom is becoming a ‘frontier’ of struggle over the future. Teaching cultural studies to undergraduates in a liberal arts environment is one way in which the disciplines emphasis on local knowledge can be put to institutionally creative uses.

'Please explain?' ignorance, poverty and the past

I do not agree with this assessment of the popularity of Pauline Hanson’s `One Nation Party’ as it exploded through the media and across Australian politics after the defeat of the Keating Labor government in November 1996. Pauline Hanson is a single working mother who, as an `amateur’ politician, led a surge of economic protectionist, anti-immigration, anti-Asian and anti-Aboriginal popular feeling powerful enough by the mid-1990s to sustain a new political party, and to shift the mood of national social debate drastically towards the right. In my view, Hanson just might have subsided into history’s footnotes if the new Liberal Prime Minister, John Howard, had shouted her down very loudly from the day he won government and she was elected to the House of Representatives on the same wave of popular anger and disaffection after 13 years of Labor’s economic and social reforms. Better, he should simply have talked her down; Hanson was alone in Parliament and barely capable of defending her policies. Howard could have stood on the distinguished record of his own Liberal Party by taking a principled stand against Hanson’s xenophobic and sometimes racist positions. He was in a good position to do so; Hanson had initially tried to run for Parliament as a Liberal but was `disendorsed’ by Howard’s party before the election for making racist remarks about Aborigines. Instead, Howard chose to begin his own leadership by attacking Hanson’s critics as (in Devine’s phrase) t̀humbscrew Leftists’Ð in other words, cultural terrorists opposed to free speech. Strongly appealing to socially conservative commentators like Devine ± a regular columnist for the Australian, the country’s leading national newspaper ± this strategy was modelled on former US President George Bush’s successful campaign against `political correctness’ in the early 1990s. Transposed to Australia, it succeeded only in amplifying and legitimising Hanson’s voice to an unexpected degree, unwelcome even to Howard (Millett, 1998). Driven by a media frenzy of fears, thrills and excitement that Australia, too, might be developing a far right wing movement resembling those led by Jean-Marie Le Pen in France, David Duke in the USA and, more recently, JoÈ rg Haider in Austria, Hanson’s popularity peaked at the Queensland state elections of 13 June 1998, when 11 One Nationers were elected with the support of 23% of the voters in that state. Within a month, however, internal con ̄ icts, high-pro® le defections and messy legal problems began to beset the movement, turning the banner-headlines negative (Barker, 1998; Rothwell 1998; Rothwell et al., 1998). At the subsequent federal election of 3 October 1998,

Hong Kong Liminal: Situation as Method

What it might mean to posit ‘Hong Kong as method’ in a transnational context today? How can a fairly small, concrete place in an unusual situation ‘be’ a method? Drawing on the models of experience proposed in such Hong Kong films as Samson Chiu’s Golden Chicken 2 (2003) and Fruit Chan’s The Midnight After (2014), this chapter argues that the anthropological concept of ‘liminality’ offers ways to think about cultural production and social change in Hong Kong today. Discussing debates about method in the field of Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, I suggest that it is Hong Kong’s transitional situation, rather than simply its contested identity as a place, that makes it methodologically resonant now for thinking about cultural politics elsewhere.

‘The Great Australian Loneliness’: On Writing an Inter-Asian Biography of Ernestine Hill

The Great Australian Loneliness (1937) is a famous book of travel reportage by Ernestine Hill (1899–1972), a key figure in the mid-twentieth century shaping of popular media culture in Australia. Through her journalism she disseminated debate about the great public issues of her day: the status of Aboriginal peoples, immigration from Asia and the state’s role in national development. In this paper, I take the White Australian ‘loneliness’ her title invokes as a methodological challenge to situate both her life and the ethnically diverse sociability she actually described in an inter-Asian framework of analysis capable of unsettling those bonds between ethnicity and nationality that many twentieth-century writers worked so hard to secure. In the process, I argue for an ‘Australian Asian’ approach to cultural history.