Time Passages: Simply Red? or Simply Read? Response to Collins

Abstract

While praising much of my analysis in Time Passages, Jim Collins contends that I essentialize ethnic subcultures, that I rely too much on the importance ofpreindustrial oral traditions, and that I impose single totalizing collective meaning on cultural practices that are individual, infinitely open, and plural. Collins suggests that I see minority subcultures as monolithically oppressed yet magical agents for social change, that my emphasis on history makes me look only to the past for critiques of the present, and that I subsume all struggles for emancipation under one banner-that of conga-line socialism. This description of my position is wrong in almost every respect; an argument along the lines Collins describes does not appear in Time Passages or in anything else that I have written. It is Collins's own commitment to abstract categories, his peculiarly essentialist brand of anti-essentialism, and his uninterrogated assumptions about the relationships among culture, power, and history that lead him to distort my views, to misrepresent several sections of my book, and most important, to write about contemporary popular culture in his review without coming to grips with the historical and commercial matrices in which it is embedded. Collins contends that I lapse into a well-intentioned essentialism by making marginality and authenticity virtually coterminous. To the extent that I am interested in marginality it is not for its own sake, but rather for the critical understandings that emanate from those on the margins as result of their struggles with power. It is misrepresentation to say that this book is about marginality rather than about the creative dialogue between margins and mainstream that has fashioned so much of American culture. Collins contends that I posit nonaggrieved populations as only vaguely alienated and as part of unitary stable center. But I say that members of dominant groups might not feel quite the same anguish of invisibility that It is misrepresentation to say that this book is about marginality rather than about the creative dialogue between margins and mainstream that has fashioned so much of American culture.