Counterculture Politics and Popular Culture Studies

CounterculturePoliticsand PopularCultureStudies Ruth A. Banes Michael J. Bell. The World From Brown's Lounge: An Ethnography of Black Middle Class Play. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983. 191 + xii pp. Karen Haltunnen. Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle Class Culture in America, 1830-1870. NewHaven: Yale University Press, 1982. 262 + xviii pp. Bernard Mergen. Play and Playthings: A Reference Guide. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1982. 281 + xi pp. Richard Gid Powers. G-Men: Hoover'.f F.B.J. in American Popula, Culture. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983. 356 + xix pp. Janice A. Radway. Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Laerature. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984. 274 +x pp. William L. Van De burg. Slave1J'and Race in American Popular Culture Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984. 283 + xiii pp. David E. Whisnant. All That is Native and Fine: The Politics of Culture in a Changing Region. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983. 340 + xv pp. Twogeneral trends characterize recent American Studies scholarship in the United States: an awareness of cultural pluralism and a covert political stance. American Studies has become a socially-consciousdiscipline informed by the values and aims of academicians who were socialized and educated during the culturally-turbulent 1960s.As Gene Wise's cultural history of the American Studies movement explains: "After the middle of the sixties, it was hard to assume that America was an integrated whole; division and conflict, not consensus, seemed to characterize the culture."' During the late sixties, when popular culture studies emerged as a branch of American Studies, the United States was troubled by moral and ethical concerns. Among the numerous issues which attracted public attention were middle-classhypocrisy, cultural imperialism, social injustice, the abuse of political power, and materialistic values-issues which are recalled in the studies of popular cultur:,eto be reviewed here. 2 The academics who initiated the American Studies movement, including Parrington, Miller and Matthiessen, sought to define and comprehend a single, monolithic American character. During the 1950s, scholars of the myth and symbol school, including Marx, Smith and Ward, argued that comprehensive American myths defined the American character during particular historical eras.3 Beginning in the 1960s,however,scholars including Cawelti, Kuklick and Wise rejected the simplistic approach of the myth and Canadian Review of American Studies, Volume 17, Number 1, Spring 1986,93-108 94 Ruth A. Banes symbol school, expanding the boundaries of American culture studies to include ordinary people and ordinary lives.4 Popular culture studies today are necessarily informed by the perspectives of sociological theory and the new social history. A sixties legacy of divergent perspectives including black studies, women's studies, material culture studies, and folklore studies, among others, has become representative of recent trends in popular culture. The books reviewed here dispute the rhetoric of myth and vision while they attempt to explain the social-historical and ideological functionality of popular culture. 5 The authors share a quest to identify the complexity and pluralism of American culture. Their theoretical approaches are as diverse as their subjects; but all of them are interdisciplinary, utilizing empirical, interpretive or linguistic techniques, in addition to the more traditional literary criticism and intellectual history. These authors reject simple, non-analytical or causal explanations of popular culture while they search for covert themes, all the while recognizing the complexity of American culture and the diverse social functions of popular texts.6 Interestingly, the covert themes in these studies are political. Not one of the authors presents disconnected scholarship for its own sake; each utilizes knowledge for political purposes in a tradition endorsed during the 1960s. 7 They are reflective and self-conscious regarding the political role of scholarship. They are aware of cultural conflict, the functions of ideology, and the role of the particular in American culture. They are exploring the relationship between popular culture and a particular social class, subculture, race, ethnic group or gender. Appropriately, then, this essay will analyze the politics of popular culture, its influence upon participants, producers and scholarly interpreters. Through a critical analysis of sentimental culture, Karen Haltunnen's Confidence Men and Painted Women reveals the covert significance of self...