Moby Dick, cultural policy and the geographies and geopolitics of cultural labor

Abstract

• This article examines the official Australia/UK television co-production of Moby Dick (1998) to engage with cultural policy issues within an increasingly transnational audiovisual sector. It begins with the political and cultural contexts of Melville's mid-19th-century novel to demonstrate that international law and commercial power have long shaped `national' cultural production. The late 20th-century co-production contexts include international cable/satellite networks seeking prestigious literary adaptations for global branding; production trends oscillating between different least-cost production locations; national policy-makers supporting co-productions to negotiate transnational trends; and intranational policy-makers competing to attract international production. Policy forums largely treated co-productions as necessary compromises between maintaining national cultural expression and supporting transnational production, creating a preservationist cultural nationalism that devalued below-the-line workers and privileged drama over other genres. To problematize this dynamic the article considers the geopolitical contexts of the Moby Dick novel and TV movie so as to destabilize these bounded conceptions of national culture and insert priorities of international political justice in cultural policy-making. •

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