Lately based at Lingnan University, in Hong Kong, Morris (like Peter Singer, who made the number four position on the APIN list) is an Australian academic whose career has followed an international trajectory and whose output has not been limited to matters Australian. What qualifies Morris – or Singer or Germaine Greer, for that matter – as an Australian intellectual? How do questions of nation and nationality bear on academic practice in an international marketplace? Such questions are Morris’s quarry in Identity Anecdotes. She asserts that Identity Anecdotes is not a book about being Australian but one about ‘transnationally circulating problems of identity production’, of which nationality poses particular dilemmas to academics. Those who apply to the Australian Research Council for funding must argue for the national significance of their projects and simultaneously market their research to a transnational audience. ‘An academic writer without a market these days is in deep trouble,’ writes Morris. The demands of the new academic market present some curious difficulties, as she reveals in her reflections on translating the concept of ‘mateship’ for a North American cultural studies journal. This situation, that ‘of a scholar who writes internationally from, and ultimately for or to a place (it needn’t be a nation) deemed unimportant or eccentric within a given economy of intellectual exchange’, is the vital context to Identity Anecdotes. Morris is as attentive to the circumstances governing the production of criticism as she is to the historical and economic contingencies that condition works of art and their reception.

Eloquently insistent upon academic writing as a mode of cultural production, Morris, in the introduction (the most recent piece in the volume), elaborates with vigour on the industrial pressures bearing upon academics and intellectuals in Australia. The relationship between intellectual and public life is not at present a comfortable one. If you believe the hype, the Australian university sector is dominated by left-wing ideologues intent on the destruction of authors, truth, justice and civility. Fewer column inches have been dedicated to the brutal impact of higher education reform on teaching and research in the university system. Morris refers to the ‘cultivated habit of professional people who are not academics to think of the university not as a workplace, conflicted and changing like any other, but as a site of personal memory that evokes strong emotions and remains frozen in time’.

This popular image of the cloistered academic, oblivious and impervious to the reality out there is a myth, albeit one with considerable traction. The professionalisation of the humanities has also served to restrict the possibilities for public intellectuals to work outside or on the fringes of the academy. Morris describes her career in the 1980s as a that of a ‘gadfly critic’, noting that ‘the paying small magazines and journals are mostly gone, along with the plentiful part-time teaching, replaced for a new generation by the grueling labour of serial casualisation’. If academia was ever a leisurely profession, a kind of state-funded dilettantism, that time, Morris argues, has well and truly passed. Translation is the logic which draws these essays together; Morris glosses the collection as ‘an argument for a translative (rather than narrowly transnational) practice of cultural work that can attend to institutional difference, moving, when need be, from one institution and/or speech situation to another’. Building on the work of Naoki Sakai, whose monograph Translation and Subjectivity (1997) is discussed in the essay entitled ‘An Ethics of Uncertainty’, translation here functions as ‘a “heterolingual” effort to address an essentially mixed audience’. Translation is of equivalent concern, then, to the scholar working in a transnational environment and to the public intellectual who must necessarily speak beyond the perimeters of academic institutions to a general public. Following Sakai, Morris treats translation as a ‘social relation, a practice always in some way carried out in the company of others and structuring the situation in which it is performed’. Making the intellectual public is an act of translation, a recognition of the incommensurability of two ‘speech situations’. This is a somewhat utopian brief, but the energy and intelligence Morris brings to the cause is a welcome and indeed exemplary antidote to the more familiar eulogies of public intellectualism. Not all of the essays in Identity Anecdotes could plausibly lay claim to address a general public; those which sit at the centre of the volume in the section entitled ‘Translation and Cultural Theory’ are dense, theoretical numbers which make considerable demands of their readers. Here we find Morris on Paul Willemin and Sakai, worrying David Harvey, mobilising Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari to read Muriel’s Wedding. There is no dumbing down here, but Morris’s style is far more legible than many of those whose work she engages. As she writes in ‘The Man in the Mirror’, her critique of Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity (1990): ‘I do not race to rescue theories from the perils of popularisation.’ She is a marvellously lucid writer, and this serves the objective of translation admirably.

Morris began her career as a film critic, and her pioneering work on cinema and history is well represented here. Rereading her 1991 essay on border paranoia, terror in the bush, and the rhetoric of menace in Australian action cinema, ‘White Panic or Mad Max and the Sublime’, illuminates more recent hysterical contestations of national space. Similarly, ‘Beyond Assimilation: Aboriginality, Media History and Public Memory’, based on a public lecture delivered in Hawai’i in 1993, takes the work of Tracey Moffat as a point of departure for a still prescient reflection on the complex dialectic between cultural artefacts and history. The delightful refutation of David Williamson’s various hackneyed mischaracterisations of post-structuralism in ‘The Scully Protocol’ (first published, incidentally, in ABR in 1996) is salutary both in its revelation of critical deficiencies in such alarmist denunciations of a ghoulish Theory and in its extremely engaging style. It is worth noting, however, that under-informed attacks on theory and its avatars have hardly diminished in number or intensity since 1996; further translation is clearly needed.

Identity Anecdotes bears witness to an impressive and enviable career in and out of the academy. For all its discernment, however, some of this collection strikes me as curiously dated. Morris tackles with panache the culture wars of the 1990s, Pauline Hanson’s notorious ‘please explain’ interview with Tracey Curro on 60 Minutes, and politically correct language. As satisfying as these clear-headed essays are, they have the appeal of period pieces. While Hanson’s relegation to the footnotes of Australian political history is a relief, the socalled ‘war on terror’ has changed the rules for discussion of language, politics and, most dramatically, national identity. That which she terms ‘Australianism’ in the first essay in this collection importantly intersects with the traffic in Australian values that has recently been so very prominent in public debate. After 9/11, after Tampa, after the Cronulla riots, I want to read Morris on terror and sedition, on the history wars and the new patriotism. Nonetheless, when the charge of un-Australianism serves as such an effective silencing device, whether it is directed at asylum seekers or the caffe latte set, such careful scrutiny of the nuances of Australian identity production is apposite.