Popular culture does need to be paid more attention within the historical community. As I expressed in my post just last week, I am often not taken seriously in Mexico because of the “frivolity” of my topic. Yet, perhaps as one of the only things Levine and Lears appear to agree on this week is the fact that one cannot dismiss popular culture as fluff.
For Levine, the field needs to turn its attention to the role of the audience in mediating the development, popularity, and meaning of popular culture much in the same way that folklorists have approached their subjects. I think this is the greatest contribution of the main article. The concept that theories used to dissect and deconstruct folklore can be applied to popular culture artifacts to provide alternative possibilities for historians. Kelley, Davis, and Lears, however, seem to have chosen to focus on the lack of discussion of the importance/power of producers of mass culture and popular culture in the relationships of meaning production. Yet, I think this discredits Levine. While he does note that he could have made it clearer that those who produce popular culture (or mass culture depending on the historical moment and your perspective) have power within the realm of generating cultural identities in a community, this was not his project. He intended to write a piece of work on the audience, and I do not feel that his work is lacking because he does not completely flush out the alternative side. The main motivating of the article is to expose how the audience contributes to the development, and better yet the legitimization, of popular culture much in the way that the “folk” are given credit for producing ‘authentic’ folklore. He explains that popular culture is a contested and constructed between the producers and the people adequately on his way to his more prominent goal for the work.
The fact that Levin does not better flush out the role of other identities within a community tied to class, gender and race (to list a few) that influence audience motivations and identities, on the other hand, seems to be the more obvious weakness of the paper (as Davis indicates). Yet, as Levine does attest, he only had a limited amount of space allotted and it is impossible to include everything. Perhaps in his book he is able, with more space, to tackle the role of concepts such as class, race, and gender in relation to the role of audience in the construction of popular culture.
* As an aside, having taken a course from Jackson Lears at Rutgers during my master’s study I can attest that he speaks and runs his classes much like he writes. He does not bother tip toeing around. He also has a great story about hosting E.P. Thompson and his wife at his home once for a few days.
Sarah Howard
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