“The long fetch of history”

Twenty years ago, lawrence levine—esteemed cultural historian and winner of a MacArthur “genius” fellowship—described his colleagues’ nervous laughter when he classified certain popular entertainers as great artists. Levine asked himself why it mattered so much to distinguish between “high” and “low” culture, and he set out to discover when the categories crystallized in the United States and whose interests they served.

The result was Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America. The book zeroes in on mid-nineteenth-century phrenology, which measured cranial dimensions to establish a hierarchy of racial types, from the high brows of European Caucasians to the low brows of alien races: Coombs’ Popular Phrenology of 1865 typically illustrated the domed forehead of Shakespeare against the flat-headed skull of “A Cannibal New Zealand Chief” (Levine 222). As the century wore on, that distinction was increasingly wielded by a class of “old stock” Anglo-American gentlemen who sought to shore up their privilege in the face of threats posed by galloping immigration, industrialization, and technology. Levine closely documents how this class succeeded in fissuring what had been “a rich shared public culture,” removing Shakespeare, symphonic music, opera, and the fine arts to a pantheon of inaccessible high culture (9). Other scholars of the late-nineteenth-century U. S.—such as Ellen Gruber Garvey, Kathy Peiss, and Richard Ohmann—have traced parallel power relations in struggles between established middle-class book publishers and the makers of mass magazines, in the gendered division of commercialized leisure, and in the commodification of audiences by advertisers. The eastern establishment sought both to distance itself from and to control this new mass culture marketplace, and a new class alignment—sometimes named the professional-managerial class—emerged.

Repeatedly, the cultural categories which crystallized in this period— highbrow/lowbrow, literary/commercial, elite/mass, serious/popular— served to widen the gap between “us” and “them.” In a period which saw the collapse of Radical Reconstruction, the attempted genocide of Indigenous peoples, the violent suppression of labour action, and the first wave of women publicly agitating for suffrage, these categories did crucial cultural work. They naturalized the hierarchies of race, class, and gender, and their divisions underwrote other forms of segregation.

Some, of course, refused such distinctions and their own relegation within the cultural hierarchy. S. Alice Callahan (Muskogee)—currently identified as the first Native American woman to publish a novel, Wynema (1891)—used the popular sentimentalism associated with white middle-class women to launch an excoriating attack on the genocidal policies and practices of the government of the day. In the same period, African-Americans across the country did an end-run on the white monopoly on publishing and distribution, seizing the new tools of mass publishing for their own ends. The Colored Cooperative Publishing Company in Boston, James McGirt in Philadelphia, and Sutton Griggs in Tennessee all produced and marketed popular magazines and books to Black communities, heroizing African-American and mixed-race figures and raging, in their various ways, against racial inequities. Along the fault lines and colour lines of cultural hierarchy, such creative forces marshaled solidarity and resistance.

What has all this, an argument from U.S. studies, to do with our position as academics, in Canada, right now? Ohmann argues that mass culture emerged hand in hand with the modern research university, each shaping and serving the other. To simplify his argument: the new universities trained the professional-managerial class which shaped and consumed the new commercial culture which, in turn, helped corporate capitalism to find stability in the economic chaos of the post-bellum U.S. Although the pmc could—and still does—generate temporary opposition to capitalism, it has also provided long-term support to the system. Now, as the corporatization and Americanization of Canadian universities gallop on apace, we are living the next step in this process, as universities fit themselves to the needs of agile capitalism. Our institutions continue to refine nineteenth-century forms of cultural distinction—celebrity culture, niche marketing, the commodification of students’ attention—while resorting to the agile tactics of twenty-first-century globalization: downsizing...