South of the West

South of the West is a study of Western aesthetics and the politics of everyday life. Cultural critic Ross Gibson examines an array of objects and attitudes encountered in his southern locale but best understood when considered in a global context. These different systems of representation construct 'Australia'. Gibson offers provocative analyses of 'national cinema' films of the 1970s, corporate-sponsored documentaries, explorer's narratives, cartographic history, ethnographic documents, archival photographs, postmodernist art, Edgar Allan Poe's South Sea tales, Thomas Watling's 'letters in exile', Chris Marker's 'exotic' cinematography, and Peter Fuller's musings about the 'antipodean aesthetic'. Nature, Gibson says, is the myth of an established Anglophone class. He suggests re-evaluation of our Western beliefs and aesthetics, and at the same time he presents a fresh interpretation of Australian culture and politics. The twelve chapters interweave to form an essay on the realignment of space, time, and meaning in contemporary Western societies.