Daughtering and mothering Book

One of the taken-for-granteds of many strands of theorising of the condition of postmodernity is that we live in an era when history is increasingly unknown or irrelevant, and were the past is passed over in favour of a time of shallowness and the image from the surface. This is not the only version of theorising the present cultural condition; Jameson sees postmodernism as the cultural form of the logic of late capitalism, Habermas remains attached to the idea of modernity as an unfinished cultural-historical project, Berman in All That is Solid Melts Into Air shows how unsettling and destabilising modernity was and remains, while Bourdieu throughout his work-at-home (as well as his early Algerian anthropology) maintained a resolutely materialist view the presence of the past in cultural and social life) – to draw on only four of the big names of contemporary social theory.

Lipsitz adds to the evidence of the presence of the past in cultural analyses, but this is not just a series of studies that add to our evidence base; his close readings of a number of contemporary (as in since 1945) cultural texts and forms shows a rich historicisation in and of popular culture, while also grounding the emergence and development of popular cultural forms in post-war social, cultural and economic developments. That is, this analysis is rigorously materialist in its analyses, and as such is a significant source of ideas for and approaches to ways to make sense of the contemporary cultural world. He is not out to underplay the extent of change in the ways that we explore and make sense of the past or to suggest that history is not a battleground; both changes are real and have had a profound effect on the ways we see, think, use and understand the past – but it does not mean that we have become history-less.

The book is framed by three powerful chapters that explore by way of introduction and conclusion the politics of popular culture, the politics of history in popular culture, and the politics of the future in popular culture. I have to admit that the chapters exploring popular television did not resonate as well as some of the other chapters, in part because many of the shows from the 1950s and early 1960s that he explores are not ones I know, but that did not diminish the power of his argument that the decline of urban working class residence and the rise of suburbia ran alongside a profound shift in popular television that saw an increasingly legitimation of consumption and individualism/familialism, a decline in collective and community identities and a depoliticisation of solutions to problems in everyday life. These two chapters draw powerful but often implicit links between popular television and other developments in urban life and studies as well as the role and image of the city in post-war national imaginaries.

Of the textual and case study analyses, three chapters in particular stood out for me – the two exploring popular music, and the one discussing what he calls counter-memory in novels. I enjoyed and appreciated the argument that rock and roll (used inclusively here) must be understood as a form of dialogue between musical styles and social groups where he draws on Bakhtin’s model of dialogue and close readings not only of music but of artists’ biographies to challenge the ahistorical tendencies in some key works in popular music analyses (especially Larry Grossberg and Anne Kaplan), which is not to say that he seems Grossberg and Kaplan a totally ahistoricial, but as not sufficiently invoking historical forces to adequately present the politics of the popular. More impressive, however, is the chapter dealing with popular music in East LA, a multi-ethnic area of the city with a strong Chicano/Latino presence (think Maggie and Hopey’s barrio in Los Bros Fernandez’s Love and Rockets series) where he outlines a weaving together musical styles, political and social experiences and the complexities of community relations to explore a form of music that is about group identities, oppostional subcultures and a desire for unity (think here the music of Los Lobos).

The standout chapter, for me, is his exploration of ‘counter-memory’ in popular narratives (in this case fiction); his sense of counter-memory is different to that of Foucault who seems to see it as a way of recording the action and effects of oppression. For Lipsitz, counter-memory “focuses on localised experiences of oppression, using them to reframe and refocus dominant narratives purporting to represent universal experience” (p 213), which is a much more active sense of memory than Foucault seems to allow. To make his case, he looks at novels by Toni Morrison, Eudory Welty, Leslie Marmon Silko, John Okada and Rudolfo Anaya, all of whom explore and deal with experiences outside the dominant Anglo-American norm – African Americans, Southern Whites, Native Americans, Japanese Americans and Chicanos – while framing them with the story-telling form in Their Eyes Were Watching God. Towards the end of this discussion he encapsulates the case of the book succinctly: “Cultural conservatives who bemoan the loss of historical consciousness in the modern world seriously misread the texts of popular culture. Certainly, dominant historical narratives have lost much of their legitimacy. But within the interstices of popular culture, a rich collective counter-memory carries on the tasks of historical thinking in new and significant ways.” (p231). (Other readers, I am sure, will find much to appreciate in the two film chapters and the chapter looking at New Orleans’ (African-American) Mardi Gras ‘Indians’.)

The book is published in 1990, and some of the chapters draw on popular cultural evidence and experience that is much older than that but it retains its power and significance both for the theoretical models it proposes, the rich materialist bases of its argument, its valuing of popular cultural texts as richly suggestive of an active politics that is not simply a protective sense of resistance-in-the-bad-times (in Gramscian terms, he sees popular culture as more than a site of a counter-hegemonic war of position). I haven’t read the book in total for nearly 20 years (and the binding is so worn I doubt I’ll be able to read my current copy again); it remains as freshly stimulating as it did in the early 1990s. Highly recommended.