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.
Meaghan Morris, Australian Research Council Senior Fellow at University of Technology, Sydney, is the author of several works of feminist cultural theory, including The Pirate's Fiancee: Feminism, Reading, Postmodernism and co-editor of Australian Cultural Studies: A Reader.
"In my opinion, Meaghan Morris is perhaps the most original practitioner of cultural studies in the English-speaking world . . . Too Soon Too Late continues the effort to forge an original and experimental practice of cultural studies, and confronts one of the most interesting questions I can imagine: How does history function, not as an intellectual or academic enterprise, but as a popular practice and desire? What is the place of history in everyday life? In a series of sometimes bizarre but always beautiful, engaging and brilliantly insightful essays, Morris gives a new power to history and to language."
