At Henry Parkes motel

Expatriation: Useful astonishment as cultural studies

“…This being Englishness, it is a convention of the programme that the Bible and Shakespeare are already there (as a kind of portable origin for Englishness), but, this being Australia, it must be remembered that the Bible and Shakespeare are not imaginary origins but real destinations, just down the road from Ilfracombe on the Capricorn Highway; Jericho and The Shakespeare. Doubtless many castaways would prefer their Shakespeare in the form of a pub, and Meaghan Morris (1988a) has shown that a hotel can be 'read' (even in terms of national origins), though in her case it was a motel. 1° The Bible and Shakespeare are obvious enough symbols of English authenticity for the BBC's imaginary desert island, but they are transformed into something quite different (not English culture but labour politics) in such destinations as Queensland, where even the status of destinations is far from final.…”

Searching for Meaghan (Morris)

“…In such practices, theory is used to 'relentlessly generate models of the proper [use of place and time]', that is, models of proper forms of agency. 10 In 'Banality,' she opposes theory that construct 'a fictive position from which anything can be dismissed as already learned', 11 radically diminishing the possibilities of agency in both the present and future tense. Hence, these practices are constantly displacing politics, especially the very possibility of a popular politics, pushing it always further into a receding horizon, creating a new vanguardism wrapped in high theory.…”

“…For de Certeau, the popular considered discursively, as stories, 'act as a means of transportation … in the shuttling that 'constantly transforms places into spaces or spaces into places'. 13 In de Certeau, the popular asserts the equivalence between (popular) tactics and space against (the established power of ) strategy and place.…”

Interpreting Lincoln: Propaganda Myths in Film

“…He is the Lincoln that modern society knows and is aware of, and every time he is depicted in dramatic fashion he is reconstructed, and thus distanced from the man who actually existed. Morris (1988) writes that the true "begins to be reproduced in the image of the pseudo, which begins to become the true" (p. 6). This consistent reproduction not only pulls what was real into ever-changing examples of new hyperreal truths, but an expectation of support for the new reality is thrust onto the viewer, which in turn plays into the propagandist's goal of a compliant audience.…”