Cirrus@Austlit

Research into how the “media worlds” of Indigenous feature filmmaking came into being in Australia is part of the broader project of the burgeoning work in the ethnography of media, which turns the analytic lens of anthropology on the production, circulation and consumption of media in a variety of locales, in this case asking what role these media play in the discursive evolution of new ways of conceptualizing diversity, contributing to the expanding (if contested) understandings of Australia as a culturally diverse nation, something that activist filmmakers have long understood. Their films contribute to that process not only by offering alternative accountings that undermine the fictions presented by unified national narratives as they play on screen; their work (in both senses of the word) also demonstrates that a textual analysis is not sufficient if it does not also take into account the “off screen” cultural and political labor of Aboriginal activists whose interventions have made this possible. More broadly, I underscore the importance of media and those who make it as critical to understanding how contemporary states and their citizens negotiate diversity. - Author's abstract.