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Whispers on the Color Line: Rumor and Race in America, and: At Stake: Monsters and the Rhetoric of Fear in Public Culture (review)
- American Literature
- Duke University Press
- Volume 75, Number 1, March 2003
- pp. 214-215
- Review
- Additional Information
- Purchase/rental options available:
American Literature 75.1 (2003) 214-215
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The culture of gossip, rumor, and scandal is the shared concern of Gary Alan Fine and Patricia Turner's Whispers on the Color Line and Edward Ingebretsen's At Stake. Working from a stunning array of source material, these books ask how contemporary legends simultaneously feed off and into the major bases of social division that structure U.S. society. Ingebretsen focuses primarily upon the realm of popular journalism and mass entertainment, while Turner and Fine ground their analysis in unofficial rumors that come into existence without—or often despite—the efforts of corporations and state agencies. Taken together, these books offer a window onto a contemporary political landscape that is continually being remade through print and electronic media as well as by word of mouth.
Aimed at a general audience, Whispers on the Color Line brings together topical rumors and so-called urban legends that have circulated among black and white publics during the last two decades. Culled from personal interviews and Internet chat rooms, these rumors address issues ranging from O. J. Simpson to air fresheners, from government conspiracies to Liz Claiborne's racial politics, from the Ku Klux Klan to the Kentucky Fried Rat. Turner and Fine interpret these rumors as symptoms of the cultures that produce them. Accordingly, they are less interested in asking whether a given rumor is true than in understanding the circumstances under which it would seem true. They are focused, in other words, on what might be called rumor's conditions of plausibility. This method yields solid if not surprising results, enabling the authors to read outward from the texts under consideration to the broad contours of racial division, mistrust, and inequality that have long characterized social life in the United States. At the same time, the potential of this analysis is limited by their assumption that "the content of rumors mirrors the social structure" (93, my emphasis). Such an assumption necessarily underestimates rumor's active role in reproducing, reshaping, and contesting the racial ideologies in which these stories find their meaning. Although limited in this respect, Turner and Fine's intriguing research makes a strong contribution [End Page 214] to the project of racial discernment to which the authors say their book is dedicated.
Edward Ingebretsen's At Stake pursues a similar interest in the role of scandal in contemporary cultural politics. Building upon recent studies of pornography and gothic narrative, At Stake argues that the figure of the monster is now regularly used in popular media to mark the boundaries of civil life. According to Ingebretsen, the language of monstrosity abandons its objects, placing them beyond the scope of moral evaluation even as it passes judgment upon them. Whether the monster in question is Andrew Cunanan or Susan Smith, Jeffrey Dahmer or Bill Clinton, At Stake works hard to pull apart the tangle of emotions—fear, disgust, desire, pleasure, shame—that attaches to these forbidden figures. While Ingebretsen does an admirable job of diagnosing the abiding erotic investment in monstrosity, his argument is expressed through a historical genealogy that is occasionally left unsubstantiated. Although he insists that the tropes he is investigating originated in the pulp fiction and horror movies of the 1950s and 1960s, Ingebretsen has little to say about the actual channels of circulation, the switching points, through which these tropes slipped into courtrooms and newspaper editorials. Instead, he too often falls back on the idea that motifs of monstrosity are simply "adrift" or "free-floating" in U.S. popular culture (71, 129). This problem is handled best in the final section on Matthew Shepard, to my mind the book'...