Too Soon Too Late: History in Popular Culture

by Meaghn Morris and Meaghan Morris

Book Overview

What good is history to cultural studies? Meaghan Morris looks at struggles over "history" in social settings created by capitalism: in tourist landscapes and in television time. The materials of her analysis are motels, shopping malls, beaches, and local politics. She focuses on history and cultural heritage as issues of controversy for white working-class and poor suburban communities, as well as for urban cultural elites.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0253211883
• ISBN13: 9780253211880
• Release Date: August 1998
• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Length: 336 Pages
• Weight: 1.25 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.0" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

Cultural criticism at its global/local wry perverse best...

Meaghan Morris, early and late, writes cultural criticism at its global/local,wry perverse best. Lest this sound too late-capitalist cynical or rude, I should say that she writes from and as the local and national site of Australia, making this political and libidinal space of transnational cultural studies resonate with the most urgent, critical, and international issues that trouble our politics and poetics. As such, she reinvents Asia/Pacific as she writes, showing us (or should I say the writerly obsessive "me") how to work and affiliate in a space of writing and moral-political concern. When I read her essays, I face the panic white sublimity of awe and admiration, clotted and displaced. She invents topics and tropes for each essay or book, reframing tourism, mass media, film, movement, embodied location, identity, without falling into the "banality of cultural studies" or the throwaway language and motel spaces that haunt our politics. She is an untimely critic, whose writing is both too soon and too late for the market. But the "tyranny of space" in the Pacific has been overcome, and I for one am very grateful such an artist and cultural critic and scholar exists all packed into one person, Meaghan Morris.