Time-Passages-Collective-Memory

Tfwe Passages This page intentionally left blank George Lipsitz Time ¥assa0es Collective Memory and American Popular Culture M IN University of Minnesota Press NE Minneapolis SO TA London Copyright © 1990 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by the University of Minnesota Press 111 Third Avenue South.Suite 290, Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520 http://www.upress.umn.edu Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper Seventh printing 2001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lipsitz, George. Time passages : collective memory and American popular culture / George Lipsitz. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-8166-3881-0 (pbk.) 1. United States—Popular culture—History—20th century. 2. Mass media—United States—Social aspects. 3. Memory—Social aspects— United States—History—20th century. I.Title. E169.12.L55 1989 973.9-dc20 89-5209 The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer. Contents Preface vii Culture and History Chapter 1 Popular Culture: This Ain't No Sideshow 3 Chapter 2 Precious and Communicable: History in an Age of Popular Culture 21 Popular Television Chapter 3 The Meaning of Memory: Family, Class, and Ethnicity in Early Network Television 39 Chapter 4 Why Remember Mama? The Changing Face of a Women's Narrative 77 Popular Music Chapter 5 Against the Wind: Dialogic Aspects of Rock and Roll 99 Chapter 6 Cruising Around the Historical Bloc: Postmodernism and Popular Music in East Lost Angeles 133 V Contents Popular Film Chapter 7 No Way Out: Dialogue and Negotiation in Reel America 163 Chapter 8 The New York Intellectuals: Samuel Fuller and Edgar Ulmer 179 Popular Narrative Chapter 9 History, Myth, and Counter-Memory: Narrative and Desire in Popular Novels 211 Chapter 10 Mardi Gras Indians: Carnival and Counter- Narrative in Black New Orleans 233 History and the Future Chapter 11 Buscando America (Looking for America): Collective Memory in an Age of Amnesia 257 Notes 275 Index 295 vi Preface This is a book about collective memory and popular culture in the United States since 1945. It does not survey or analyze the aesthetics of popular culture itself, nor does it chronicle direct references to "historical" issues within popular culture texts. Rather, I wish to ex- plore the ways in which collective memory and popular culture are peculiarly linked—how the infinitely renewable present of electronic mass media creates a crisis for collective memory, and how collective memory decisively frames the production and reception of commercial culture. This is not an uncritical celebration of mass- mediated imagery. I believe that the ever expanding influence, reach, and scope of the mass media has worked insidiously to legit- imate exploitative social hierarchies, to colonize the body as a site of capital accumulation, and to inculcate within us the idea that con- sumer desire is the logical center of human existence. But neither is this a jeremiad against popular culture and the individuals who cre- ate and receive it. People act in the arenas open to them; there is nothing intrinsically better or worse about the generation and circu- lation of ideas through electronic mass media than through the printed word. Our time has more than its share of barbarism, but that barbarism is more the product of very old patterns of social organi- zation than it is the product of new communications technology. New technologies do lend themselves to new forms of exploitation and oppression, but they also have possible uses for fundamentally new forms of resistance and revolution. In the first section of this book I present discussions of history and popular culture. My intention is to show how forms of popular cul- vii Preface ture emerging over the past two centuries have helped make a crisis of historical memory the constitutive problem of our time. Rather than signaling the death knell for historical inquiry, electronic mass media make collective memory a crucial constituent of individual and group identity in the modern world. In section two I examine the relationship between commercial network television and popular memory, first by examining the "meaning of memory" in a series of early network programs on American commercial television in the 1950s, and second by exploring the dynamics of remembering and forgetting surrounding one representative show of that era, Mama. In section three I turn my attention to popular music, starting with a general inquiry into the "dialogic" nature of rock-and-roll music, and then concluding with a detailed case study about the relationship between past and present in rock music made by Mexican-Americans in Los Angeles since World War II. Section four outlines an approach to motion pictures and collective memory, emphasizing the ways in which Hollywood films do more to reveal social contradictions than to provide political solutions to them. I conclude section four with a detailed examination of two Hollywood auteurs, Samuel Fuller and Edgar Ulmer, for whom questions of past, present, and future offered a guiding aesthetic and a recurrent source of dramatic tension. In section five I turn my inquiry to popular narrative, first examining the sense of "counter-memory" pervading novels by women and "minority" authors, and then exploring the "open closures" of a sub- cultural oppositional narrative, that of the Mardi Gras Indians in New Orleans. Finally in "Buscando America" (looking for America), I try to survey the cumulative effects of the struggle for collective memory within popular culture over the past five decades. This ordered framework obscures the tortuous struggle that brought this book into existence. A conceptual revolution in the hu- manities and social sciences has given new vigor to inquiries about cultural studies in a variety of fields over the past twenty years, but that ongoing revolution leaves investigators with no stable ground on which to stand. A dizzying succession of new methods and theo- ries has shattered traditional disciplinary paradigms, forcing scholars to engage in bold departures from their own training, to become "specialists" in fields with few acknowledged experts and few firm standards of evidence and argument. My own inquiries have often left me between fields—too historical for the sociologists, too socio- viii Preface logical for the linguists, and too linguistic and too sociological for the historians. Under those circumstances, speaking to readers and au- diences outside of academic circles becomes even more difficult, be- cause one must explain or at least neutralize the special vocabularies and concerns of many disciplines, not just one. But this book is not a product of some abstract revolution in scholarly methods; rather, it is a manifestation of the more general social crisis that brought that scholarly revolution into being in the first place. That social crisis is not something I learned about solely in libraries and classrooms; it has been the determinant experience of my life, and I would not be telling the whole truth about this book if I failed to relate it to the personal life struggles of which it is a part. Over the past ten years I have been teaching American history and culture courses in colleges under conditions that have demanded a series of detours. I went to school in the politically charged 1960s and 1970s, and made myself the kind of teacher I wished that I had encountered in those years. But when I started to teach, I faced students who came of age in more quiescent and apolitical environ- ments. My graduate research focused on labor history at precisely the time when deindustrialization and political reaction devastated the constituencies most interested in that subject. My deepest personal and professional commitments connected me to scholarship and social change at a moment when anti-intellectualism and materialism dominated American culture and politics. In my teaching and writ- ing, I too often seemed to be delivering the wrong message to the wrong audience at the wrong time. My career and professional development took place in the context of extraordinary changes in American society. The painful after- shocks of the Vietnam War, the startling misuses of power revealed by the Watergate investigations, and the deindustrialization of the American economy added elements of uncertainty and instability to the lives of all Americans in the 1970s. I found myself facing some of the contrasts of that era directly. The economic crises engendered by deindustrialization wreaked havoc on American higher education in those years; I moved from St. Louis to Houston to Minneapolis in pursuit of secure employment. In St. Louis, I rode to work everyday on the City Limits bus through a devastated inner-city ghetto, and at the University of Missouri-St. Louis I taught working-class students who were afraid that for the first time in generations higher educa- ix Preface tion would not result in upward mobility. In Houston, I routinely saw .homeless people scavenging food from garbage bins as I drove off to teach at a campus in the middle of one of the most affluent suburban areas in the country. In Minneapolis, my students directed my attention to the ways in which the concurrent demise of blue-collar man- ufacturing jobs and the family farm undercut the political, moral, and economic foundations of their lives. Through all of this turmoil, my students and I attempted to study "American culture" from books that, for the most part, treated America as a secure stable repository of timeless truths. Popular culture texts provided me with one means of understand- ing and enduring the circumstances I found myself in.

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