Cirrus@Austlit

'Steeped in story-telling and endlessly curious, Reading the Country: An Introduction to Nomadology (1984) was the product of Paddy Roe, Stephen Muecke and Krim Benterrak, experimenting with what it might be like to think together about country. In the process a senior traditional owner, a cultural theorist and a painter produced a text unlike any other. Reading the Country: 30 Years On is a celebration of one of the great twentieth-century books of intercultural dialogue. Recalling a spirit of intellectual risk and respect, in this collection, Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars, poets, writers and publishers both acknowledge the past and look, with hope, to future transformations of culture and country.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Meaghan Morris was celebrated at the Meaghan Morris Festival as a mentor, a cultural theorist, a much-loved colleague, a lecturer, a polemicist and a stirrer, a teacher, an internationalist, a translator and much else besides. Here, I want to add to that chorus by making a very specific case: that Meaghan Morris is the most significant and innovative living Australian cultural historian. This characterisation is, in part, rooted in my own investments in work at the intersections of cultural studies and cultural history but it is of much greater significance. An influential contemporary characterisation of cultural studies is that it was a boomer reaction to existing disciplinary constraints, a manifestation of anti-canonical impulses that choose instead to celebrate marginality while at the same time making an innovative case for the ways in which culture matters. It follows that if, today, academic disciplines in the social sciences and humanities have become highly flexible (rather than canonical) and maintained their institutional hegemony while simultaneously becoming irrelevant to much knowledge-work and that, today, margins and mainstreams seem like next-to-useless terms to describe cultural topographies or flows and that, today, culture matters nowhere so much as the rapacious industries of media cultures, then perhaps the moment of cultural studies seems of historical interest only.'  (Introduction)

'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.'  (Introduction)

'In this issue of Cultural Studies Review, Sean Sturm considers Ruth Barcan’s book, Academic Life and Labour in the New University: Hope and Other Choices, in which she describes the contemporary university as a ‘a palimpsest: a scholarly community, a bureaucracy and a transnational corporation’. It would seem that academic journals might be similarly palimpsestic. Publications in refereed journals offer an opportunity to share original scholarly research, to review and debate research published elsewhere, and (in this journal at least) occasions for intellectual creativity and exploration. At the same time, articles in refereed journals are subject to relentless systems of quantification which both measure individual productivity and are fed into metrics of aggregation which, in turn, are harvested to produce rankings which are then key marketing messages for the promotion of particular corporate entities. And, more often than not, the journals we read and publish in are themselves products of transnational corporations. Although not this journal.' (Introduction)

'Forgetting Aborigines explores a central paradox in Australian History: Aborigines are often remembered as absent in the face of a continuing actual Indigenous historical presence. Chris Healy argues that in the ways we remember our history, Aborigines keep disappearing...Aboriginal issues can be on the front page for weeks prompting white Australians to ask the questions like 'why weren't we told?' and then recede again. The book examines the way in which we can stop this dishonest and destructive silence.

Healy explores the entanglements that emerge from various encounters between white and Indigenous people since the 1960s. The book draws on the extraordinary cultural production emerging from the domain of Aboriginality in painting, photography, exhibition, performance, poetry, fiction and much more... Forgetting Aborigines makes personal, reflective and intellectual observations about the ways in which we remember and forget and how we might make Aboriginality meaningful and visible in Australia'. Source: Publisher's blurb