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138 the minnesota review Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture by George Lipsitz. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990. 306 pp., $14.95 (paper), $34.95 (cloth). In this remarkable, ambitious book, George Lipsitz combines historical and cultural criticisms to evaluate a wide range of postwar American texts, including early television comedies, music, film, contemporary novels, and the Mardi Gras Indian celebrations. Right from the start, Time Passages lays its ideological cards on the table: the Preface is a cogent, committed, and very personal argument for the central role of culture studies in the university curriculum. Lipsitz became convinced of this when faced with apolitical students, who believed only "in their own powerlessness"; he found that "popular culture texts provoked a different response from them. They identified with television programs, films, and popular music in a way that they would not even consider about politics" (xiii). His political agenda helps unify and motivate a book which, as he acknowledges, tackles a daunting variety of topics. Lipsitz divides the book into six sections: an introduction, "Culture and History"; four analyses, of "Popular Television," "Popular Music," "Popular Film," and "Popular Narrative" (each of which is further subdivided into two chapters); and a conclusion, "History and the Future." The introduction invokes a range of theoretical models—Bakhtin, Gramsci, and Marshall Berman chief among them—and argues that culture critics too often neglect what Lipsitz terms the dialogic process of cultural creation. "|T|he 'remembering' of history and the 'forgetting' of commercialized leisure," he argues, "form parts of a dialectical totality" (6). By forging a methodology which is itself a dialogue between historical and textual analyses, Lipsitz works toward establishing how mass cultural texts both created and reflected the "collective memory" of postwar America. The book, then, is part of the increasing rejection of "hypodermic" theories of mass culture, invoking instead a dynamic model of ideologies involved in continual contestation and construction. It explores texts as sites of ideological struggle, open to reappropriation and revision by their audiences. In "Popular Television." as in each of the following sections, Lipsitz first establishes an overall historical and cultural context. He locates television's development as "the most important discursive medium in American culture" (42) in the postwar era. when sales of television sets jumped from three million in the entire decade of the 1940s to over five million a year in the 1950s. Incorporating 1950s business, advertising, and marketing data into his discussion of television programs, he argues that television was used as a forum for redefining American ethnic, class, and family identities into consumer identities to satisfy the economic imperatives of the 1950s. His evidence is both convincing and entertaining: in The Goldbergs. for example, a son tells his mother, when she disapproves of her future daughter-in-law's plan to buy a washing machine on the installment plan. "Listen Ma, almost everybody in this country lives above their means—and everybody enjoys it" (48). The following account, of Amos V Andy, addresses what was missing in the discussion of The Goldbergs: questions of audience reception. Citing a viewer's memories of how he and his family viewed the show, Lipsitz argues for the validity of Gramscian theories of negotiated or contested readings, and reads the show's eventual cancellation (in 1966) as proving the possibility of television's politicization as a result of audience protest. Compelling as his argument is, it seems a bit Utopian; for one thing, the evidence for contested readings rests on the retrospective testimony of one viewer, activist and author Julius Lester. The second chapter in "Popular Television" is a complex and fascinating account of the 1949-1956 series / Remember Mama. Lipsitz evaluates all aspects of the show, including production context, writers' and advertisers' agendas, cast members' experiences, and audience response. There's a fascinating critique of a thirty-years-later Mama reunion hosted by the Museum of Broadcasting in New York; citing questions and responses from this forum, Lipsitz establishes that viewers, cast, and production team used the show to reinterpret, or even reremember , aspects of their own lives. In one of his characteristically nice turns of phrase, he reviews 139 sees this as evidence of...

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