Article,
Cultural Nationalism, Australian Media Studies, and Tom O’Regan
Continuum, 35 (3): 383-392 (2021)
DOI: 10.1080/10304312.2021.1902163
Abstract
This article focuses upon the context within which much of Tom O’Regan’s early work took place, and which this work helped to frame. The importance of a particular formation of cultural nationalism to the beginnings of media and cultural studies in Australia is no longer front of mind for most of us today as we confront the challenges of a dramatically reconfigured transnational media landscape. However, it was particularly important to the development of these fields over the 1980s and 1990s. Initially most closely collected with the case being made for government support of the resurgent Australian film industry, it also became crucial to what was a distinctive field of concentration of work in Australian media studies: the link between a critical media studies and an interest in the formation of cultural policy in the national interest. The article discusses this tendency in, and its influence upon, Tom O’Regan’s pioneering contribution to Australian film, media and cultural studies, before turning to the more recent shifts that took place in his work as it went beyond cultural nationalism to engage with the emerging issues around the rise of the platform.
