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••• Ann Brooks •••

a process of creating spaces in which feminist voices can be heard … somewhere
between the popular and the academic’ (ibid.: 440).
Morris has rebuked Turner for overstating the significance of the binary of British
high culture as against Australian popular culture (see Morris, 1991). Whereas
Turner’s response to the hegemonic tendencies of British cultural studies is to fret
about the rules of the game, Wark comments that ‘[i]n the essays of Meaghan Morris,
there is a playful, self-conscious version of this dilemma of authority as it appears
from the antipodean end of the line … Morris writes in a manner which is self-
consciously antipodean but which does not necessarily have anything to do with
being Australian’ (Wark, 1992: 443).
The difference between Turner and Morris is ultimately one of ‘vulnerability’ of
positioning. Turner attempts to assert a ‘postcolonial identity’ for cultural studies but
does not attempt to conceptualize postcolonial feminist discourse within this for-
mulation. Morris discusses the problem of ‘identity’ in both feminist and antipodean
discourse. As Wark comments:

she takes all this on board – colonial antipodality and feminism as minor and
difficult speaking positions – and gets away with it. In multiplying the difficul-
ties of finding a place and a rhetorical means to speak, Morris has improvised
solutions. For example she treats the question of defining the feminist content
of an enquiry into everyday life as ‘an invitation to make up answers as I go
along’.
(1998b: 188)

A critical postcolonial perspective can be seen to be highly productive for cultural stud-
ies, as Stratton and Ang note, through its ability to shift the focus of cultural studies to
a ‘transnational dimension’, so that the conceptualization of cultural struggle and cul-
tural power ‘is now located as enacted between “societies” as well as within “societies”’
(Stratton and Ang, 1996: 381). However, this is not the only model which can interro-
gate a hegemonic cultural studies framework. The work of Stuart Hall provides the basis
of a second model suggested by Stratton and Ang, which is the diasporic model. The par-
ticular inflection given to British cultural studies by the ‘representational politics’ advo-
cated by Stuart Hall and the interjection of his own intellectual and personal biography
frame a speaking position which is identified by Hall himself as ‘diasporic’. This model
is one trajectory which accommodates Bennett’s articulated need for mobilization of an
international cultural studies ‘rendez-vous among the marginals themselves, bypassing
the presence of the hegemonic center’ (ibid.).
Hall’s personal history in relation to cultural studies has been formative in terms
of the development of British cultural studies, and Hall’s increasingly autobiograph-
ical contribution has led to a greater reflexivity within British cultural studies around
the ‘peculiarities of “Britishness”’. As Stratton and Ang observe, ‘what the diasporic
position opens up is the possibility of developing a post-imperial British identity, one
based explicitly on an acknowledgement and vindication of the “coming home” of
the colonized Other’ (ibid.: 383). The impact of the work of Hall (1992: 1993) and

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