Page 198 - Cultural Theory

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••• Reconceptualizing Representation and Identity •••

Australian cultural studies ‘at the margins’ confronted by the Anglocentric,
neo-colonialist ‘universalism’ characterized by British cultural studies. Stratton and
Ang comment that ‘[t]he politics of the position is to assert “Australia” in the face of
a powerful … “Britain”. But this Australian postcolonial position is also, profoundly
informed by the former settler colony’s residual preoccupation, if not obsession, with
what used to be the mother country’ (1996: 380).
The relationship between representation and identity in relation to conceptualiz-
ing an Australian cultural studies and indeed ‘Australianism’ is a complicated one
and Turner recognizes the difficulties:

On the one hand a defence must be mounted of the nation that there is a national
culture which may not be ‘organic’ or ‘authentic’ but which nonetheless system-
atically produces differences and interests which should be respected, maintained
and, at times protected. On the other hand, those who have reservations about
the idea of the nation have to insist that it is, after all, imaginary, and that its
momentum towards unity is to be resisted and interrogated.
(Turner, 1992: 428)

While Turner recognizes the dangers of attempting to ‘fix’ a conception of national
identity, his model of an Australian cultural studies falls dangerously close to being
caricatured by Meaghan Morris’s conception of the relationship between ‘settler
subjectivity – primarily but not exclusively articulated in Australia by Anglo-Celtic
people … and cultural studies’. As Morris observes: ‘To use an Australianism, dominion
subjects are the “whinging whites” of international cultural studies. Dubiously post-
colonial, prematurely postmodern, constitutively multi-cultural but still predomi-
nantly white, we oscillate historically between identities of colonizer and colonized’
(1992a: 471).
Morris shares with Angela McRobbie (1994) (see also Brooks 1997a; 1997b) an
interest in the ‘micropolitics of everyday life’. In Morris’s essay ‘Afterthoughts on
“Australianism”’(1992a), she puts the Australian conception of ‘mateship’ on the cul-
tural studies agenda. As she observes: ‘[s]ince mateship is an everyday medium of
micro political pressure … it also thrives in those oppositional milieux (feminist,
anti-racist, multiculturalism, gay and lesbian activist) which most affect to despise it
from its exclusionary determinants and its current complicities of power’ (ibid.: 469).
In framing ‘mateship’ within a cultural studies context, Morris ‘dismantles’ its overt
masculinist and nationalist rhetoric and draws on it as a metaphor with which to
explore conceptions of ‘Australianism’. In doing so, she addresses aspects of Australia’s
postcolonial identity, both as colonized and coloniser.
Morris, like McRobbie operates at a number of different levels of analysis. She
shares with McRobbie two dimensions in her critical cultural studies repertoire, first,
her desire to ‘“create a place from which to speak” that allows a feminist voice to do
more than “answer back” to hegemonic modes of discourse’ (Wark, 1992: 434).
Second, her objection to cultural studies is conceived in terms of an opposition
between academic and popular discourse. As McKenzie Wark observes: ‘[h]er work is

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