National Popular Culture Research Articles

For Tom Inge (1936–2021)

I met M. Thomas Inge in 1989 at the conference of the Popular Culture Association of the South after I chaired a panel on the antebellum comic writer George Washington Harris. I had tried to put the panel into MLA's national conference but was turned down. Another fan of Harris and his creation, Sut Lovingood, Tom arranged to have the panel added to the regional conference: typical of Tom's generosity. After the panel, he suggested a collection of essays on Harris, which I agreed to work on if he helped; that was one of the best deals I ever made, for it was the start of a collaboration that was part mentorship, part friendship. I doubt my career path would have been the same if I hadn't tried to shoehorn Harris and his rowdy character Sut into MLA. Tom and I also shared a passion for the work of William Faulkner, yet another fan of Harris and Sut.Tom was an indefatigable scholar and author of over fifty books. Twenty-five years ago, I once had a copy of his bibliography, which was then more than forty pages long. It is no exaggeration to say that he was a force majeure in American literature, especially in Southern literature, humor studies, and comic books. He was a founding member of the American Humor Studies Association, started American Humor: An Interdisciplinary Newsletter in 1974 with Larry Mintz, and later was the editor of Studies in American Humor.But it was in the arena of comic books and popular culture that Tom truly stood out. His book Comics as Culture (1990) was foundational for the now burgeoning academic field of comic books and graphic novels. I have this memory of him saying that he had to rent a place to hold his collection of original comic artifacts. I understand Virginia Commonwealth University will be the repository for the collection, making it an instant Mecca for research on comics in American culture. As mentioned in the VCU Libraries tribute to Dr. Inge, “The collection features correspondence from noted artists and writers such as Art Spiegelman, Mort Walker, Bruce Duncan, and Harold Foster in addition to manuscripts of Inge's scholarly works. … In 2018, he received the Lynn Bartholome Eminent Scholar Award, the highest honor offered by the national Popular Culture Association that recognizes distinguished scholars who have made significant and lasting contributions to the study of popular and American culture” (“Thomas Inge, Pioneering Comics Scholar and Former Professor, Dies at 85,” VCU Libraries, May 24, 2021, https://www.library.vcu.edu/).Tom's sense of the comic in American literature was large: he once coaxed me into participating in a special issue he was editing on humor by Nathaniel Hawthorne, not the only time I benefited from his projects. Edgar Allan Poe is perhaps more obvious than Hawthorne as a subject for unexpected humor as a theme and a topic, and here Tom's extensive collection demonstrates its impact. Tom gave the Poe Museum thirty-six comic books, including issues of Classics Illustrated, Edgar Allan Poe's Haunt of Horror, Roman Dirge's Lenore, and Weird Tales of Horror. He also donated a page of original artwork for a Zippy the Pinhead comic strip and a Lenore doll based on the character in the Lenore comics. Some of his other comics formed the core of the Poe Museum's exhibit “Poe in Comics.” Similarly, items from his collection created “Mark Twain in the Comics: An Exhibition” for the 2009 State of Mark Twain Studies.In many ways, Tom was a legend in the part of academia that worked on comics and pop culture, or Southern literature, or humor studies in general, but what I will remember most is how approachable Tom was, always friendly and always gentlemanly in his demeanor. I was lucky our paths crossed, for he provided a model of how scholars in the humanities should work and play.

Entertainment publics in the Philippines

Since the late 1980s, Filipino entertainment television has assumed and maintained a dominance in national popular culture, which expanded in the digital era. The media landscape into which digital technologies were launched in the Philippines was largely set in the wake of the 1986 popular movement and change of government referred to as the EDSA revolution: television stations that had been sequestered under martial law were turned over to family-dominated commercial enterprises, and entertainment media proliferated. Building upon the long development of entertainment industries in the Philippines, new social media encounters with entertainment content generate expanded and engaged publics whose formation continues to operate upon a foundation of televisual media. This article considers the particular role that entertainment media plays in the formation of publics in which comedic, melodramatic and celebrity-led content generates networks of followers, users and viewers whose loyalty produces various forms of capital, including in notable cases political capital.

Roland Corbisier: Nacional-desenvolvimentismo e hegeliano-marxismo no Iseb

The article recovers the political trajectory and theoretical formulations of the philosopher Roland Corbisier (1914-2005) from his initiation into integralism in São Paulo, through his studies of philosophical existentialism, until his adhesion to the “Grupo de Itatiaia” that would later give origin of the ISEB (1955-1964). As executive director of the Institute, special emphasis is given to the philosophical path that led his thinking of national developmentalism as opposition to the "colonial statute", moving through formulations about a national philosophy and reaching the philosophy of praxis, Marxism, as the main vector of the anticolonial struggle and national independence. The contradictions of that period led to the 1964 coup that closed the ISEB, eliminated the Basic Reforms and revoked his mandate as federal deputy. In the course of the 70s and 80s, he made unique contributions to dialectical thought, specifically in the development of logical conjunctions between Hegelianism and Marxism, as well as polemics with academic intellectuals about nationalism. We conclude our presentation by joining the PCdoB in the 1990s as a synthesis of its political convictions in socialism, in the development of the country and in the national-popular culture. His intellectual biography and political praxis constitute a paradigmatic synopsis of the transitions that took place in Brazil and in the world during the twentieth century.

Southern Religion, Southern Culture: Essays Honoring Charles Reagan Wilson ed. by Darren E. Grem, Ted Ownby, James G. Thomas Jr.

Reviewed by: Southern Religion, Southern Culture: Essays Honoring Charles Reagan Wilson ed. by Darren E. Grem, Ted Ownby, James G. Thomas Jr. Charity W. Rakestraw Southern Religion, Southern Culture: Essays Honoring Charles Reagan Wilson. Edited by Darren E. Grem, Ted Ownby, and James G. Thomas Jr. The Chancellor Porter L. Fortune Symposium in Southern History Series. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2019. Pp. xx, 141. $70.00, ISBN 978-1-4968-2047-1.) In books like Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865–1920 (Athens, Ga., 1980), Judgment and Grace in Dixie: Southern Faiths from Faulkner to Elvis (Athens, Ga., 1995), and Flashes of Southern Spirit: Meanings of the Spirit in the U.S. South (Athens, Ga., 2011), Charles Reagan Wilson reinterprets southern culture, redefines the parameters of religion, and sets forth an innovative model for exploring the complexities of the region. Wilson has developed a legacy, as he has inspired his former and current students and colleagues to push the boundaries of southern studies and expand our knowledge of regional and national culture. In this Festschrift, Southern Religion, Southern Culture: Essays Honoring Charles Reagan Wilson, editors Darren E. Grem, Ted Ownby, and James G. Thomas Jr. have compiled a collection that is appropriately diverse in its content and consistent in employing the creativity cultivated by the honoree. On topics that range from antebellum Episcopalians in politics to African American education, Holiness media innovation, football goalposts, and macabre southern relics, the essays in this volume successfully reflect the powerful impact that Wilson has had on the field of southern history. In their introductory essays, Grem and Paul Harvey respectively situate Wilson’s work in his classroom at the University of Mississippi and within the larger theoretical framework he has established for southern studies. Grem begins in the Tupelo Room at the university, where The Shroud of Memphis (a painting of Elvis Presley by artist William Dunlap) looms over the lecturer as he introduces classes to photographs of artifacts imbued with religious significance, such as “a hand-stitched quilt, a used-car dealer’s leaflet, a late-model truck painted with biblical scenes” (p. xi). The scene reflects Wilson’s expansion of the concept of religious culture to include church happenings as well as seemingly nonreligious rites and rituals. Harvey’s carefully crafted essay further underscores this theme of religious nonreligious artifacts in Wilson’s writings, specifically acknowledging the scholar’s successful investigation of the Cartesian split in southern religion. Harvey explains that the feted historian used southern objects and texts (including music) to influence a new intellectual history, one that is “properly seen not as the history of thought but of the history of humans thinking creatively” (p. 6). By employing a fluid theoretical mixture of cultural and intellectual history [End Page 164] and anthropology, Wilson exposes the mind and body dualism of the South and considers how national popular culture emerged from this heady mix. Wilson’s approach of investigating both the sacred and the secular as religious texts is reflected in the division of the collection into institutional and noninstitutional religion. In chapters devoted to institutional histories, Wilson’s influence is apparent as authors make original arguments regarding church and politics, a complex but not-so-complex Lost Cause ideology, and black evangelicalism and education. Ryan L. Fletcher’s study, set in antebellum Arkansas, argues that evangelicalism did not snuff out the Episcopal Church in the area because of members’ control of “labor power” (read: slaves) (p. 37). The author meticulously describes the Episcopalian influence in the Whig Party as it contested Baptist and Methodist Democrats over economics and political offices. Also fusing the political with the spiritual, Otis W. Pickett explores the conflicted legacy of John Lafayette Girardeau, a nineteenth-century Presbyterian minister who recognized black church leaders before the war but, in the postbellum period, became a prominent voice for the Lost Cause and segregation. A confounding figure, Girardeau embodies the Cartesian duality referenced by Harvey earlier in the volume. In an essay on black education in the first decades of the twentieth century, Alicia Jackson investigates the successful fund-raising efforts of leaders in the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church as they invested...

Teresa Mannion and the Emergence of Extreme Weather Culture in Ireland

In this article I consider how registers of weather media carry/convey cultural information, specifically how texts about extreme weather articulate with investment in a supposed post-recession restored normality marked by the Irish government's commitment to deregulated transnational capitalism. I maintain that, in a process of cross-cultural remediation, sensationalist codes of US weather media that discursively manage awareness of systemic climate problems are just starting to infiltrate the Irish broadcasting environment. In early December 2015 RTÉ’s Teresa Mannion covered a strong gale, Storm Desmond, amidst inclement conditions in Salthill, Co Galway. Modelling the kind of ‘body at risk’ coverage consummately performed by US Weather Channel personnel, Mannion could barely speak over the lashing rain and strong winds in a dramatic broadcast that quickly became a viral video. This article analyses the fascination with Mannion's piece and its memetic, and attends to the nature of the pleasure taken in her on-camera discomfiture and the breach of gendered territory committed by Mannion at a time when national popular culture in Ireland is under increased obligation to identify and explain climate change-related extreme weather.

Iconoclast in Ink: The Political Cartoons of Jay N. "Ding" Darling by Richard Samuel West

Reviewed by: Iconoclast in Ink: The Political Cartoons of Jay N. "Ding" Darling by Richard Samuel West Paul V. Murphy Richard Samuel West, Iconoclast in Ink: The Political Cartoons of Jay N. "Ding" Darling. Columbus: The Ohio State University Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum, 2012. 194 pp. $24.95. Jay Norwood "Ding" Darling began his nearly fifty-year career as a cartoonist in 1900 when he joined the staff of the Sioux City Journal. Newspapers of that era were in transition, still at the center of partisan politics but also part of an emerging mass media that played an important role in integrating the towns and cities scattered across the country into a national popular culture. Darling contributed to both projects. He gained a national following, eventually earning two Pulitzer Prizes, while advancing a progressive political vision fostered by two prominent and gifted [End Page 179] Republican newspapermen. The first of these, George Perkins, initially hired Darling for the Journal. Gardner Cowles later lured him to the Des Moines Register and Leader in 1906, where Darling spent the bulk of his career. Darling perfected the gentle but biting single-panel, front-page political cartoon, using homey and charming images to bring public figures down to size and to translate complex issues into "everyday terms that anyone could understand" (5). He eventually gained a national audience through syndication by the New York Tribune. In collaboration with The Ohio State University Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum, Richard Samuel West has produced a handsome, large-format, and copiously illustrated volume attesting to Darling's abilities. West pairs a knowledgeable, well-illustrated eighty-page survey of Darling's art and politics with a selection of over one hundred cartoons, presented on a scale that almost matches the six-by-eight-inch format in which many originally appeared. Read together, they give a glimpse of a political world lost. Born in the tiny lakeshore village of Norwood (from which his middle name derived) in the upper stretches of Michigan's lower peninsula in 1876, Darling moved throughout Michigan and Indiana before his family settled in Sioux City, Iowa, in 1886. He was an energetic, irreverent youth, expelled from Yankton College in South Dakota for commandeering the president's horse and buggy and suspended from his next school, Beloit College, due to poor attendance and scholarship. At Beloit, he drew satirical drawings of his professors, signing himself as Ding, from "D'ing", a contraction that had become a habit with his father and brother. "Ding" Darling became the name by which he was known. He first attracted national notice as a cartoonist in 1907 with a fine panel featuring President Theodore Roosevelt sitting at the end of a makeshift diving board over a rural stream, splashing idly in the water, unsure what to do, while seven would-be rivals for the 1908 Republican presidential nomination—from William Howard Taft to Robert La Follette—lined up impatiently behind him. Darling exemplified a type of progressivism almost unknown in the Republican Party of today. He was skeptical of trusts and the business selfishness they embodied, optimistic regarding the regulatory power of government (to end child labor and regulate railroads, for example), and passionate in his belief in international government to prevent the scourge of war. He idolized Herbert Hoover and generally criticized Democratic policies, but he supported Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt when they advanced progressive aims, particularly in foreign affairs. He often [End Page 180] assumed the stance of a gentle prophet, skewering the inattentiveness, emotionalism, irrationality, hypocrisy, and alarmism that led to unjust and destructive policies. He hailed, instead, the enlightened, forward-thinking, disinterested, and fraternal impulses that promised a better future. In one wartime fantasy, Darling depicted a businessman and workingman becoming solicitous brothers in the trenches despite their mutual hatred in peacetime. Darling wrote a remarkably sober-minded assessment of the Soviet Union after a brief visit there in 1931. It revealed much about his temperament, condemning authoritarianism but issuing a biting warning as well. "If you are … afflicted with conservatism, one dose of Russia will make you well," Darling wrote. "Every American ought to make a trip to Russia at least once...

Statement of Correction

Verboord, M., & Brandellero, A. (2016). The globalization of popular music, 1960-2010. Communication Research. Advance online publication. doi:10.1177/0093650215623834 The editors of Communication Research, Drs. Gibbs and Knobloch-Westerwick, wish to issue this statement of correction regarding the aforementioned article, published in OnlineFirst on January 16, 2016. This article was first submitted to Communication Research on July 11, 2012, and accepted for publication by the prior editors on November 19, 2015. In 2015, Drs. Marc Verboord and Amanda Brandellero published a book chapter that is based on the same data set and dependent variable as the abovementioned article. As a reference to the book chapter was not cited in the Communication Research journal article, the editors of CR would like to correct the academic record here by including the reference in this correction notice: Verboord, M., & Brandellero, A. (2015) National popular culture in an interconnected world: The case of pop charts. In W. de Been, P. Arora, & M. Hildebrandt (Eds.), Crossroads in new media, identity and law (pp. 218-236). London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. We have examined the two texts and corresponded with the authors on the matter. The authors responded that the two texts target different audiences (the chapter for readers of an interdisciplinary work in the areas of new media and law, while the article for specialists in global cultural communication) and that different analyses are reported in the two texts. We agree that the article has more complex analyses, different theory considerations than the chapter, and examines additional independent variables. However, we are concerned about the use in both works of the same dependent variable (condensed to a dichotomous variable in the article, whereas the chapter uses the same variable with metric information). Further, the authors failed to acknowledge any other publication reporting data from the same data set in their correspondence with the journal or through a citation in the manuscript. Our final determination has been to issue this statement of correction and editors’ commentary. Subsequent versions of the article will be corrected to include the citation to the book chapter. As editors of Communication Research since 2016, we wish to take this opportunity to reiterate the journal’s mission of publishing new, original research and theory. Upon submission to Communication Research, authors are required to disclose any other works drawing on the same whole (or partial) data set in the pursuit of assessing and ensuring a manuscript’s novelty to the literature, as well as overseeing appropriate attribution to related works. Our aim is to enrich our field of study and the body of work that buttresses it, and the cooperation of future authors in flagging prior publications drawing on the same data set is vital to this endeavor. Drs. Jennifer Gibbs and Silvia Knobloch-Westerwick

Satanism and Family Murder in Late Apartheid South Africa: imaging the end of whiteness by Nicky Falkof

Reviewed by: Satanism and Family Murder in Late Apartheid South Africa: imaging the end of whiteness by Nicky Falkof Melissa Hackman (bio) Nicky Falkof (2015) Satanism and Family Murder in Late Apartheid South Africa: imaging the end of whiteness. London/NY: Palgrave MacMillan Hysterical white adolescent girls claiming to be possessed by Satan; Afrikaans men who violently killed their entire families with guns and axes. These are some of the white South Africans who populate the pages of Nicky Falkof’s Satanism and Family Murder in Late Apartheid South Africa: imagining the end of whiteness. In this book, Falkof writes about the fissures in whiteness during National Party rule in a culture that believed that questioning authority, challenging the status quo, and going against heteropatriarchal whiteness was heretical. Falkof wants the reader to see the cracks in white hegemony as the apartheid state crumbled and movements like the End Conscription Campaign, the fight for liberation, and international sanctions burst the bubble of whites claiming to be living idyllic lives. Falkof is clear, however, that she did not write the book to make the reader feel sorry for South African whites. Instead, it is about the ways that systems of domination are violent to the oppressor and the oppressed, albeit in radically different ways. Falkof explains to the reader that she chose both these moral panics in order to show how late apartheid led whites to claim that their social world was in crisis and under siege from within. The body politic, she explains, was in shock and reeling. To explore how repression and moral panic operated in the 1980s and 1990s, Falkof dives into an archive of national popular culture. In particular, she uses white newspapers and magazines, with a focus on ‘family magazines’, all which had ‘allegiances to the state’ (33) and were ‘moral entrepreneurs’ who both reported on and contributed [End Page 112] to moral panics. Falkof convincingly explains how this primary source data is key to understanding the ways that white society’s decades of repression, violence, and social control had psychic, cultural, and violent effects. Falkof’s text is divided in two. The first half of the book is on the Satanic scare (she is quick to remind the reader that there was no evidence of real Satanists in South Africa performing the acts they claimed, like murdering and eating babies) and the second half on family murders (gesinsmoorde), mostly carried out by Afrikaans men. Satanic scares were prevalent in both Afrikaans and English communities. A number of moral entrepreneurs, including the Dutch Reformed Church, Pentecostal ministers, so-called ‘cult cops’ (who worked in the South African Police force’s Occult-related crime unit), government officials, and the white media claimed to be actively battling against Satan and his influence. Unlike places like America and Britain, where Satanic scares were propagated by social workers and psychologists, in South Africa, Satanic scares were fought by Christians and ‘Christian government functionaries’ (36). Satanic rumours and accusations were part of a ‘generalized paranoia’ (61) from inside white society. Coloured and black South Africans were on the margins of white Satanic accusations and scares because whites were more concerned with the ways that their social worlds had been infiltrated from within by what they saw as evil. Satan abounded in late apartheid social worlds and Satanic accusations were one way to police those who questioned social, moral, and political authorities. The second half of Falkof’s text delves into the mostly Afrikaans men who murdered their entire families in the same time period as the Satanic scares. These murders had a number of stated causes in white newspapers and magazines, including the ways that so-called ‘traditional’ family values were being left behind, how Afrikaans marriages emotionally isolated men from being able to express their feelings and concerns, the changing economy, the influx of non-censored foreign media, and even the ways that mainstream churches were being flooded by liberation rhetoric and social movements. These all, claimed the media, had a detrimental effect on the power and social prestige of the Afrikaans patriarch (133–4). However, Falkof notes, while the white media may have been quick to critique Afrikaans masculinity...

“Mountain of Destiny”: Nanga Parbat and Its Path into the German Imagination by Harold Höbusch

Reviewed by: “Mountain of Destiny”: Nanga Parbat and Its Path into the German Imagination by Harold Höbusch Samuel J. Kessler Harold Höbusch, “Mountain of Destiny”: Nanga Parbat and Its Path into the German Imagination. Studies in German Literature, Linguistics, and Culture. Rochester: Camden House, 2016. 282 pp. Harold Höbusch’s “Mountain of Destiny”: Nanga Parbat and Its Path into the German Imagination is three books in one: a history of the German exploration of the Himalayan mountain known as Nanga Parbat; an analysis of the relationship between the ethos of mountaineering and the ideology of National Socialism; and a critical discussion about why mountains became such a common referent in German popular culture in the middle decades of the twentieth century. Though the title suggests the book’s common thread will be Nanga Parbat, in fact Höbusch has given us something far more wide-ranging. “Mountain of Destiny” is a deeply sourced account of the co-development of mountaineering culture and Germany’s modern self-identity, hinged around the rhetoric and trauma of National Socialism. Höbusch opens by laying out a theory of the interrelation of mountains and cultural identity, tracing how the ethos and ideology of mountaineering was increasingly depicted and valorized in German popular culture between the 1920s and 1950s. “The various representations of these [Himalayan] expeditions to the German public in print, film, and audio—[are] in my opinion the crucial segments of Nanga Parbat’s path into the German imagination,” he writes (13). This widespread use of mountaineering as a means of depicting communal values he calls, somewhat awkwardly, “the cultural phenomenon Nanga Parbat.” This theoretical lens (“the cultural phenomenon Nanga Parbat”) overshadows, however, Höbusch’s most incisive and compelling findings. It is not that Nanga Parbat the mountain plays such a role in German cultural [End Page 173] identity. Instead, it is the spirit of expedition, of brotherhood on the icy slope, and of attaining a prize (reaching the summit)—these qualities permeate German mass culture. Höbusch, it often seems, is writing two equally compelling though at some level quite different books. Either this is a history of Nanga Parbat (the ninth-highest mountain in the world) and the German men who climbed it, or it is a study of mountaineering as a social and ideological phenomenon, an analysis of the way that climbing as an ethos became a cipher for German angst, self-glorification, and moral education before, during, and after National Socialism. It is the latter book, buried inside the former, that has the most consequence for historians of twentieth-century Germany. For reasons not entirely clear, Höbusch avoids placing “Mountain of Destiny” into conversation with others works that discuss the cultural preludes and propagandist exploits of National Socialism. Yet some of the most fascinating and disturbing moments in “Mountain of Destiny” describe the way mountaineers and their texts were easily (and often happily) appropriated by the Nazi state. Analyzing the language of mountaineers from the 1920s Höbusch repeatedly points to the aspects of the sport that allowed its cooptation by the Nazis: the idea of the mountain as spiritual alternative to modernity; the valorization of struggle as the central character of the endeavor; and the description of the forging of non-egocentric bonds in the midst of extraordinary circumstances in order to achieve success. “Mountain of Destiny” is an excellent account of how NS ideology infiltrated (or perhaps merely accentuated) one more aspect of prewar German life. Höbusch describes how willingly German climbers were to adapt their seemingly apolitical culture to fit Nazi ideology. Why, then, does Höbusch not situate the book as part of the history of National Socialism? The answer lies, perhaps, with Höbusch’s other, primary research area: the history of sports. By describing this book as a history of sports and its effect on national popular culture—rather than on the way political ideology coopted or manipulated the language of mountaineering—Höbusch allows himself the space to give a richer, fuller account of mid-twentieth-century German mountaineering and the men who defined it. It also allows him to show that, though the tenets of...

Brasil em Tempo de Cinema como método de análise fílmica de Jean-Claude Bernardet

Escrito no auge do fenômeno do Cinema Novo, Brasil em Tempo de Cinema (1967) de Jean-Claude Bernardet foi a primeira obra de análise do movimento. Pioneiro na crítica à cultura do nacional popular, o livro tornou-se peça obrigatória para o debate dos realizadores e uma referência teórica de análise do cinema brasileiro para os críticos. O artigo avalia o método de análise fílmica desenvolvido por Bernardet a partir do diálogo com a sociologia das visões de mundo e com a crítica materialista para traçar um panorama da evolução desses conceitos na crítica dos anos setenta.

The Good, the Bad, and the Commons: A Critical Review of Popular Discourse on Piracy and Power During Anti-ACTA Protests

The article analyses popular discourse on and power that emerged as a result of people's online anti-ACTA Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement engagement in Poland. Drawing upon a social semiotic visual analysis of 921 ACTA-related images shared online in 2012, author analyzes a collective reconstruction of concept of piracy and popular narrative of conflict in terms of its sides and subject. The study reveals how anti-ACTA images form a medium of national popular culture adaptation of global pop- and countercultural modalities. The protesters appropriated them to oppose another attempt at global copyright enforcement. New media became not only tool and environment for these activities but were also collectively depicted as the commons, endangered by agreement.

Riding Deep Waters: An Appalachian Meditation

Riding Deep WatersAn Appalachian Meditation Elizabeth S. D. Engelhardt (bio) Solitude is deep water, and small boats do not ride well in it. Only a superficial observer could fail to understand that the mountain people really love their wilderness—love it for its beauty, for its freedom. —Emma Bell Miles, The Spirit of the Mountains In 1905, Emma Bell Miles wrote a parable in her Appalachian manifesto, The Spirit of the Mountains (17). Concerned with unfettered development, new demeaning forms of service industry work, and erosion of community that she witnessed in Chattanooga and Walden’s Ridge, Tennessee, Miles picked up her pen to capture southern mountain cultures before tourism, industry, and rapid spread of national popular culture brought what she saw as devastating changes. Miles employed every strategy she had to hand—close textual description, poetry, paintings, folkloric song recording and transcribing, linguistic gathering of phrases and dialect, interviews, and, finally, the political radical’s protest voice, all in the spare 201 pages of the book. Today we might call it a hybrid, multigenre, experimental text. If she were writing it today, surely it would have a digital component, hyperlinks, and interactive crowd-sourced passages. The voice of The Spirit of the Mountains is as complicated as the structure of the book. Sometimes Miles writes in first-person singular: “Early next morning I shut the cabin door and took my way down the mountain,” on her way to learn how to [End Page 16] weave a coverlet from an older woman in the community (38). In other passages, the first person is collective: “We who live so far apart that we rarely see more of one another than the blue smoke of each other’s chimneys are never at ease without the feel of the forest on every side—room to breathe, to expand, to develop, as well as to hunt and to wander at will” (73). At still other times, Miles positions the narrator as an outsider looking in on mountain residents; after all, they “love their wilderness” (17), a perhaps surprising embrace of early-century wilderness aesthetics not placed in Northeast or West.1 She continues, “All alike cling to the ungracious acres they have so patiently and hardly won, because of the wild world that lies outside their puny fences, because of the dream-vistas, blue and violet, that lead their eyes far among the hills” (19)—and I am left wondering what the narrator thinks in this exuberance of their and they. At the same time, the narrator separates self from tourists, whom she calls summer people or city people: “‘Have we not built roads for a people too lazy to build for themselves?’ say the city people. . . . In short, haven’t we paid them well?” (195, emphasis in original). Calling out misunderstandings about lawlessness among mountain residents, suddenly a second-person “you” sneaks in as the narrator directs the reader: “If you read that no attempt has been made to bring the murderer to justice, you may be reasonably certain that the dead man was not valuable to his neighborhood” (75). In other words, “your” interpretation, “fostered by newspaper stories” (74), needs correcting. In the final manifesto chapter, which begins with a clarion “My people, everywhere” (190), the voices combine, sometimes in the space of a single paragraph: “the mountaineers must awaken to consciousness of themselves as a people. For although throughout the highlands of Kentucky, Tennessee and the Carolinas our nature is one, our hopes, our loves, our daily life the same, we are yet a people asleep” (200). Just when I think I have a handle on the text, Miles shifts yet again. The voice is so personal and so detailed that for years scholars tried to read the book as autobiography. But that proved inaccurate. The superficial observation from the small boat is wrong. Miles lived at times in urban Chattanooga, the birthplace of African American blues singer Bessie Smith and home to a vibrant arts community. Coverage of her writing appeared in newspapers, including the Chattanooga News, for which she wrote a semi-regular column, and the Chattanooga Times, the latter owned by Adolph Ochs (who led the New...

Under the Spell of Populism: Popular Culture and Intellectuals in Brazil

In the 1960s, Brazil experienced profound changes, due mainly to the emergence of the urban masses. At that time, political and cultural projects of a populist and nationalist nature appeared, supported by the idea of a national popular culture through which the masses would be led to a tomada de consciência (critical consciousness) of the country’s social problems. It fell to the intellectuals to lead the way, to create a distinctive national popular culture that, contrary to foreign imports, would reflect the true experience of the popular classes, among whom they proudly counted themselves. In this context, popular culture became associated with products made and distributed by the Centros Populares de Cultura (Popular Culture Centers—CPC). This essay aims at analyzing the role of the intellectuals affiliated with the CPC in realizing these objectives.

Eternal Recurrence of (almost) the Same. Nostalgia in Italian Advertising from Carmencita and Gringo to Jake la Furia

The paper sets out to analyse the relationship between past, present, and future as applied to the behaviour of consumption. The favoured approach examines the use of nostalgia in advertising and in several forms of Italian contemporary national popular culture. The hypothesis posits that the emotion of nostalgia acts as a powerful factor in mobilising consumers because it inspires a desire that can speak not only to the past (which is impossible to recover) but also to the future; the latter here is taken as what one could achieve via a consumption which employs the past as a symbolic resource to activate desire. The study delineates three main strategies via which communication makes efficient use of nostalgia: the special dynamic of drawing the subject and object closer together and farther apart, the past’s identity-related function, and the memory’s complex work of interpretation and reconstruction of the past. The text will examine some specific examples of advertising commercials and mass-media products which demonstrate the emotion of nostalgia’s capacity to mobilise consumers.

Designs on the popular: framings of general, universal and common culture in French educational policy

This article examines the culture‐shaping strategies pursued through French educational policies. It traces the process through which the republican education system claimed legitimacy to bring all citizens into its universalising embrace and to institute a form of national popular culture. At the same time, the article shows how specifications of esoterically ‘universal’ and ‘general’ curricular content were used to maintain barriers between elite and popular classes. The article then explores endeavours since the 1940s to delineate more democratically framed notions of ‘general’ or ‘common’ culture, and the difficulties that have accompanied the integration of such perspectives into mass secondary schooling since the 1960s. In particular, one sees in France persistent disjunctions between the ‘universal’ cultures carried by academic curricula and contemporary popular cultures and experience (though the balance of power between these poles has shifted in some respects).

Playing Promotional Politics: Mythologizing Hockey and Manufacturing “Ordinary” Canadians

Over 15 years ago, Andrew Wernick described a new stage of promotion within the mainstream politics of advanced capitalist democracies through which political dialogue was effectively subsumed by the language and practices of contemporary marketing and image-making spectacles. In this article, we examine how the national sport of hockey and its associated traditions and cultural identities continue to be mythologized and deployed in the new millennium for the purpose of contemporary political promotional strategies. We argue that, as a central element of national popular culture, hockey remains the pre-eminent signifier of a particular ‘brand’ of Canadianness for the current federal Conservative Government as it massages its neoliberal political platform to a demographic of imagined, “ordinary Canadians”—a key concept of neoliberal discourse that is redefining citizenship and identity across contemporary Canada.

"What shall we do with the Negro?": Lincoln, white racism, and Civil War America

Throughout the Civil War, newspaper headlines and stories repeatedly asked some variation of the question posed by the New York Times in 1862, 'What shall we do with the negro?' The future status of African Americans was a pressing issue for both those in the North and in the South. Consulting a broad range of contemporary newspapers, magazines, books, army records, government documents, publications of citizens' organizations, letters, diaries, and other sources, Paul D. Escott examines the attitudes and actions of Northerners and Southerners regarding the future of African Americans after the end of slavery. What Shall We Do with the Negro? demonstrates how historians together with our larger national popular culture have wrenched the history of this period from its context in order to portray key figures as heroes or exemplars of national virtue. Escott gives especial critical attention to Abraham Lincoln. Since the civil rights movement, many popular books have treated Lincoln as an icon, a mythical leader with thoroughly modern views on all aspects of race. But, focusing on Lincoln's policies rather than attempting to divine Lincoln's intentions from his often ambiguous or cryptic statements, Escott reveals a president who placed a higher priority on reunion than on emancipation, who showed an enduring respect for states' rights, who assumed that the social status of African Americans would change very slowly in freedom, and who offered major incentives to white Southerners at the expense of the interests of blacks. Escott's approach reveals the depth of slavery's influence on society and the pervasiveness of assumptions of white supremacy. What Shall We Do with the Negro? serves as a corrective in offering a more realistic, more nuanced, and less celebratory approach to understanding this crucial period in American history.

“O fantasma de um clássico”: recepção e reminiscências de Favela dos Meus Amores (H. Mauro, 1935)

O filme Favela dos meus amores (1935), de Humberto Mauro, cujas cópias se perderam, foi muito bem recebido pela crítica e pelo público, tornando-se objeto de culto e memória nas décadas seguintes. Neste artigo pretendo articular, a partir dos fragmentos documentais que nos informam sobre o filme, três aspectos principais: 1) o papel de “Favela...” na construção de uma nova identidade nacional e de uma nova cultura popular urbana, tendo como centro o Rio de Janeiro; 2) os aspectos ideológicos e estéticos da recepção crítica do filme; 3) Seu papel como objeto de memória da história cultural brasileira. A partir destes três eixos de análise pretendo mapear o impacto de “Favela...” na formatação de uma nova cultura “nacional popular” no Brasil, cujo sentido ideológico era disputado à esquerda e à direita.

A (Napoleon) Dynamite Identity: Rural Idaho, the Politics of Place, and the Creation of a New Western Film

This essay examines the 2004 comedy Napoleon Dynamite, analyzing its impacton national popular culture and rural identity in the American West, particularly in the town of Preston, Idaho, where the movie was filmed . As part coming-of-age film, part comedy, and part critique of real life, Napoleon Dynamite fashioned a unique and contested image of theWest that helps to expose the underlying anxieties, stereotypes, assumptions, and hopes that still underscore much of the fraught relationship between the rural West and mainstream America.

The Discourse of Location

This article examines the recent rise in popularity of German film, in particular comedy, with German cinema audiences. This trend contrasts sharply with negative reviews from cinema critics while being in line with the agenda of popular directors and certain conservative politicians. The article examines what may be deduced about the place of such a cinema in the rearticulation of a specifically German national-popular culture and how this may inform us about the importance of the location of post-unification Germany in the global context in terms of its national identity. By national-popular is meant the ways in which popular entertainment can be used to create a network of identifications within a specific linguistic and cultural grouping such as the nation-state. It also has a resonance of Antonio Gramsci's usage in his Prison Notebooks in that it helps to understand the informal way in which popular culture may actively support the nationalist rhetoric which is necessary to legitimate a nationstate. This is particularly relevant in contemporary Germany, which needs as a political entity to ensure broad support for its reconfigured status.