Moby Dick, cultural policy and the geographies and geopolitics of cultural labor
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12602016 |
|---|---|
| Authors | John Mcmurria (University of California San Diego, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2009 |
| Volume | 12 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 237-256 |
| Publication date | 2009-04-15 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | International Journal of Cultural Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1367-8779 • E-ISSN: 1460-356X |
| Publisher | SAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1177/1367877908101570 |
| OpenAlex | W2130073471 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 20 |
This article examines the official Australia/UK television co-production of Moby Dick (1998) to engage with cultural policy issues within an increasingly transnational audiovisual sector. It begins with the political and cultural contexts of Melville's mid-19th-century novel to demonstrate that international law and commercial power have long shaped `national' cultural production. The late 20th-century co-production contexts include international cable/satellite networks seeking prestigious literary adaptations for global branding; production trends oscillating between different least-cost production locations; national policy-makers supporting co-productions to negotiate transnational trends; and intranational policy-makers competing to attract international production. Policy forums largely treated co-productions as necessary compromises between maintaining national cultural expression and supporting transnational production, creating a preservationist cultural nationalism that devalued below-the-line workers and privileged drama over other genres. To problematize this dynamic the article considers the geopolitical contexts of the Moby Dick novel and TV movie so as to destabilize these bounded conceptions of national culture and insert priorities of international political justice in cultural policy-making
Cultural policy · Drama · Geopolitics · Media studies · Nationalism · Negotiation · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Social science · Sociology · Cultural Industries and Urban Development · Law
Routes
Subversive Genealogy
British Influence on the Brith of American Literature
The Well-Tempered Self
On Location
A Concise History of Australia
From White Australia to Woomera
A Concise History of Australia
The Raven and the Whale
On Location
Servicing `the other Hollywood
Cultural resources, creative industries and the long economy
Locomotives and Stargates
The Cultural Roots of American Islamicism
The Letters of Herman Melville
The Raven and the Whale
The Rise of the American Novel
| Citations per year | 0.08 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2014 - 2014 (1) |
| Highly cited | No |