Cultural Studies
EDITORIAL
Review
Meaghan
Vol. 24, No. 1
March 2018
Chris Healy1*, Katrina Schlunke2, Prudence Black3, Stephen Muecke4,
Catherine Driscoll5
University of Melbourne
University of Sydney and University of Tasmania
3
University of Sydney
4
University of Adelaide
5
University of Sydney
1
2
Corresponding author: Chris Healy, School of Culture and Communication, University of
Melbourne VIC 3010 Australia. clhealy@unimelb.edu.au
© 2018 by the author(s). This
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Citation: Healy, C., Schlunke,
K., Black, P., Muecke, S. and
Driscoll, C. 2018. Meaghan.
Cultural Studies Review, 24:1,
1-4. http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/
csr.v24i1.5997
ISSN 1837-8692 | Published by
UTS ePRESS | http://epress.
lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.
php/csrj/index
1
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/csr.v24i1.5997
Article History: Received 13/03/2018; Revised 22/03/2018; Accepted 24/03/2018;
Published 20/04/2018
It had to be ‘Meaghan’. The title of this edition of Cultural Studies Review is our salute to the
work of Meaghan Morris and her lasting influence. That legacy is directly addressed in the
collection of written works that emerged from the Meaghan Morris Festival held in 2016 but
it is also echoed in the essays and reviews that are gathered within, that in their very mix speak
to the particular tradition of cultural studies, Australian and otherwise, that Meaghan Morris
helped so much to create.
It had to be a festival. What else would be capaciousness enough to hold, if only for a
moment, Meaghan Morris’s intellectual, disciplinary, political, interpersonal and professional
contributions? What else would communicate the intellectual force with which her work
has crossed, and continues to cross, philosophical, national and international boundaries
while, at the same time, honouring the particularity of the popular and political in everyday
lives? How else to showcase her history of academic labour that has spanned multiple genres
of writing, including film reviewing and translation, and academic work that ranges from
international visiting professorships, leadership in expanding networks of scholars both
regionally and globally, and myriad forms of mentorship as an editor, reviewer and advisor.
And, of course, tenured academic positions. So—a festival organised by Prudence Black,
Catherine Driscoll, Stephen Muecke and Katrina Schlunke. A celebration with merrymaking
that would also recognise and revisit, through Meaghan’s work, some principles of the diversity
of cultural studies. This necessarily included some deliberations about the changing state of
DECLARATION OF CONFLICTING INTEREST The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect
to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. FUNDING The author(s) received no financial support
for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Healy, Schlunke, Black, Muecke and Driscoll
our institutions, a reckoning with our contemporary politics and a reflection on our lives as
scholars, writers and teachers.
The festival featured musical introductions to each of the presentations. The music chosen
by each presenter was an opportunity to ‘translate’ Meaghan and her work into a sonic register,
creating perhaps an affective score for the festival. It also allowed the day to operate within
a sliding temporal cum cultural environment. The music, speakers and presentations made
for an order of participation and expectation different from most academic forums. Together,
they created an active experiment within the very traditional, sharply tiered, wooden-seated,
University of Sydney lecture theatre where the festival was held—and where Meaghan had
attended lectures decades before. The setting floated orders of re-enactment into the event.
Sitting high in the uncomfortable seats was itself an act of continuity with an institutional
materiality, but it was also an interruption to our usual academic work. While the festival
echoed the more traditional Festschrift, whereby essays in honour of an academic’s work are
gathered together, it also hoped to reach beyond that to a new way of figuring the legacy of
Meaghan Morris. Hers is a strikingly original legacy to honour.
The day began with a welcome from two University of Sydney colleagues, Elspeth Probyn,
Professor in Gender and Cultural Studies, and Barbara Caine, Dean of the Faculty of Arts
and Social Sciences. Presentations followed from a who’s who of cultural studies scholars
from across the world, as well as from poets, anthropologists and scholars of film, gender
and English literature. The opening trio of Katrina Schlunke, Graeme Turner and Lawrence
Grossberg were followed by poetic performances from Pam Brown and Kate Lilley, and
more papers by Stephen Muecke, Melissa Hardie, Stephen Chan and Chua Beng-Huat.
After lunch, Ghassan Hage, John Frow, Chris Healy, Kara Keeling and Catherine Driscoll all
spoke, with Adrian Martin sending a recorded video from Vilassar de Mar, in Spain. Audrey
Yue, Laleen Jaymanne and Alifa Bandali rounded off the day, but not before Meaghan gave a
thundering closing address.
Post-festival drinks were accompanied by a scrolling series of film clips. If the musical
selections were a translation of Meaghan-ness, selecting the clips was an easier task. Film has
been an abiding passion of Meaghan’s and Prudence Black took on the task of selecting an
arrangement of films that have been featured in Meaghan’s writing: Mad Max (1), Rocky (1),
Wake in Fright, Fist of Fury, Picnic at Hanging Rock, Australia, Muriel’s Wedding and, of course,
the climactic fight scene between Bruce Lee and Chuck Norris in The Way of the Dragon. These
film clips, then, offered another reflection on Meaghan’s legacy, paying tribute to the way her
work has helped persuade students and scholars that cinema, especially Australian film and
martial arts movies, can be important not only for the vast popular audiences it attracts but as
a means of addressing some key questions at stake in contemporary culture.
Meaghan might be thought of as a singularly distinctive ‘pioneer’, an independent scholar
and part of the scholarly precariat of another time. She taught film part-time at the New
South Wales Institute of Technology in the early 1980s, in seminar rooms filled with clouds
of smoke and intense discussions about Laura Mulvey, Roland Barthes and Paul Hogan. Like
many of her students, Meaghan also had to work for a living in different capacities, and in
her case brought to class the real-world engagement of writing film reviews for the Sydney
Morning Herald and the Australian Financial Review. The cultural studies ‘conjuncture’ was a
livewire; the Drum tobacco was carefully eked out.
In 1991, Stephen Muecke had the opportunity to interview Meaghan for a book on small
journals edited by David Carter.1 It was part of the import/export energies that animated
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Cultural Studies Review, Vol. 24, No. 1, March 2018
Meaghan
conference titles like ‘Foreign Bodies’ (the 1981 conference where Jean Baudrillard was a
rock-star of European obscurity, and the commentariat was given its first chance to denounce
‘French theory’). Meaghan mounted a spirited defence in conversation with Martin Harrison
on the ABC at the time, ironically citing Bjelke-Peterson’s phrase, ‘that just because a few
wogs want their spicy tucker, that doesn’t mean that Australian health has to be put at risk’.2
This was a time when ‘theory’ was self-published on miniscule budgets and in the case of the
‘Working Papers’ collection, minuscule font sizes to save paper. These were incredibly exciting
little books featuring translations into English of Foucault and Irigaray, publishing that
contributed to making Australian cultural studies part of global circuits.3 English intellectuals
like Tony Bennett and John Fiske would later be attracted to Australia because of this
pioneering work, and Larry Grossberg’s version of US cultural studies was strongly influenced
by Meaghan as he took over from Fiske in transitioning the Australian Journal of Cultural
Studies into the American-based publication, Cultural Studies.
Meaghan has always pursued her intellectual work across the boundaries between
universities and the world of thinkers—poets, filmmakers, activists and writers—outside
it. And she has never been confined in her more strictly academic work to the Australian
university system. After her long tenure as Chair Professor of Cultural Studies at Lingnan
University in Hong Kong, Meaghan came back to the Australian academy, but it has never
owned her. While teaching at Sydney University, she was also helping run cultural studies
camps in Asia; while sustaining international networks like the Association for Cultural
Studies and the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Society, she was also leading local research groups
back in Australia. And, of course, she has continued to be an inspirational thinker, speaker and
writer.
What follows is a written record of that day; it includes diverse forms of writing, from
traditional academic essays through anecdotal memoirs, poetry and polemics of a particular
order to careful explorations of particular aspects of Meaghan’s work. They don’t share a shape
but they do share a focus. They are part of a festival of thinking and writing that leveraged the
possibilities of language and celebrated the rich legacies in the work of Meaghan Morris.
Elsewhere in this issue of Cultural Studies Review, Kate Wright writes of the weeping
willow and the way a community garden might be imagined as a decolonising metaphor.
In a poetic form, this article makes a very cogent argument for the ways the contemporary
university, with its bureaucratic and economic production of research cultures, limits
decolonising work and engagement and ‘blinds us to minoritarian multispecies realities’.
Wendy Alexander also experiments with styles of research and writing in her ‘object-oriented
literary criticism’ of a late 1800s newspaper short story. Alexander follows the material trail of
the writing’s production to detail the way in which it not only works as a ‘thing in the world’
but also contributes to the work of world creating.
Emma Sarian shows us that the Australian Citizenship Test depended upon the history
of other such tests that seek to register and thus create ‘good’ Australian citizens. This is an
elegant portrayal of how tools of exclusion are refigured as ‘common-sense’ paths to inclusion
and used to create a (limited) idea of national cohesion. In an article that is as much about
pedagogy as it is about theory, as much about practice as it is about research, Astrid Lorange
and Tim Gregory work through the idea of post-pornography. Their focus was inspired by
‘the growing disjuncture between students’ lived experience of porn and the institutional and
disciplinary structures that present pornography as an object of study’, a widening gap they
felt demanded ‘a shift towards the post-pornographic’. That shift has opened the possibilities
for an important refiguring of how we (and our students) think and experience gender, sex and
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Cultural Studies Review, Vol. 24, No. 1, March 2018
Healy, Schlunke, Black, Muecke and Driscoll
bodies—historicised in relation to the here-and-now of ephemeral screens. In book reviews,
Nabeel Zuberi explores how Margie Borschke’s This is Not a Remix: Piracy, Authenticity
and Popular Music ‘delineates a genealogy of remix’, from its origins to recent issues such as
copyright. Astrida Neimanis provides an emplaced and affecting review of Kath Weston’s
Animate Planet that reminds us that ‘feeling’ the weather and the effects on our planet presents
possibilities for a new order of activism and activity. Lynn Comella’s Vibrator Nation is
reviewed by Megan Le Masurier who, along the way, provides a neat history of sexuality. We
hope our readers might also pick up some hands-on hints!
Bibliography
Foss, P. and M. Morris (eds), Language, Sexuality & Subversion, Feral Publications, Sydney, 1978
Morris, M. and S. Muecke, ‘Relations of Theory—A Dialogue’, in Outside the Book: Contemporary Essays
on Literary Periodicals, ed. D. Carter, Local Consumption Publications, Sydney, 1991.
Muecke, S. (comp. and transc.), ‘A Martin Harrison ABC’, Plumwood Mountain: An Australian Journal of
Ecopoetry and Ecopoetics, https://plumwoodmountain.com/a-martin-harrison-abc/.
Patton, P. and M. Morris (eds), Michel Foucault: Power, Truth, Strategy, Feral Publications, Sydney, 1979.
https://doi.org/10.2307/3683911
Notes
1. Meaghan Morris and Stephen Muecke, ‘Relations of Theory—A Dialogue’, in Outside the Book:
Contemporary Essays on Literary Periodicals, ed. David Carter, Local Consumption Publications, Sydney,
1991. Also available at: https://www.academia.edu/29577366/Relations_of_Theory_A_Dialogue_1991_.pdf.
2. Stephen Muecke (comp. and transc.), ‘A Martin Harrison ABC’, Plumwood Mountain: An Australian
Journal of Ecopoetry and Ecopoetics, https://plumwoodmountain.com/a-martin-harrison-abc/.
3. See the now rare publications: Paul Foss and Meaghan Morris (eds), Language, Sexuality & Subversion,
Feral Publications, Sydney, 1978; and Paul Patton and Meaghan Morris (eds), Michel Foucault: Power, Truth,
Strategy, Feral Publications, Sydney, 1979.
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