Cultural Politics

                              HISTORICAL ANALYSIS OF POPULAR CULTURE

Historical analysis is less a separate analytical framework or approach than it is an element that should be present in any analysis of popular culture. Observing and analyzing changes over time is essential to understanding why a contemporary text is the way it is. We cannot understand our present without understanding our past. And we cannot fully imagine change without a sense of how our culture has

developed over time. Our ability to     understand the improvements in and the limits of current media representations of African Americans, for example, is greatly enhanced by viewing two documentaries that detail the history of African American representations in the mass media, "Ethnic Notions" and "Color Adjustment." The sites and bibliography below represent various approaches to studying the shifts in the values and ideologies of popular culture over the decades.

Some Key Websites

• Ad Flip. Advertises itself as the “world’s largest archive of classic print ads,” and it is in fact an excellent resource with hundreds of ads from the 1940s to the present, arranged by year or by subject matter.
• Advertising Age magazine. Includes a section on the history of the advertising industry.
• Baseball Cards, 1887–1914. Nice site on early history of baseball.
• Edison Motion Pictures. American Memory Project site on one of the important sources for early silent films.
• Emergence of Advertising in America: 1850-1920. Excellent resource from Duke University.
• Film and History. Website from the journalFilm and History: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Film and Television History.
• Lyrics World. Amazing collection of Top 40 Hits music lyrics from 1930 to 1999.
• New Deal Network. Another excellent thirties site that includes many photographs, cartoons, and other pieces of popular visual culture.
• Nineteen Thirties Project. Excellent site from the University of Virginia that includes nice sections on film and radio.
• Nuke Pop. Excellent site exploring images of nuclear weapons in post-WWII US (and some Japanese) popular culture.
• Old-Time Radio. Links to radio programs from the Golden Age of radio in the mid-20th century.
• Origins of American Animation. An excellent site from the Library of Congress.
• Psychedelic Sixties. Fine site that includes much on popular culture of the 1960s in social context.
• Red Scare, 1918–21. Includes a number of cartoons, and other pop culture representations of the anti-radical craze that swept America after World War I.
• TV in the 1950s. Divided by categories of drama, comedy, quiz shows, etc. Includes a number of audio clips of theme music from the shows.

Historic Advertisements

• Ad Access. Duke University presents images and database information for over 7,000 advertisements printed in US and Canadian newspapers and magazines between 1911 and 1955.
• Classic Advertisements Gallery. Includes about twenty ads made between the 1880s and 1930s (two pages).

Film/Video documentaries:

Color Adjustment. Dir. Marlon Riggs. San Francisco: California Newsreel, 1991.

Documentary on the evolution of the potrayal of blacks in television.

 

Ethnic Notions. Dir. Marlon Riggs. San Francisco: California Newsreel, 1987.

Documentary on the history of black prejudice.

Books & Articles

 

Bibliography

[Few topics on popular culture can be adequately researched on the web alone. These reading suggestions are designed as beginning points for further offline study.]

Ang, Ien. Watching Dallas: Soap Opera and the Melodramatic Imagination. London: Methuen, 1985. One of the best studies of the soap opera as a genre in historical context.

Ashby, LeRoy. With Amusement for All: A History of American Popular Culture since 1830. Lexington: U of Kentucky P, 2006. Excellent overview of pop culture historical transformation from the mid-19th to the 21st century.

Barnouw, Erik. Tube of Plenty: The Evolution of American Television. Rev. ed. New York: Oxford UP, 1982. Classic, still useful study of TV from the 50s to the 80s.

Becker, Ron. Gay TV and Straight America. Rutgers University Press, 2006. What sense and non-sense have non-gay people made of LGBTQI2+ characters and programs?

Bennett, Andy; Barry Shank; and JaysonToynbee, eds. The Popular Music Studies Reader. NY: Routledge, 2006. Includes a number of important historical essay.

Berlant, Lauren. "The Female Woman: Fanny Fern and the Form of Sentiment." The Culture of Sentiment: Race: Gender, and Sentimentality in Nineteenth-Century America, ed. Shirley Samuels. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993. 265-81.

Bird, S. Elizabeth, ed. Dressing in Feathers: The Construction of the Indian in American Popular Culture. Boulder: Westview P, 1996.

Bode, Carl N. The Anatomy of American Popular Culture: 1840-1861. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1970. Pioneering, insightful work before the rise of popular culture as an academic field of study.

Bogle, Donald. Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films. [4th ed.]. New York: Continuum, 2001.

 

Cawelti, John G. Adventure, Mystery and Romance: Formula Stories As Art and Popular Culture. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1976. Breakthrough study of the role of formulaic storytelling in the history of three major genres of pop culture.

Chang, Jeff. Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation. New York: Picador, 2005. Brilliant study of the rise of hip-hop from the 1970s to the early 21st century.

Chasin, Alexandra. Selling Out: The Gay and Lesbian Movement Goes to the Market. NY: Palgrave McMillan, 2001. Critiques the limited gains for the LGBT movement when advertisers in the 1990s decided a gay market was worth targeting.

Clover, Carol J. Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992. Excellent psychologic study of the precursors to the modern slasher and torture porn genres.

Davila, Arlene. Latinos Inc.: The Marketing and Making of a People. Berkeley: U of California Press, 2001. Excellent study of the advertising industry's "discovery" of Latinos in the 1990s and the illusion of inclusion it offered.

 

Denning Michael. The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the 20th Century. London: Verso, 2011. Brilliant study of how the radicalism of the "popular front" left and labor movements in the 1930s and after reshaped U.S. high and popular culture in ways that honored ordinary working people, and a deeper vision of social equality.

Denning, Michael. Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working-Class Culture in America. New York: Verso, 1987. Classic study of 19th century American popular culture as a site of class consciousness.

Doty, Alexander. Making Things Perfectly Queer: Interpreting Mass Culture. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993. Breakthrough treatment of gay subtexts in American pop culture.

Driver, Susan. Queer Girls and Popular Culture: Reading, Resisting, and Creating Media. New York: Peter Lang, 2007. Explores relationships between media representations and the creative media receptions of lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and questioning teens and young adults. Draws upon examples from a wide range of media including television, film, magazines, Internet, and music.

Fregoso, Rose Linda. The Bronze Screen: Chicana and Chicano Film Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. Classic study of the history of Mexican American film representations.

Garvey, Ellen. The Adman in the Parlor: Magazines and the Gendering of Consumer Culture, 1880s to 1910s. New York: Oxford UP, 1995.

Gaspar de Alba, Alicia. Chicano Art Inside/Outside the Master’s House: Cultural Politics and the CARA Exhibition.Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998. Rich interpretation of a major Chicano/a/x art retrospective that raises key questions about the construction of high art vs. popular art among marginalized ethno-racialized groups.

Gitlin, Todd. The Whole World is Watching: Mass Media and the Making and Unmaking of the New Left. Berkeley: U of California P, 1980. Classic study of how TV news and print journalism distort coverage of social change movements.

Guerrero, Ed. Framing Blackness: The African American Image in Film. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993. Key study of the black image in film up to the 1990s.

 

Jamieson, Kathleen Hall. Packaging the Presidency: A History and Criticism of Presidential Campaign Advertising.New York: Oxford University Press, 1984. Classic study of how advertising techniques have shaped the American electoral process.

Jhally, Sut, and Justin Lewis. Enlightened Racism: The Cosby Show, Audiences, and the Myth of the American Dream. Boulder: Westview P, 1992. Key study of how race is white-washed in US popular culture, supporting the myth of a post-racial society.

Kaplan, E. Ann. Rocking Around the Clock: Music Television, Postmodernism and Consumer Culture. London: Routledge, 1987. Still the best study of the politic meanings of MTV.

Lears, T.J. Jackson. Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of American Advertising.New York: Basic Books, 1994. Richly detailed study of the rise of American advertising in the context of later 19th and early 20th century American culture.

 

Lee, Robert G. Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture.Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999. The most comprehensive study to date on Asian Americans in pop culture, covering two centuries and many different cultural forms.

 

Lefèvre, Pascal and Dierick Charles, eds. Forging a New Medium: The Comic Strip in the Nineteenth Century.Brussel: Vub Brussels University Press, 1999. Establishes the historical background necessary to understand the origin and nature of the modern comic strip. Includes essays on rise of comics in particular countries, among them England, Spain, Germany, and the US, essays from prominent artists in the genre, as well as a useful timeline on the development of the comic strip.

 

Levine, Lawrence. Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America.Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988. Highly influential study of the formation of our current split of “high” and “popular” culture in the later 19th, early 20th century.

 

Lipsitz, George. Dangerous Crossroads: Popular Music, Postmodernism and the Poetics of Place. London: Verso, 1994. Astute study of informal apartheid in the music industry, and the role of popular culture in both resisting and reinforcing ethno-racial secretions in the US. 

 

___. Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture.Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990. Innovative study of relations between mass-produced pop culture and the realities of communal memory dimly present in those commodified productions.

 

Lott, Eric. Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. Oxford UK and NY: Oxford U Press, 2013. Brilliant, innovative study of how white working class men performing in blackface illuminates the psychosocial politics of race and class in the 19th century America.

 

Lutz, Catherine and Jane L. Collins. Reading National Geographic.Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Two visual anthropologists study the racial, gender, and international politics of this influential journal.

 

Marcus, Greil.Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock and Roll Music.New York: E. P. Dutton, 1975. The revised American Studies dissertation of one of America’s foremost rock critics is a searching study of the gritty roots of what has become glossy pop culture.

 

McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics.New York: Harper Perennial, 1993. Brilliant study using the comic book for to analyze how comics have worked historically.

 

Mukerji, Chandra & Michael Schudson, eds., Rethinking Popular Culture, Berkeley: University of California Press,1991. Important collection of historical essays.

 

Nasaw, David. Going Out: The Rise and Fall of Public Amusements.New York, NY: Basic Books, 1993. Wide-ranging study of the culture industries of the early 20th century, with particular emphasis on the role they played for immigrant workers.

 

Peiss, Kathy. Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York.Philadelphia, PN: Temple University Press, 1986. Classic text looking at the various forms of early 20th century pop culture aimed at women from the working class.

 

———.A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire.Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997. One of the few books that looks carefully at the construction of “middle-brow” taste as exemplified in the book of the month club’s efforts to provide enlightening reading.

Radway, Janice. Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1984. Brilliant breakthrough study on the romance novel as social and historical phenomenon.

Rose, Tricia. Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America. Hanover: Wesleyan UP, 1994. Best study of the rise of rap and hip-hop from the 1970s to 1990s.

Ross, Andrew. No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture.New York: Routledge, 1989. Important collection of essays tracing the various kinds of analysis US intellectuals have made of popular culture over the course of the 20th century.

 

Smoodin, Eric, ed. Disney Discourse: Producing the Magic Kingdom. New York: Routledge, 1994. Excellent set of analyses of the Walt Disney corporation's impact on US culture.