Humanities and Social Sciences

Trans/forming Cultures Annual Public Lecture 2007

Professor Toby Miller

Professor of English, Sociology and Women's Studies
College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, University of California, Riverside, USA

Professor Toby Miller presented the 3rd TfC Annual Public Lecture at 7:00pm, on the 11th July 2007, entitled:
'Madeover Nation: The United States of Reinvention?' (Read the abstract)
Lecture Theatre CB02.04.13 University of Technology, Sydney.
Download a poster for the Anuual Lecture here [pdf].

 

 

 



Brief biography:
After working in broadcasting, banking and the civil service, Toby Miller became an academic in the late 1980s, when cultural studies was starting its boom. He has taught media and cultural studies across the humanities and social sciences in the University of New South Wales, Griffith University, Murdoch University and NYU.Toby Miller is currently Professor in the Departments of English, Sociology and Women's Studies and is Director of the University's Program in Film, and Visual Culture. His research areas include: media, sport, labour, gender, race, citizenship, politics and cultural policy via political economy. He engages in textual analysis, archival research and ethnography and he has recently become the co-editor of Social Identities.

Significant publications include:
The Well-Tempered Self: Citizenship, Culture and the Postmodern Subject (The John Hopkins UP, 1993)

Contemporary Australian Television (University of New South Wales Pub. 1994: with S. Cunningham)

Technologies of Truth: Cultural Citizenship and the Popular Media (University of Minnesota Press, 1998)

Popular Culture and Everyday Life (Sage, 1998 - with A McHoul)

SportCult (University of Minnesota Press, 1999 - co-ed R Martin)

Film and Theory: An Anthology (Blackwell, 2000 - co-ed R Stam)

Globalisation and Sport: Playing the World (Sage, 2001 - with G Lawrence, J McKay, D Rowe)

SportSex (Temple University Press, 2001)

Global Hollywood (British Film Institute/University of California Press, 2001)

A Companion to Cultural Studies (Blackwell, 2001 - ed.)

The Television Genre Book (British Film Institute/Indiana University Press, 2001 - assoc. ed. with J Tulloch, ed. G Creeber)

Cultural Policy (Sage, 2002 - with G Yudice)

Television Studies (British Film Institute/ University of California Press, 2002 - ed. assoc. A Locke)

Critical Cultural Policy Studies: A Reader (Blackwell, 2003 - co-ed J Lewis)

Television: Critical Concepts in Cultural and Media Studies (Routledge, 2003 - 5 vols. ed.)

Spyscreen: Espionage on Film and TV from the 1930s to the 1960s (Oxford University Press, 2003)

International Cultural Studies: An Anthology (Blackwell, in press - sec. ed. with A Abbas, J Erni)

Global Hollywood 2 (British Film Institute/University of California Press, 2005 - with Nitin Govil, John McMurria, Richard Maxwell, Ting Wang).

Cultural Citizenship: cosmopolitanism, consumerism, and television in a neo-liberal age (Temple University Press, 2007 - ed.)

Abstract:
Madeover Nation: The United States of Reinvention?
The grand promise of the United States is that what its people were born as need not define them ever more. James Truslow Adams coined the term 'American Dream' in 1931 as the core to his wide-ranging overview of national history, The Epic of America.Adams argued that since the 17th century, voluntary immigrants had been driven not only by '[t]he economic motive,' but also 'the hope of a better and freer life, a life in which a man might think as he would and develop as he willed.' The 'American dream' was 'of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller... with opportunity for each according to his ability or achievement.' Measured by something beyond commodities ('merely material plenty') it was 'a dream of being able to grow to fullest development as man and woman,' defying class barriers. That grand meritocratic promise still has the power to fascinate. It is expressed and achieved through the ultimate Yanqui desire: self-invention via commodities. Commodities appeal because they provide a way to dodge that old Hegelian dilemma: what to do about an absense of ethical substance. In the US, a sense of ethical incompleteness comes courtesy of origins in the under class of Europe and Asia, the enslaved of Africa, and the dispossessed of the Americas. It encourages an ongoing personal self-criticism that relies on faith and consumerism as means of surviving and thriving. One alternately loving and severe world of superstition (AKA religion) is matched by a second alternately loving and severe world of superstition (AKA consumption). In times of economic dynamism and uncertainty, they merge with old myths about meritocracy and religion to inform the way we think about the nation and manufacture citizens. DH Lawrence identified 'the true myth of America' as: 'She of the old skin, towards a new youth' (1953:64). The detritus of Europe needed remaking, and so have successive newcomers and newborns. Foundational myths of the 'American Dream' permeate this society. And dreams reference and distort reality. They attract and please even as they horrify and disappoint. So I look at the power of various forms of knowledge about people and their emotions applied to the US population. If we are to understand an absurdly wealthy and wasteful country, we must question the pleasures of reinvention as well as embracing them, teasing out as we do so the mystification of moral panics, and the reality of risk society.