Consumption Of Popular Culture Research Articles

A New Road and a Dead End in Sherman Alexie's Reservation Blues

A New Road and a Dead End in Sherman Alexie’s Reservation Blues Scott Andrews (bio) With the title of his first novel, Reservation Blues, and the presence of Delta blues legend Robert Johnson on the first page, Sherman Alexie quickly and clearly acknowledges similarities between the social and economic conditions of African Americans and American Indians. Concurrently, he signals the possibility of a cross-cultural exchange between these two groups of Americans that offers hope for emotional and material improvements in their lives. Early in the novel, its protagonist, Thomas Builds-the-Fire, says that blues music, combined with reservation stories, could offer his troubled community a "new road," a new way of seeing old problems and defeating them. However, despite the hopeful beginnings of Thomas's efforts to "save his little country" (16), the novel cuts short the possibilities of this "new road" and the music is silenced. Rather than exploring the exciting opportunities that cross-cultural exchanges can create for individuals and communities, the novel resorts to a puzzling sense of despair and settles for survival rather than imagining success for its protagonists. The novel bitingly and comically criticizes popular culture's consumption of American Indians and the influence these pop culture creations have on American Indians who use these images to build their identities. However, while Reservation Blues may criticize the "Vanishing race rhetoric" that permeates much pop culture productions, as James Cox has discussed (63), it also participates in that rhetoric when it silences Thomas's band and its message of hope. Alexie's novel depicts multiple, intriguing hybridities—mixed musical styles, mixed heritages, and mixed bloods—in ways that Douglas Ford says "makes the old equation of dominance and submission unsustainable" [End Page 137] (204), but the failure of Thomas's band suggests that dominance and submission are still in place. This essay explores the possibilities of that cross-cultural exchange and the ambiguity of its failure. If the living conditions of African Americans in the South helped generate the blues as a musical form, then that form could seem appropriate for those American Indians living with severely limited opportunities. Long after slavery's end, African Americans continued to be exploited—limited freedoms, governmental harassment, poverty, poor or nonexistent health care, etc. In Looking Up at Down: The Emergence of Blues Culture, William Barlow discusses the social and economic conditions that gave birth to the blues. He writes that the blues "have always been a collective expression of the ideology and character of black people situated at the bottom of the social order in America" (xii). The blues provided "critical assessment of the working conditions, living conditions, and the treatment of African Americans by the white-controlled criminal justice system in the South [that] helped to sharpen the contradictions between the black and white social orders" (Barlow 6). The blues artists were "the oracles of their generation, contrasting the promise of freedom with the reality of their harsh living conditions" (6). Many of the living conditions and injustices that Barlow describes easily could apply to many American Indian communities in recent years. In The Turn to the Native, Arnold Krupat says it is tempting to label American Indian literature as post-colonial, since it frequently asserts its differences from the "imperial center," as do many of the accepted works of post-colonial literature. But Krupat points out that "there is not a 'post-' to the colonial status of Native Americans . . . . a considerable number of Native people exist in conditions of politically sustained subalternity" (30). He then cites the material effects of this condition: Indians experience twelve times the U.S. national rate of malnutrition, nine times the rate of alcoholism, and seven times the rate of infant mortality; as of the early 1990s, the life of reservation-based men was just over forty-four years, with reservation-based women enjoying, on average, a life-expectancy of just under forty-seven years. (30–31) [End Page 138] Given these conditions, the appeal of an "Indian blues artist" seems evident. Many Indians, it seems, have earned the right to sing the blues. Blues music was born in the South from the mediation of poverty and plenitude...

Culture and Stigma: Popular Culture and the Case of Comic Books

This paper argues that a better articulated conception of stigma can enhance the analysis of popular culture. Beginning with the work on stigma by Erving Goffman and other scholars, the article contends that the stigma sometimes attached to the production and consumption of popular culture is distinct from the low status associated with certain forms of popular culture. Unlike low status, stigma discredits cultural forms and practitioners often rendering them problematic. This reassessment of stigma is applied and developed further through a study of comic books, showing the various ways stigma can operate in popular culture. The analysis suggests that stigma significantly impeded the evolution of the comic book as an art form, illustrating the potential negative effects of stigma in popular culture.

How Cultural Tastes Shape Personal Networks

This article examines the relationship between different forms of cultural taste and the density of social contacts across alternative types of network relations classified by average tie strength. The author builds on Bourdieu's ([1986] 2001) classic statement on the “forms of capital” (economic, social, and cultural) and the conversion dynamics among them, and on DiMaggio's (1987) connection between cultural tastes and sociability. He hypothesizes that (1) in addition to cultural tastes being determined by network relations, cultural tastes are used to form and sustain those networks. Furthermore he expects that (2) highbrow culture taste will be less likely to be converted into social capital beyond immediate strong-tie circles due to its more restricted, “assetspecific” nature. Because of its generalized appeal, taste for popular culture will be more likely to be associated with weak-tie network density. The results broadly support these hypotheses: a model that specifies an effect of culture on network density provides a better fit to the data than the traditional conception of networks as determining taste. In addition using log-linear models and instrumental-variable methods, I show that popular culture consumption has a positive impact on weak-tie network density but not strong-tie network density, while highbrow culture consumption selectively increases strong-tie density but has no appreciable effect on weak ties, net of standard socioeconomic variables. These findings help to shed light on the mechanisms that translate mastery of different types of cultural knowledge into integration across distant social positions or closure around strong group boundaries. The author also discusses the implications of the results for current models describing the transformation of cultural into social resources.

Local modes of practice in an age of globalization: renegotiating national identity as enacted in South Korean advertising

This article examines broad discursive strategies as exemplified in South Korean advertising and how those meanings are produced within contemporary Korean society through cultural production and everyday practices. The central theme of this article is to discover the possibility of resistance and negotiation through the production and consumption of popular culture and to discover the field of cultural interpretations that are not yet integrated in the global market system and global culture. This article suggests that cultural power and autonomy are crucial in this age of globalization. One role of media representations in the process of constructing and articulating the national identity of South Korea is to make public those specific processes of negotiation and indigenization involving tensions between Korean identity and western influence. I argue that media (ads) can be central to this activity.

Always Famous

Always Famous

Editors’ Introduction to the Special Issue

The articles in this special edition on 'Commercializing Emotions' represent a series of studies that apply and develop current approaches to consumption, with a focus on the content and emotional bases of its cultural meaning. In different ways, all throw light on the social processes by which consumption is imbued with meaning. Taken together, they demonstrate the complex interactions of cultural and commercial logics that shape consumption. Beginning the issue is Kylie Jarrett's analysis of why e-commerce is frequently seen to empower consumers. Jarrett uncovers the ways e-commerce can be used to enlist consumers in the construction of new virtual 'communities' that require affective commitment from them. These are sometimes seen as empowering consumers by forcing producers and retailers to be more responsive to their demands and needs. Digging deeper, Jarrett argues that this image of empowered consumers is possible partly because post-Fordist production regimes require the constant generation of consumer demand. More important, it also flourishes as other images of empowerment associated with more traditional social groupings, such as class, break down leaving space for new images of consumption communities. Jarrett effectively claims that the meaning of consumption and consumption communities in contemporary e-commerce can be understood only by taking account of both the character of contemporary post-Fordist production regimes and the disintegration of older bases for group and community formation. Ken Parker's article presents a fascinating tour of 19th-century department stores, focusing on the meanings embodied in the visual merchandising they used. Parker shows that 19th-century consumers were effectively urged to consume goods as much for their symbolic value as for their use value, just as contemporary shoppers are said to do. Nineteenth-century department stores tried to imbue their merchandise with meanings that had special attraction at the time, those of wealth (opulence), mystery (exoticism) and abundance (excess). Parker's demonstration of the complexity of meaning formation in consumption thus directs our attention to the historical specificity of the meanings that retailers build to try to attract consumers. Marriage has long attracted the attention of sociologists. Raelene Wilding takes the act of getting married--the wedding--as the focus for an examination of the relation between the narratives of popular cinema and those of 'real' people undergoing the same experiences. Responding to the idea that the consumption of popular culture generates people's understandings of social phenomena, she shows the parallels and divergences in the meaning given to the wedding in cinema and 'real life'. Her challenging interpretation is that the meanings that are shared between these realms have a common origin, rather than one producing the other. …

Black Picket Fences: Privilege and Peril among the Black Middle Class

After living for three years in Groveland, a black middle-class neighbourhood on Chicago's South Side, sociologist Mary Pattillo-McCoy sought to explain the discontinuities in their daily life, both troublesome and hopeful, she witnessed. Residents work in stable middle-class jobs and many have single-family homes with a backyard and a two-car garage. Some send their children to private schools and are able to retire with solid pensions. Yet despite such privileges, Pattillo-McCoy argues, they face unique perils. Continuing inequities in wealth and occupational attainment make these families economically fragile. Racial segregation confines many middle-class African Americans to neighbourhoods with higher poverty rates, more crime, fewer resources, less political clout, and worse schools than most white neighbourhoods. Finally, youths are targets of and participate in a popular consumer culture that romanticizes the hard life of poverty. Despite arguments that race no longer matters, Pattillo-McCoy shows a different reality: even the black and white middle classes remain separate and unequal.

The realm of the visual: Agency and modern civil society

Everyday acts of seeing and knowing enable persons as actors and consumers to constitute their identities and construct meaning from their world. Taken in the aggregate, these individual acts harness the agency of participants in shaping their societies and scrutinising their nation-states. The argument implicit in these two statements is that the study of popular culture points us to modern acts of discernment, identity-formation, and passionate activism. Aggregation matters, for it brings together individual and (various) collective interests. Working through the familiar and the new, the local and the global, popular culture refracts and mediates these interactions and their aggregation. It is through popular cultural artifacts that historians may trace evidence of the ways in which the agency of viewers/consumers impels a civil society to grapple with change, to process change through indigenous sociologies of knowledge so that it can be naturalised and accommodated. I would argue that the visual realm is an absolutely critical component in this process in South Asia. Here we look, therefore, at both the consumption of popular culture (mass-produced and mass-consumed visual materials) and the production of it (especially the intentions of entrepreneurs to serve a market) to delineate how acts of seeing became acts of knowing in 20th century India.

Memory-Work

Memory-Work

‘Superbrides’: Wedding Consumer Culture and the Construction of Bridal Identity

This paper examines the role of the media in articulating and sustaining the tension between romance, fantasy and reason as key dimensions of wedding consumption. Two types of media are analysed as evidence of the development of a popular wedding consumer culture in Britain. First, I cite examples of the coverage of celebrity and unconventional weddings in the popular presses to highlight the current media emphasis upon the wedding as a spectacular, within-reach consumer fantasy. I then provide a more sustained analysis of six British bridal magazines, part of the ideological output of the contemporary wedding industry, which do not exist in a vacuum from those other media sites transmitting wedding imagery. In doing so, I deconstruct the recently formed consumer identity of the ‘superbride’ to reveal two underpinning aspects of her personality: the rational ‘project manager’ existing alongside the emotional ‘childish fantasiser’. This leads me later in this paper into a more general discussion about the roles of reason and emotion, rationality and romance in wedding consumption.

Review: Visuality in Teaching and Research: Activist Art Education

Review: Visuality in Teaching and Research: Activist Art Education Laurie E. Hicks University of Maine This paper is much improved from first draft. I appreciate author's efforts to address reviewer's comments. However, I still maintain that paper lacks a single clearly organized focus or its focus is presented in such a way as to make it slightly opaque to this reader. In reading paper, I find five possible areas of focus: visuality (implied throughout but discussed primarily in first half of paper), lens media (discussed in latter half), art criticism (the primary focus in first half and implied in second half), activism in education (implied throughout but as an underlying theme) and interdisciplinary teaching in post-secondary education (a focus of latter half ). These are listed here in no particular order. Clearly, there are moments in text where these five components intertwine, but there is not sufficient integration for them to merge as a single focus and remain clear throughout. For example, author spends most of first 15 pages of text discussing issues related to visuality in criticism. At end of this section, author provides two examples of works created by students in an effort to respond critically to pieces created by Hans Haacke and Eugene Delacroix. The author provides a visual image of students' work accompanied by author's brief description and commentary. This section of paper provides reader with a theoretical discussion and practical application or examples of author's focus on issues of visuality in art criticism. However, aspect of it that is activism (as indicated in title) is less clear. This may be due to author's attempt to keep these practical descriptions brief, but nonetheless, this discussion does not clarify how such experiences help student see act of creating such responses as a form of basic Such a discussion would be extremely helpful in linking various elements of this paper together and in interweaving educational concerns and considerations throughout. A related, but somewhat separate concern, is that author provides us with an assessment of what he or she assumes individual response pieces were intended to imply instead of with an insight into students' sense of their work. This is a result of what I see as author's attempt to let visuals stand alone, without explanation. However, in so doing, author leaves us focused only on his or her interpretation of response works, not with an insight into how students saw what they did as a form of critical analysis or as a form of activism. As indicated before, such information would be extremely helpful in linking together various elements of this paper. This leads me to a question concerning counterpoint of visual vs. verbal: How did each student arrive at a response to work they were given? Was entire process visual, or were verbal (oral/written) tools used to work through student responses to work, and then to give these responses visual form? Was this part of author's consideration in his or her interpretation and assessment of student work? In closing this section of paper, author uses Fiske's distinction between popular culture and consumer culture to indicate how reproduction of an artwork, process used in creating response works of his students, opens the authority of work, critic and, ultimately both academic and economic branches of artworld for 11 critical Though appealing, author fails to develop how Fiske's concepts apply to students' work or how they opened up these bastions of Western art for critical review. I suggest more development is needed here. In what I see as second section of paper, author describes experiences with an interdisciplinary, team-taught course in which students were encouraged to use visual and rhetorical means to communicate critical social insights. …

Too Many Other Enticing “Texts”: On Why I Didn’t Read Last Night

Argues that composition teachers, rather than dismiss their students’ consumption of popular culture, should juxtapose popular culture with scholarly interpretations of popular culture and with traditional texts to draw students in and encourage analysis, interpretation and reevaluation of their assumptions.

The Perpetuation of Subtle Prejudice: Race and Gender Imagery in 1990s Television Advertising.

Scholars have long argued that popular consumer culture is both producer and product of social inequality, but few detailed empirical studies have explored the ways that advertising imagery simultaneously constructs stereotypes of race and gender. This article reports on a content analysis of television commercials (n = 1699) aired on programs with high ratings for specific target audiences from 1992 to 1994. Characters in the television commercials enjoy more prominence and exercise more authority if they are White or men. Logistic regression analyses indicate that images of romantic and domestic fulfillment also differ by race and gender, with women and Whites disproportionately shown in family settings and in cross-sex interactions. In general, 1990s television commercials tend to portray White men as powerful, white women as sex objects, African American men as aggressive, and African American women as inconsequential. The authors suggest that these commercial images contribute to the perpetuation of subtle prejudice against African Americans by exaggerating cultural differences and denying positive emotions. Results are discussed in relation to the segmentation of media markets and possibilities for social change.

Black Picket Fences: Privileges and Peril among the Black Middle Class

After living for three years in Groveland, a black middle-class neighbourhood on Chicago's South Side, sociologist Mary Pattillo-McCoy sought to explain the discontinuities in their daily life, both troublesome and hopeful, she witnessed. Residents work in stable middle-class jobs and many have single-family homes with a backyard and a two-car garage. Some send their children to private schools and are able to retire with solid pensions. Yet despite such privileges, Pattillo-McCoy argues, they face unique perils. Continuing inequities in wealth and occupational attainment make these families economically fragile. Racial segregation confines many middle-class African Americans to neighbourhoods with higher poverty rates, more crime, fewer resources, less political clout, and worse schools than most white neighbourhoods. Finally, youths are targets of and participate in a popular consumer culture that romanticizes the hard life of poverty. Despite arguments that race no longer matters, Pattillo-McCoy shows a different reality: even the black and white middle classes remain separate and unequal.

Women's Magazinesin the Popular Culture Library at Bowling Green State University

Women's magazines form an important part of the collection of primary research materials from the 19th— and 20th-centuries in the Popular Culture Library. This article discusses how the library organizes and provides access to these magazines for students and scholars. Tt also discusses how these magazines are used to research women's roles as both producers and consumers of popular culture.

Popular culture as an ideological mask: Mass-produced popular culture and the remaking of criminal justice-related imagery

This article examines the ability of modern forms of popular culture to capture and remake images of crime. This examination contrasts the role of the production and consumption of popular culture in two broad periods in the “long history” of popular culture: popular culture produced by the masses and mass-produced popular culture. This distinction is used to examine: (1) the association between popular culture and violence; (2) the transformation from the historical period dominated by popular culture produced by the masses to the mass-produced popular culture era; and (3) an application of these arguments demonstrating the ability of mass-produced popular culture to remake modern forms of popular culture produced by the masses. This latter process is illustrated using images generated by rap music and gang movies.

Policing the field of the popular

ABSTRACT Culture has been articulated in various ways over the past few centuries, and consequently remains one of the most elusive concepts in Western thought. However, as Bennett (1991) shows, culture has often been conceived of as a governmental technology for ‘policing’ the social field, and as such is integral to social management. Rather than regarding culture as (systems of) representations, culture can be seen as specific articulations within broader social, economic and political formations. Such a view opens up possibilities for intervention in the field of culture on the level of policy-making. However, popular culture as such has been widely theorised in academic publications, but remains excluded from policy documents. The popular concerns the terrain of the everyday, and policies affecting the production, distribution and consumption of popular culture, such as media policies, may have profound effects on the terrain of the everyday. In order therefore to intervene in the field of popular culture policy, popular culture has to be reconsidered in its various articulations and with regard to its deployment in the social field. In the South African situation, this would entail attention to issues of identity, agency, globalisation and capitalism, and issues affecting nation-building and reconstruction and development. This article traces possible articulations of the popular in the current South African situation and looks at issues such as human rights, a new nationalism, development and policy formations.

Marcus Clarke and the Society of the Spectacle: Reflections on Writing and Commodity Captialism in Nineteenth-Century Melbourne

Marcus Clarke was fascinated not only with the public spaces of the nineteenth-century city, colonial Melbourne in particular, but with the increasingly commodified, spectacularised forms of cultural production that inhabited these spaces. In both his fiction and journalism the crowds that mill through city streets, arcades and cafes are always, it seems, collections of potential consumers awaiting writers, impresarios or showmen offering various forms of sensationalised entertainment. In these urban tableaux there is an implicit critique of both populism and mass culture; the public's thirst for curious, grotesque or morbid spectacles is a sure index of its gullibility and lack of enduring moral and political conviction. The arrest and public vilification of the accused murderer Rufus Dawes, in His Natural Life, is the occasion of just such an attack on popular culture-consumption.

Return to Asia?

A pendulum of Japanese history is slowly swinging towards return to Asia again, with the ascent of Asian economic power. In the audiovisual market, the Japanese cultural industry is becoming keen to enter the Asian market by producing 'localised' cultural products based upon the strategy of 'global localisation'; global corporations should be sensitive to local preference while spreading standardised commodities. In this 'return to Asia', Japan claims a common 'Asianness' whose main characteristics are 'Americanised' popular culture and urban consumer culture. This claim is crucial for Japanese cultural industries in terms of economic and marketing strategy and, in so doing, cultural hybridisation is becoming constitutive of contemporary 'Asianness', since its dynamic process is exactly what the Japanese cultural industry is trying to sell in Asian locales.

Domesticating the Reader: Women and Die Gartenlaube

I argue here that popular reading material in the nineteenth century, besides providing a source of entertainment, also helped create a sense of national identity in its readers, unifying a disparate nation into a cohesive reading audience. In discussing the most popular illustrated magazine of the time, Die Gartenlaube , this paper outlines the text's specific strategies for distinguishing between male and female readers. Although the magazine explicitly addressed the entire family, women readers were presented with a restricted, exclusively domestic identity. This analysis of the narrative domestication of women contributes to an understanding of the role of gender both in the conception of the nation and in the creation and consumption of popular culture. (KB)