Mass Consumer Culture Research Articles

Margaret Anderson’s Compromise: Art and Advertising in the Little Review

ABSTRACT Despite its rhetorical attacks on “the public taste,” the Little Review carried many advertisements promoting precisely the mass consumer culture it allegedly rejected. This irreverent mixing of cultural registers has typically been read as an expression of enthusiasm vis-à-vis the social and cultural function of advertising on the part of the magazine’s editor Margaret Anderson. This article critically reexamines Anderson’s engagement with the form and function of promotional discourse to show that, rather than suspending the tension between art and advertising, she continually sought to shape her magazine’s relationship with commercial mass culture into a compromise on her own terms.

The “Thingness” of the American Middlebrow:

In this paper, I examine the ways in which Anita Loos’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby both critique and engage with materialism and consumerism as middlebrow texts. Bill Brown’s discussion of the power and meaning of “things” of literature (2003; 16-17) serves as a framework through which I analyze the double “thingness” of the middlebrow as depicted in these novels—that is, the simultaneous investment in and critique of consumer objects. To that end, I analyze both the print culture histories and content of Blondes (which is widely considered a middlebrow text in academic scholarship) in conversation with Gatsby (which is not always thought of as a middlebrow text). I argue that, rather than view middlebrow within a high/low brow paradigm, we should instead consider the ways in which the middlebrow operates with and within mass consumer culture as well as provides a critique of that culture. Because the American middlebrow has a distinct socioeconomic history, I demonstrate how these novels also grapple with the “thingness” of American identity and the Americanness of “things” by centering the protagonists’ engagement with material objects in the construction of their identities. Gatsby and Blondes demonstrate the middlebrow American quality of things through their narrative content, and the novels’ histories as print objects reflect their circulation as commercial things themselves. This article challenges understandings of the “middlebrow” as a genre unto itself by examining the historical situatedness of the term and its evolving definitions. This article also invites renewed conversation around the middlebrow by proposing a new perspective and an alternative approach to the understanding of middlebrow literature. I argue that these novels present an ideal re-entry into discussion of the middlebrow because of their disparate print culture histories and the cultural capital (or lack thereof) they signify in the present day. This article thus traces the print histories of these two novels alongside analyses of their reception histories and critiques the concept of a middlebrow literature, turning again to contradictory definitions of the term to suggest a more fluid understanding of the middlebrow in scholarship should be able to account both for the continuing appeal of early twentieth-century middlebrow literature and the ways in which the middlebrow itself as an aspirational aesthetic and consumerist ethic has evolved and is ubiquitous in the twenty-first century.

Student Consumer Culture in Nineteenth-Century Oxford, by Sabine Chaouche

Reviewed by: Student Consumer Culture in Nineteenth-Century Oxford by Sabine Chaouche Emily Rutherford (bio) Student Consumer Culture in Nineteenth-Century Oxford, by Sabine Chaouche; pp. xv + 318. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, $109.99, $109.99 paper, $84.99 ebook. In 1848, a twenty-two-year-old man named Edward Napleton Jennings appeared before the London Insolvent Debtors' Court in connection with debts of £1,865 that he had incurred while a student at Oxford—a sum over seven times the annual allowance he received from his father. Among other things, Jennings had spent £56 on wine, £40 on billiards, and—to the astonishment of the press reporting on the case—£98 on hats. Jennings was evidently a highly unusual nineteenth-century Oxford student, with his case provoking a furor about unscrupulous merchants who extended too much credit to naïve undergraduates who were too young to possess sound financial judgment. But the details about his spending habits are indicative of how Student Consumer Culture in Nineteenth-Century Oxford recovers what nineteenth-century Oxford undergraduates wanted to buy, what they bought, how they bought it, and how much they spent. Sabine Chaouche has delved into the accounts of Oxford colleges, the records of the Chancellor's Court (which, instead of the county sessions, heard legal cases involving members of the university), students' personal papers, commercial directories, and the national and regional press to reconstruct a fine-grained picture of the spending habits of one specific group of elite young men amid the rise of a mass consumer culture. A monograph that began its life as a PhD thesis, Chaouche's book is organized thematically, with chapters covering topics including the overall cost of attending Oxford; masculinity, the social relations of undergraduate culture, and how they influenced consumption habits; the economic relationships between the university and the city of Oxford; the roles of debt and credit in the Oxford economy; and some students' opposition to consumer culture. Over the course of these chapters, a narrative of continuity and change in student consumer habits emerges. Chaouche demonstrates with convincing detail and precision that the Oxford economy continuously ran on credit over the course of the nineteenth century and did so to a greater extent than wider British commerce in this period. Layers of credit governed the relationships between town and gown, as shopkeepers secured business by extending generous long-term credit to their student customers, but then needed to borrow themselves from banks or wholesale suppliers to cover the risk they took on through their extension of consumer credit. Chaouche identifies two spikes in student spending and indebtedness, for which she offers two very different explanations. The first occurred in the 1830s, when the Chancellor's Court sued as many as twenty percent of students for repayment of truly enormous consumer debts, and it came at a time when the percentage of Oxford students who were noblemen was at a peak. At this time, indebtedness indicated extravagant spending associated with the performance of a lifestyle of extreme privilege. But when student indebtedness rose again in the 1870s, the debts were smaller and reflected significant changes in the university's constitution and student body that followed a series of mid-nineteenth-century university reforms. Chaouche offers two broadly convincing explanations for these latter debtors: a new class of aspirational bourgeois students who spent beyond their means in their efforts to keep up with the conspicuous consumption of their wealthier peers; and a shift to more students living out of college, meaning that [End Page 478] they were more liable to participate in the urban economy—and to fall prey to the temptation of easy credit. It is unusual for literature on Oxford to span the entire nineteenth century, including both sides of the period of university reform. By doing so, Chaouche is able to offer new insights into how both student experiences and the social and economic world of the city of Oxford changed over the course of this dynamic and consequential period. Her sources allow her to say much more about the relationships between town and gown, and about how the city of Oxford and its local economy depended on the...

The Popularity of Japanese Mystery Novels in South Korea ：The Traslation Status from1945 to the 2010s

This paper gives an overview of the reception of translated Japanese detective novels in South Korea from 1945 to 2021. The resulting analysis of the impact and characteristics of these translations, in the context of changes in Korean publishing and in popular culture, explains the popularity of Japanese detective novels in South Korea, and the significance of the still-current Japanese detective novel boom. Previously I have analyzed the reception of translated Japanese detective novels in South Korea from 1945 to 2009, so in this article, I will continue this analysis for the period up to 2021.The translation and publication of Japanese detective novels in South Korea began in 1961, and the number of such texts increased little by little every year until the end of the 20th century. Then, in the 2000s, the number of translations increased sharply, and since the beginning of the 2010s, detective novels have been translated and published at nearly three times the rate as was previously the case. The popularity of Japanese detective novels in South Korea has been influenced by the prevailing circumstances in the publishing world and by political and social conditions in South Korea. In addition, detective novels with a social dimension were popular from the 1960s to the 1980s, but since 1990 when they began to make an impact on mass consumer culture, more diverse detective novels and those with lighter themes have come to the fore. Finally, the unprecedented Japanese detective novel boom Korea is experiencing is due to the appearance of star writers such as Keigo Higashino and Miyuki Miyabe. This boom seems to have cultivated a more refined sense in Korean readers of the aesthetics of detective novels, and it has also been naturally influenced by the mystery narrative form in Korean popular culture.

Re-visiting The History of Consumerism: The Emergence of Mass Consumer Culture as a Distinctive Feature of Capitalist Societies

The Frankfurt School was the first school to discern the roles of the media in shaping human thought, influencing politics, and increasing the insatiable demand of consumers in capitalist societies. The analysis brought to the fore by Adorno and Horkheimer regarding the ‘Culture Industry’ illustrated a model of media as tools of hegemony and social control advanced by Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, and Jurgen Habermas. The School also examined the repercussions of mass culture and the rise of the consumer society on the proletariat that was aimed to be the instrument of revolution in the classical Marxian scenario. Another thing that was analyzed is how the culture industries and consumer society were considered as stabilizing forces of contemporary capitalism. Therefore, they were among the first to see the expansion of communication and mass media roles in politics, socialization and social life, culture, and the construction of docile subjects as Foucault puts it. In the present article, I review the contributions to media and social theory advanced by the Frankfurt School. The integration of psychoanalysis, aesthetic theory and the critique of mass culture, and the critique of the Enlightenment are the main components discussed in the present article.

Come and see Guatemala at Macy’s! Indigenous aesthetics and informal empire on display in the heart of the American home

ABSTRACT During the 1920s and 1930s, a new wave of mass consumer culture swept through the United States, fueling a fad for modern and exotic objects to display at home. Department stores stuffed their massive showrooms with new home decor styles, such as the exciting textile patterns industrial designer Ruth Reeves created following her ethnographic collecting trip to Guatemala in 1934. Although scholars have shown how powerful transnational corporations, such as the United Fruit Corporation, shaped exploitative large-scale neocolonial economies in Central America, I argue that individual consumption of indigenous culture transformed middle-class white women into stakeholders in new destructive patterns of U.S. imperial expansion in Latin America. This article historicizes the development of racial capitalism and shows how individual acts of cultural appropriation and consumption of indigenous material culture were transformed into collective practices of racial and gendered exploitation to restore U.S. cultural and economic vitality through empire during the Great Depression.

Making Light of Convicts

Making Light of Convicts

My Most Prized Possession, an American Obsession. Virginity and the Sexual Politics of the American Teen Film.

American "teen films" and TV series can be regarded as mass consumerculture's version of literature's "bildungsroman". Their main trope isthe adolescent individual's search for identity and independence,narrated via the personal and social initiation associated with acoming-of-age experience, often ignited and/or epitomized by a sexualinitiation, most commonly in the form of virginity loss. Thus, manyteen films are negotiations of purity, chastity, and virginity—withquite mixed messages.With recourses to Jean Paul Sartre, Barrington Moore Jr., MichelFoucault, Sigmund Freud, Laura M. Carpenter and others, this paperaddresses how the transitional in-between state of adolescence isevaluated in American (popular) culture, the sexual politics of manyof these narratives, and their agency in reflecting as well as shapingadolescent sexual identities.

Art and Form: From Roger Fry to Global Modernism by Sam Rose

Reviewed by: Art and Form: From Roger Fry to Global Modernism by Sam Rose Patrick Fessenbecker Art and Form: From Roger Fry to Global Modernism. Sam Rose. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019. Pp 224. $89.95 (cloth); $34.95 (paper). Sam Rose's compelling new book Art and Form begins with the observation that modernist formalism has suffered severe blows to its reputation since its heyday in Clement Greenberg's aesthetics, but argues that many of its critics have been attacking straw men. The supposed doxa of formalist aesthetics—that there is an autonomous realm of aesthetic experience, that this realm is radically separated from the world and available only to the sophisticated, and that a work of art is independent of its creator—have been long-standing targets of attack, and have often seemed like important and significant mistakes whose failures require significantly different accounts of the nature of art. But, Rose contends, when one looks back at key sources for modernist formalism, what one finds is that many of these issues were energetically present at the moment of its inception. Returning with this in mind to the central writers for the theory of artistic form in the years between 1910 and 1939, then, restores a sense of the real complexity of the history. But it does something more. In the book's most ambitious (and most tentative) claim, Rose contends that this restored history points towards a more plausible theory of the artwork: a modest or post-formalism, which "acknowledges at once both the end of grand modernist self-confidence and universality and the fact that the desire to do anything historical with objects will always require some… appeal to form" (152). Five pleasantly concise chapters present this revisionist history of formalism topically. The first chapter emphasizes Clive Bell and Roger Fry, and points out, in particular, the importance of connoisseurship for making sense of what Fry thought the formalist response to the work of art involved. Contrary to the assumption that modernist aesthetics ignored artistic intention, Rose contends that Fry's formalism depended on an extensive analysis of just that: interpretation required an imaginative grasp of the process of artistic creation. Chapter two addresses the question of what knowledge, exactly, is produced by formalist art [End Page 407] criticism and how this knowledge compares to scientific investigation; the chapter concludes provocatively by arguing that the postwar revival of aesthetics in analytic philosophy by writers like Nelson Goodman involved forgetting the complexity of earlier formalisms. Chapter three turns to the ethics and politics of formalism, observing the irony by which the informed and active kind of perception championed by Fry became the seed of the experience of mass consumer culture by later writers, and contends that the fusion of social criticism and formalist aesthetics in writers like Richard Wollheim should be understood not "as a move beyond early formalism so much as a development and exemplification of its ethical ideal" (97). Chapter four takes a slightly different tack, narrating formalism's encounter with "mass culture," which Rose portrays as a tension between the mechanized production inherent in "design" on the one hand and Marxist attempts to imagine a truly popular art on the other. The iterations of formalism in this chapter are uncertain, seemingly abandoned by Marxists but surprisingly maintained when such critics hesitated to affirm "mass taste under modern industrialized capitalism" (122). Finally, chapter five turns to the question of global modernism, discussing several artists from Nigeria and India as a way of developing a humbler formalism that neither privileges the artistic tradition of the West or assumes the universality of artistic experience but preserves the sense that formalism is a necessary part of historical interpretation. Rose's correction is a welcome one, restoring a fuller picture to an approach that is often easily caricatured, while keeping in mind a sense of its limitations. It is particularly sharp in pulling out the limitations of British conceptions of aesthetic education and their emphasis on individual and cultural authenticity when they were imported to the Empire, noting of Gerard Sekoto's use of postimpressionism in imperial South Africa that "[t]here could be no stronger indication of...

ЕКЗИСТЕНЦІЯ ОСОБИСТОСТІ: ПИТАННЯ ЕКОЛОГІЧНОСТІ СВІДОМОСТІ ТА СВОБОДИ ВИБОРУ МОДЕЛЕЙ САМОРЕАЛІЗАЦІЇ СУЧАСНОЇ ЛЮДИНИ

The article analyzes the potential of the existential personality setting in the face of social crises, the issues of ecological consciousness and the freedom to choose models of self-realization of modern man. Constructiveness and effectiveness of existential way of life are investigated on the example of ecological practices and downshifting phenomenon.In the axiological dimension, the crisis is characterized by the collapse of norms, the absence of generally significant values. The problem for the self-identification and self-realization of Ukrainians is that Ukraine does not have a well-defined strategy of development, an official ideology as a concentrated expression of the main problems of Ukrainian society.In today's Ukrainian socio-cultural context, the existential problems of responsibility for one's choice of life path are actualized. This choice as an existential choice is certainly an axiological choice.Traditional family values and families remain relevant to Ukrainians. In times of social crisis, in the era of development of social programming technologies, globalization of mental regulation of behavior, the presence of the family is a threat to resistance to mass consumer culture, because the family is a violation of the homogeneity of the mass - a source of personal meanings and values, etc.The actualization of existential problems in society has been the impetus for the growth of existential topics in humanities. Рractices built on the platform of existential outlook as being of concrete application demonstrating their effectiveness by refuting the concept of existentialism as a cultural and historical temporary project.The existential personality setting is closely linked to the ecological setting, which is seen as an alternative to the consumer setting. Particular attention is paid to eco-practices, environmental lifestyles as a way of solving existential problems, realizing authentic existence and existential self-realization.In this context, the choice of Simple life as a strategy of life is a choice between the scales of values and the possibilities of their realization. Simple life reflects the movement towards true self-realization, an ecology of consciousness, freedom and responsibility.Thus, the existential setting of the personality provides an increase in the dimensions of one's freedom can be a constructive and effective basis for self-realization of the individual.

National and Rational Dress: Catholics Debate Female Fashion in Lithuania, 1920s–1930s

The debates about female fashion in the new Republic of Lithuania in the 1920s and 1930s saw papal representatives, bishops, leading public intellectuals, and members of Catholic youth movements argue about deep décolletés and short skirts. In this predominantly Catholic country, objections made against modern fashion may initially look like a conservative stand against modern developments. Studying more closely the debate around women's fashion as it developed in a particular subset of the Catholic population in Lithuania—educated youth in the Ateitis Catholic student association, this article examines the interconnected arguments that were woven together to evaluate what women should wear in interwar Lithuania and shows that Catholics in this northeastern European country aimed to create a modern national and rational woman. At issue were not just Catholic moral norms but also national identity and the challenges posed by mass consumer culture. The new ideal being proposed was a modern Catholic female intelligentsia, a gender ideal that embraced the opportunities offered in the first decades of the twentieth century, such as suffrage, education, urban living, more active participation in civic life, while retaining more conservative moral norms, questioning consumer culture, and debating woman's nature and mission.

Marilyn Monroe’s Star Canon: American Consumerism and the Semiotics of Stardom

In an age of mass consumerism, celebrity images dominate the potent force of mass production. As a prolific contemporary American writer, Joyce Carol Oates has created a large number of works with comprehensive and inclusive topics covering race, ethnicity, violence, historical events and politic. Her novel Blonde (2000), a fictional depiction of Marilyn Monroe’s life, demonstrates Monroe’s and her. Joyce Carol Oates unflinchingly unfolds the 20 th century American capitalizing and consumerism penetrating world in Blonde. Monroe as a monumental cultural figure embodies the American mass consumer culture symbols. Monroe was a powerful but simplifies public image; an indicator of a particular historical and social context; and an embodiment of significant cultural debates. This article aims to decipher Monroe’s screen persona and off-screen life in resistance to conventional value, extensively reveals how Monroe embodied the contradictions inherit in the American mass consumer culture and history.

And religious conceptualizations of greed in the writing of Erich Fromm and John Chrysostom

In modern society, which is conceptualized as a society of mass consumption and consumer culture, the discussion about the balance of the positively stimulating role and costs of the consumer attitudes as the basis of social behavior does not stop. The greatest danger of consumerism for a person lies, however, not in the socio-economic, but in the ethical-psychological aspect of a person’s life. This study seeks to clarify in which categories it is possible to achieve a productive understanding of the role of greed in the development of a person’s spiritual world. A comparative analysis of the reasoning of the classics of Christian and atheistic humanistic ethics makes it possible to see the specifics of the anthropological consideration of greed and draw conclusions about the relevance of educational and pedagogical support to people who have taken the path to combat this spiritual ailment.

“The world food crisis is not a fad”: TheMore-with-LessCookbook and Protestant Environmental Spirituality

ABSTRACTThis article examines the spirituality reflected in the 1976 cookbookMore-with-Less. Written by a former Mennonite missionary hoping to provide religious households with a practical way to respond to world hunger, the cookbook's message of a simple diet that could transform users' influence on the world is an early example of the religious environmentalism that has grown increasingly popular among middle-class American Protestants in the last several decades. By examining its historical context, narrating its genesis, and critically assessing the spirituality it recommended, this article argues that the cookbook provides a useful window into Protestant environmental spirituality, its version of which allowed practitioners to maintain traditional institutional relationships and conceptions of the divine while cultivating the individuated religiosity increasingly sought after in modern culture. Emerging in the institutional overlap of traditional religious organizations and the putatively secular formations of mass media, globalization, and consumer culture, the cookbook leveraged the incipient emphasis on lifestyle choices within consumer culture to craft an individuated response to a vision of the world in permanent crisis.More-with-Lessand the Protestant environmental spirituality it represents shed light on current scholarly debates about the form religion takes within modern contexts of secularity, especially when religious practitioners seek adaptations that can maintain traditional theological and organizational commitments.

SOCIO-CULTURAL ASPECTS OF THE PHENOMENON OF INTERNET-ADDICTION

Introduction. The article attempts to implement the socio-philosophical reflection of the phenomenon of Internet-addiction. Analysing the Internet as a social phenomenon, the author wants to highlight the peculiarities of the social space being formed through the network. There is a certain rivalry of realities, social and virtual, which has not become antagonistic yet, but is rather acute when it comes to a man, and problems of social identity in cyberspace. The aim of the article is to make a social-philosophical analysis of some aspects of virtualization of the human living space in the conditions of the Information society, which determine the development and formation of the phenomenon of online addiction. The author sets the task of systematizing domestic and foreign experience in deter-mining the social components that influence the formation of the phenomenon of Internet addiction. Research methods: The article uses the method of comparison, descriptive method and method of system analysis. Research results. The author stresses the rele-vance of the study of the phenomenon of Internet addiction, describes the impact of the Internet on the formation of Internet addictive behavior of man. Among the features that attract users to live online, one can distinguish: anonymity, accessibility, invisibility, and plurality of social roles, security, and the ease of use. Among the factors that contribute into the formation of dependence on the Internet the leading place is given to social factors. The most attractive among them is the anonymity of communication and the ability to exper-iment with their own identity. It has been also emphasized the negative social consequences of the active use of the Internet, which leads to the destruction of sociability; cause the social isolation of person. One of the leading aspects of virtualization of individual life is escapism. The desire to from reality, to be free from the need for decision-making, taking on responsibility, labor, etc. Strangely enough, but the desire to escape from reality is typical of socially and economically well-off societies. A man who does not need to struggle for survival or a high idea, being in a state of material well-being and freedom, however, chooses another life, full of extreme feelings and passions. Discussion. The social functions of the network, which are intended to promote the growth communications between users, are the basis of the formation of the phenomenon of Internet addiction. Accordingly, the reasons why users access to the network, which are prone to Internet-addictive behavior, will have a communicative character: communication, learning, entertain-ment and others. The development of information and communication technologies, mass consumer culture, sociopolitical and econom-ic transformation, changing attitudes and values lead to the emergence of Internet addiction, which appears as a social and cultural issue of our time. By fulfilling the social and communicative function, the Internet acts as one of the conditions for the formation of dys-functional consequences - Internet addiction. Conclusion. The transformation of various spheres of public life, due to the influence of the Internet, caused the interest and attention of researchers from different fields of knowledge, mainly due to the ambiguity of influence and the manifestation of both positive and negative social consequences of the active use of the Internet. When Internet-addictive be-havior destroys sociability, there is a social separation due to the incompleteness of the participation of individuals and groups in the life of society, and dominated by informal social practices. That is, there is a departure to social isolation. Society loses its historical func-tions associated with the process of socialization of the person.

Vernacular Song and the Folkloric Imagination at the Fin de Siècle

This article foregrounds discrepancies between vernacular singing in England and the work of London’s Folk-Song Society during the 1890s. Figures such as Lucy Broadwood, Kate Lee, and Hubert Parry acted as gatekeepers through whom folk culture had to pass in order to be understood as such. Informed by colonialist epistemology, socialist radicalism, and literary Romanticism, what may be termed the “folkloric imagination” concealed the very thing it claimed to identify. Folk song, thus produced, represents the popular voice under erasure. Situated as the antidote to degeneration, burgeoning mass consumer culture, and escalating urbanization, the folk proved to be the perfect tabula rasa upon which the historiographical, political, and ethnological fantasies of the fin de siècle could be inscribed. Positioned as a restorative bulwark against the shifting tides of modernity, the talismanic folk and their songs were temporal anachronisms conjured up via the discursive strategies that attempted to describe them. Increased attention should hence be paid to singers such as Henry Burstow and the Copper brothers of Rottingdean in order to rescue their histories from the conceptual apparatus of folk song.

Anxiety in the Consumer Shell

espanolEn este comentario se examina la metafora de la maquina de Michael Roller que se utiliza para describir el condicionamiento social asociado con el consumo de masas del siglo XX. El consumismo de masas "maquinico" evoca ansiedades familiares al iluminar las maneras en que la materialidad del consumidor moldea la experiencia humana. El riesgo es que el consumismo de masas maquinico corra el peligro de subestimar la creatividad, retiro, silencio e imaginacion de la vida cotidiana que traspasan y alteran la maquinaria de la cultura de consumo de masas. francaisLe present commentaire examine la metaphore de la machine de Michael Roller utilisee pour decrire le conditionnement social associe a la consommation en masse du 20e siecle. Le consumerisme 'machinique' en masse de Roller evoque des anxietes familieres en faisant la lumiere sur la facon dont la materialite du consommateur donne forme a l’experience humaine. Le danger est que le consumerisme machinique en masse minimise la creativite, le retrait, le silence et l’imagination de tous les jours qui negocient et remettent en question la culture de consommation en masse de la machinerie. EnglishThis commentary examines Michael Roller’s metaphor of the machine to describe the social conditioning associated with 20th-century mass consumption. Roller’s machinic mass consumerism evokes familiar anxieties in its illumination of the ways consumer materiality shapes human experience. The hazard is that machinic mass consumerism risks understating the everyday creativity, retreat, silence, and imagination that negotiate and upset the machinery of mass consumer culture.

The Third Coast: When Chicago Built the American Dream by Thmas Dyja

Reviewed by: The Third Coast: When Chicago Built the American Dream by Thmas Dyja Elaine Lewinnek Thmas Dyja, The Third Coast: When Chicago Built the American Dream. New York: Penguin Books, 2013. 508 pp. $29.95. In this ambitious book, Thomas Dyja aims to make mid-century Chicago central to American art history and cultural history. With vivid writing, he traces the arc of Chicago architecture, literature, music, television, theater, visual arts, and politics from the 1940s through to 1960, following Chicago culture from Mies van der Rohe to McDonald's. Nineteen-fifty-five is the central hinge year, for Dyja, and persuasively so. That is the year that Richard Daley first became mayor, Hugh Hefner invented Playmates, Chuck Berry gave birth to rock-and-roll (in Dyja's view, 293), Mamie Till Bradley "catalyzed" the civil rights movement through her open-casket funeral for her son (317), Ray Kroc founded McDonald's, actors around the University of Chicago launched improv theater, Sun Ra refined his Afrofuturism, O'Hare airport opened, a series of unsolved child abductions dominated the Chicago news, and Chicago's urban population began its decades-long decline. As that list suggests, Dyja is prone to fall into a sort of great-man theory of history, asserting that a single Chicago person invented rock and roll [End Page 109] or postwar urban renewal or even hip-centered dancing (29)—though at other times his careful research does lead him to credit groups or eras. His personality-driven history may seem dubious to many academics, but it does make for great storytelling, as each chapter focuses on a few vivid people and places, often with surprising, creative pairings, for instance in his chapter connecting the controversies over the Farnsworth House and Cicero Riots. Dyja describes the stormy relationship between Nelson Algren and Simone de Beauvoir as one useful synecdoche for Chicago's mid-century arts scene. He has a knack for selecting memorable details, including what Richard Daley and Hugh Hefner each ate for breakfast: a poached egg every day for Daley and the first of the day's two dozen Pepsis for Hefner. Dyja also has a terrific ability to select memorable quotes, so that one of the most teachable explanations of white flight that I have ever read is Dyja's account of Mahalia Jackson's experience purchasing a home at 8353 S. Indiana Street. Dyja's theme is the way that Chicago-based ideas of "regular" folk culture, community, art, and individuality all eventually twisted through corporate commodification, Cold War consumer culture, racism, and too much top-down control from both politics and business. The American dream in his title means both consumer culture and ideas of the common man. Given this theme, he might have engaged more with academic theorists concerned with similar ideas. Michael Denning's analysis of images of regular folk in the 1930s cultural front, Lizabeth Cohen's work on how mass consumer culture both strengthened and then eroded Chicago's 1930s labor movement, and Margaret Garb's work on Chicago-based ideas of property values that structured the American dream as early as the 1920s might have better informed this book. Dyja's strength lies elsewhere. In his acknowledgments, he calls one friend a "cultural spelunker extraordinaire" and that is not a bad explanation for Dyja himself. He highlights important overlooked literature, including Gwendolyn Brooks's Maud Martha and Frank London Brown's Trumbull Park. He persuasively asserts that Chicago's contributions to early television, including Studs' Place but especially the Kukla, Fran, and Ollie show, represent a calm, "regular," improvisational, intimate, intelligent, and creative alternative to the hectic "wasteland" that came to dominate television created on the two other coasts. His prose sparkles, his primary-source research is deep, and he writes with admirable fairness to potential human villains, like Leonard and Phil Chess of Chess Records or Chicago businessman and arts patron Walter Paepcke, who relocated to Aspen. [End Page 110] Unfortunately, Dyja's is a binary Chicago, black and white, without any Asians or Latinos, although in the 1940s, Chicago was the most popular resettlement destination for Japanese-Americans banned from the West Coast during World War...

Paths to Respectability: Consumption and Stigma Management in the Contemporary Black Middle Class

AbstractWhen confronted with racial stigma, how do people manage it? What specific arrangements of objects and tactics do they mobilize to make everyday life more tolerable (if not more equal)? The politics of respectability (respectability) is one such arrangement. Respectability makes life more tolerable by offering a counternarrative that disavows stigma through status-oriented displays. This strategy of action emerged alongside mass consumer culture in the late 19th century, but what relevance does it have to those who are stigmatized in contemporary consumer culture? Based on ethnographic interviews and observations with middle-class African Americans, respectability remains an important strategy that has undergone profound changes since its origins while still operating in similar ways. In the late 20th century it fractured into two related but distinct counternarratives: (1) “discern and avoid,” which seeks distance from whatever is stigmatized, and (2) “destigmatize,” using black culture as a source of high status. Perceptions of how well either counternarrative manages stigma depend on how ideology, strategy, and consumption are connected via specific sociohistorical features of place and individual power resources. I illustrate those connections through four cases that show perceived success and perceived failure for each counternarrative.

Supernatural monsters and neo-Victorian detectives: Capitalism, rationality and affect in Japanese girls’ comics

Detective fiction was introduced to Japanese readers in the 19th century, together with the idea that the rationality detectives embody is an ideal for Japan to emulate. This article examines Yuki Kaori’s Count Cain series, a neo-Victorian Japanese girls’ comic (shōjo manga) that references the Sherlock Holmes stories and the wider genre of the detective mystery. The Count Cain series both supports and challenges the idealization of western rationality. It raises doubts about the ability of western rationality to resolve the social disorder engendered by the development of industrial capitalism and mass consumer culture in Japan since the early 20th century. The text thereby articulates a contradictory desire to both emulate the west and assert Japaneseness, which has characterized Japan’s encounter with the west since the 19th century.