The Origins of Popular Culture and Why it Matters (Natasha)

The readings for this week all came from a special issue of the American Historical Review published in December 1992. Lawrence Levine wrote an article on the importance of bridging cultural studies with historical research on popular culture and on the need for historians to recognize that the dichotomy between producers and consumers of popular culture is a false one. While his words might have been revolutionary at the time (although according to scholars like Jackson Lears they were not) I found much of his critique of cultural history to be outdated.

Authors of the cultural history I’m most familiar with, most of whom research modern Mexico have long since embraced the idea that popular culture is reciprocally created by both producers and consumers. In his widely read treatise Mexican national identity in the 1920s and 30s, Alan Knight clearly states that the Mexican people responded to revolutionary identity projects “as positive actors not mere recipients or victims of top-down manipulation.” Thus, if Levine’s essay struck was relevant when he wrote it, it is quickly becoming irrelevant as increasingly more scholars take the idea of reciprocally produced popular culture as a given.

Various scholars were invited to respond to Levine’s essays and, of the ones we were assigned to read, I found Robin Kelley’s to be the most incisive and useful to my own work. Kelley argues that Levine was right in saying that popular culture was not passively received by its audience but points out his flaws in considering popular culture’s audience to be a homogenous block. He argues that it is important to look at questions of power, race, and gender when considering how audiences interpret popular culture and how ideas and stereotypes are reinforced or challenged by the producers and consumers of popular culture. Essentially, Kelley believes that since Levine is so correct in stating the agency audiences have in deriving meaning from popular culture and, specifically mass media, it is essential to understand how and why images are constructed and how audiences used those messages.

Here I think it would have been useful for Kelley to reference Stuart Hall’s work, as he does, in passing, earlier in the essay. Hall’s theories on the encoding and decoding of messages in mass media lend a framework for interpreting meaning and various ways audiences might understand the messages that are embedded in popular culture. While Kelley’s research offers the most ambitious theory that is still relevant to cultural historians, incorporating citations of Hall’s work could have pointed scholars in a methodological direction that would make the implementation of Kelley’s ideas far more feasible.

In sum, Levine’s essay was meant to be central to the special edition of the journal and, presumably, to our readings this week but I found Kelley’s critique to offer a more substantial and valuable theoretical framework for approaching cultural history. His essay could have been imminently more useful to historians if he had pointed more to the work of Stuart Hall, a cultural theorist whose work has much to offer historians hoping to engage in the kinds of critical approaches Kelley advocates.