ISSN: 1329-878X

Soap Operas and Telenovelas No 106 February 2003 Order form Abstracts

Contents

Abstracts

Christina Slade: Telenovelas and soap operas:

Negotiating reality from the periphery Latin American telenovelas, like the Australasian soap operas, have been globally successful. It is a remarkable feature of this success that it has reversed the flow from the centres of production in Europe and the United States. I argue that we should assess these products from the 'periphery' in their own terms, and not through the lens of the industries of the heartland. I take the Mexican case as a specific example, and turn then to comparisons between the Australasian soap industry and that in Latin America.

Trish Dunleavy: A Soap of our own: New Zealand's Shortland Street

Shortland Street is a primetime soap opera that launched on New Zealand television in 1992 and was created to meet a combination of commercial and 'public service' objectives. Shortland Street is institutionally and culturally significant as New Zealand's first attempt at daily drama production and one of the first major productions to follow New Zealand television's 1989 deregulation. Placing Shortland Street in the context of national television culture and within the genre of locally produced TV drama, this paper explores several key facets of the program, including: its creation as a co-production between public and private broadcasting institutions; its domestic role in a small television market; its relationships with New Zealand 'identity and culture'; its application of genre conventions and foreign influences; and its progress - as a production that was co-developed by Grundy Television - in a range of export markets.

Mauro Pereira Porto: Realism and politics in Brazilian telenovelas

Telenovelas have been central to the constitution and development of Latin American cultures, becoming the most popular genre of television broadcasting. In the Brazilian case, the melodramatic serials soon became the basis for the commercial success of TV Globo, the dominant network. The prime-time telenovelas of TV Globo are currently watched in almost 50 per cent of the dwellings with TV sets every night. This paper argues that this popularity is specific to the Brazilian industry. The realism and treatment of political issues in the genre is traced to the role of scriptwriters.

Daniel Mato: The telenovela industry: markets and representations of transnational identities

This article discusses the process of transnationalisation of the telenovela industry from a perspective that seeks to articulate economic and cultural analysis (social symbolic). Two objectives guide this analysis. First, to contribute to the theoretical field on globalisation through a criticism of the attributes of 'deterritorialisation' and 'homogenisation' which are often associated with the idea of globalisation without being put to the test in at least some realms of experience. Through a close analysis of the telenovela industry, I examine those presuppositions in order to demonstrate both how new territorial references emerge (particularly the city of Miami) and how certain differences are erased while new ones appear. The second objective is to explore some tensions related to the production of markets and of representations of identities, especially relative to the construction of a transnational 'Hispanic' identity. A significant outcome of the analysis of the case of the telenovela industry is that it makes particularly evident the tight interwoven of cultural and economic factors.

Angélica Aragón, edited by Christina Slade: Killing the goose that lays the golden eggs: A Mexican perspective on the industry

The business of making telenovelas is immensely profitable, yet very few of the profits are fed back into the industry. The industry in Mexico is, according to Angélica Aragón, unprofessional and slapdash. She argues that actors and directors should insist on their artistic imperatives, and seek a professional structure within which to work.

Cuauhtémoc Blanco Arias, Greg Haddrick and Gillian Arnold, edited and introduced by Felicity Packard: Creating social reality: template or mirror? An industry perspective

While much has been written by academics about television strip serials and telenovelas, a perspective less frequently discussed is that of these programs' writers and creators. What aspects of social realities do the writers, story editors and script producers of soap operas and telenovelas invest in their writing? This article draws together the views of practitioners from three very different backgrounds. Cuauhtémoc Blanco, a leading Mexican writer of telenovelas, Felicity Packard and Greg Haddrick of Home and Away, and Gillian Arnold of Going Home, discuss their understanding of the ways they create social reality on television.

Michael Sergi and Peter Dodds: How reality bites: The production of Australian soap operas

Soap opera in Australia is driven artistically by the bottom line, according to Peter Dodds, the producer of the archetypal Australian soap Neighbours, and to Michael Sergi, a freelance director and academic. The meaning of any particular episode is best understood as being filtered by constraints governing production and direction. The specific production and direction processes illuminate much debate about soaps.

Jorge González: Understanding Telenovelas as a Cultural Front: a complex analysis of a complex reality

The social phenomenon of televised melodramas called telenovelas in Spanish can be taken as a perfect example of a complex symbolic form in contemporary societies. There are a number of differences and nuances between Latin telenovelas and their electronic 'cousin', the soap opera. Nevertheless, the two genres are closely related. In this brief paper, I will stress some traits of a major theoretical and methodological framework of cultural fronts to analyse and bring into partial scientific visibility this global and local phenomenon. My aim is to set up a general framework to facilitate a necessary deeper reflection, and hopefully initiate some international comparative research, given the 'intriguing' global appeal of this symbolic form.

Steven Maras: The communications environment

This article discusses and evaluates different understandings of the term 'communications environment'. The article suggests that the term has a complex place in critical discourse, and is caught up within a process of media and communication theory rethinking its own ground. In the discussion that follows, I attempt to locate various uses of the term in relation to each other, and different traditions of communications research.

Greg Noble and Scott Poynting: Acts of war: Military metaphors in representations of Lebanese youth gangs

The media representations of the terrorist attacks of September 11 in the United States and their aftermath bear strong similarities to the media coverage of 'Lebanese youth gangs' over the last few years - both rely significantly on the metaphor of war. This paper explores two media narratives about Lebanese youth gangs which draw on this metaphor - the first deploys a simple us/them structure which, like the dominant Western reportage of the terrorist crisis, turns on a form of moral reduction in which the forces of good and evil are relatively clear. The accumulated imagery of Lebanese gangs, drugs, crime, violence and 'ethnic gang rape' articulates a dangerous otherness of those of Arabic-speaking background - echoed in the coverage of the terrorist 'attack on America'. This simple narrative, however, gives way to a second, emerging narrative about Lebanese youth gangs which also relies on the metaphor of war but acknowledges the moral duplicity of both 'combatants' - registering the culpability of the state and its police service but distancing 'the ordinary Australian' from this culpability. The second narrative, like the first, tries to recuperate a moral innocence for the 'ordinary Australian', but in doing so underlines a crisis in Australian multiculturalism.

Matthew Rimmer: Virtual countries: Internet domain names and geographical terms

This paper examines the dispute between the Seattle company Virtual Countries Inc. and the Republic of South Africa over the ownership of the domain name address southafrica.com. The first part of the paper deals with the pre-emptive litigation taken by Virtual Countries Inc. in a District Court of the United States. The second part considers the possible arbitration of the dispute under the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Process of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and examines the wider implications of this dispute for the jurisdiction and the governance of ICANN. The final section of the paper evaluates the Final Report of the Second WIPO Internet Domain Name Process.

Graeme Turner: 'Popularising Politics': This Day Tonight and Australian television current affairs

This paper presents a history of the pioneering ABC TV current affairs program, This Day Tonight (TDT). This Day Tonight has mythic status in the history of Australian television news and current affairs, and is often used as a reference point for the kind of political journalism that is now generally held to have disappeared from Australian television. The research for this paper does endorse this myth to some extent but it also reminds us of the importance of the broader cultural contexts within which television programming must find its audience. There are significant differences to be noted, and important lessons to be learnt, from the comparison between TDT and its audience, and the kinds of current affairs programming and audiences we have today. Further, the history of TDT's demise challenges the basis for the industry nostrum that audiences find politics boring and that therefore political journalism is no longer a commercial option for contemporary current affairs television.