concern themselves with film. Jon Stratton’s insightful opening essay posits that the Australian tilt towards neo-liberalism from the mid 1990s, with its replacement of the social contract with individualism, has led to a series of films in which individual contracts and narratives of revenge are legitimised. Concerns with this ideological shift pervade a number of the essays, including pointed analyses of TV networks mining tragedy and triumph in Beaconsfield (by Jason Bainbridge) and the Howard government’s constructions of ‘crisis’ in indigenous communities (Virginia Watson).

The issue also surveys the comforts and discomforts of cultural studies’ own homefronts – in academia and in ‘field’ research. For Grant Farred, cultural studies represents a ‘perpetually dislocated’ thinking and as such is not only concerned with cultural diasporas but is itself diasporic, though devices such as repeated citings of ‘the Other’ belie claims made for its resistance to orthodoxy. Graeme Turner questions an institutional shift in emphasis from teaching cultural studies to research. Ann Deslandes’s diaristic reflection sees her scrutinising her own ‘perverse thrill’ of exposure to Third World ‘realities’. Her frank contribution is as much about Western anti-capitalist romanticisation of resistance movements as it is about Brazil’s Movimento Sem Terra and its reclamations of land for the poor.