Popular CultureMulticulturalism

John G. Cawelti

A little over one hundred years ago, Walt Whitman noted that
culture is the word of the modern.’ Not one of his more original
statements, since this was the chorus of most major nineteenth century
critics from Carlyle to Arnold. Culture, in both its normative and
descriptive senses continued to be a dominant concept of western
intellectual life right up to the beginning of the second half of the
twentieth century.2 Normatively, the concept of culture was a unifying
ideal, centered around a vision of Western civilization as the climax of
cultural progress and synthesis. This vision led to a concept of the
humanistic curriculum as a pedagogy leading the student to acquire a
significant proportion of the artistic and philosophical canon which was
thought to define this ci~ilization.~
On the other hand, used descriptively by the new disciplines of
anthropology, sociology, and social psychology, culture was a concept
used to articulate the multiplicity of behaviors created by actual human
beings in different places and times. Ambiguous and confusing as this
double meaning of the word could be in practice, the two senses of
culture worked out a complex dialectic with each other throughout the
nineteenth century. Together they expressed an ideal of human society as
“liberal,” that is as both broadly tolerant of religious and cultural
diversity and also as dedicated to the idea of progress toward increasing
cultural integration and transcendence of the limitations of past cultures.
This ideal was most powerfully symbolized by the idea of America with
its great motto: e pluribus unum. Ultimitely there developed a dream of a
world civilization which would embody the best that had been thought
and said (to quote one famous thumbnail definition of culture) and
eventually synthesize individual cultural heritages into one grand stream
of civilization.
Alas, too often this cultural ideal really meant the imperializing
domination of some national culture, whether the American way of life,
British hegemony, Deutsche kultur, or the Communist international; two
world wars and a half-century of other conflicts have made the progress
of civilization seem more like an appointment with Armageddon than the
3
4 Journal of Popular Culture
emergence of a transcendent world culture. Growing doubts about the
value or even the possibility of a unified culture have increasingly led
critics and scholars to use the word with qualifying adjectives-popular,
working-class, ethnic, folk, high, low, and middle, global, etc. The word
of the post-modern is no longer culture but hyphen-culture and two of
the most significant of these hyphen-culture constructs are those which
concern us today-popular culture and multiculturalism. These two
hyphens emerged around the same time historically and they do indeed
share certain central themes, but in the last two decades they
increasingly diverged until they now seem like quite different ideas.
I’m not even going to try to present a clear definition of either
popular culture or multiculturalism. There’s still a great deal of
controversy about what these two terms designate and I’d rather be
understood as making very tentative feints toward a definition. To begin
with, popular culture and multiculturalism both claim a more direct
relationship with “the people” than elitist or canonic culture. In the
1960s when these areas were first emerging, both gender studies and
ethnic studies, now seen as aspects of multiculturalism, were often
subsumed under popular culture. A notorious early study in popular
culture analyzed “The Significance of ‘Mother’ Pillows in American
History and Culture” a topic which nicely brought gender and popularity
together. Of course, it turned out to be a put-on. However, popular
culture studies have remained hospitable to all sorts of hyphenated
approaches to popular material, while studies in race, ethnicity, and
gender have gone on to form their own academic communities,
supported by different associations, different journals, different courses
and projects, and ultimately, different purposes.
Three main factors were involved in this divergence between
popular culture and the newer concepts of multicultural studies. First of
all, scholars developing multicultural approaches naturally wished to
concentrate on the materials associated with their particular hyphenated
culture-people in women’s studies are mostly concerned with the
works of women or with the patterns of culture affecting women’s lives;
African Americanists mainly study black cultural creations; those in
ethnic studies focus on the materials of the particular ethnic groups they
are interested in, etc. Second, multiculturalists today seem especially
concerned with developing theories and methodologies which will
protect and project the perspectives and the historical experiences of
their particular cultural groups. Thus, in recent years, both African
American studies and women’s studies have prolifically created theories
and analytical approaches which offer a distinctive angle not only on
their own materials but on other aspects of culture as well. Many of
 Popular Culture/Multiculturalism 5
these new approaches have been extremely interesting and have enriched
our understanding of all sorts of texts and cultural patterns. However,
these approaches have also been restrictive insofar as they excluded
alternate approaches to the material and have resisted synthesis with
other modes of analysis. Moreover this theoretical separatism has
sometimes led particular groups devoted to multicultural analysis to
claim that only members of particular hyphenated cultures could really
understand and apply these analytical methods-only women could
produce a successful feminist analysis, only African Americans could
interpret African American culture, etc. Finally, while several
multiculturalists have made important contributions to popular culture?
most of them have been mainly interested in constructing their own
canons by highlighting the most powerful, complex and aesthetically
interesting works of their traditions. Women’s studies scholars have done
outstanding work on major women writers like Virginia Woolf, on
recovering important earlier women novelists and in criticizing the sexist
limitations of white male canonic authors. Similarly, African
Americanists have concentrated on the major black literary tradition
from the Harlem Renaissance to Toni Morrison and on analyzing the
racism of white writers.
Popular culture studies, on the other hand, have embraced a very
wide definition of culture, have resisted any particular set of theories and
methodologies, and, above all, have sought to expand or perhaps more
accurately, to abandon the notion of a cultural canon altogether. No form
or level of cultural activity or text is automatically excluded from its
purview. As Ray Browne says “it has been a call for scholars in the
Humanities to be less prone to constantly re-canonize the Classics, but
instead to question their relevance and value in the academic program. In
other words, the study of Popular Culture has been a call for academics
to be more thoughtful and critical of the works they have been taught to
accept as the canon and to exercise their rationalizing power more than
their memory” (Browne 1-2).
These characteristics of the popular culture movement-its
resistance to clear definitions of its area of study, its rejection of any sort
of official theory or methodology, and its hostility to canon formation-
have made it widely suspect in some comers of the university and have
also been responsible, I think, for some of the contemporary divergence
between students of popular culture and exponents of various forms of
multiculturalism. It’s perhaps not surprising that in seeking academic
recognition and support, new disciplines like gender studies, African-
American studies and ethnic studies have sometimes out-theorized and
out-canonized the traditional disciplines. In addition, while emphasizing
6 Journal of Popular Culture
the intellectual rigor and scholarly solidity of their work, these new
multicultural disciplines have rejected the inclusiveness and vagueness
of Popular Culture in order to assert the difference between the hyphen-
cultures they are studying and traditional Anglo-American ideas of
civilization. The canons they promulgate are made up of substantial new
proportions of women and minority writers, and they tend to insist on
viewing these writers through the lenses of different methods of analysis
and evaluation. Nonetheless, these revised canons are canons, and the
way they are used in the educational process often leads to the
establishment of new orthodoxies. One need only look at the latest
editions of the major anthologies of American literature to see how the
growing number of women, Native American, African American and
ethnic American writers now included have fallen neatly into their places
in a new canon of American culture, validated by new literary histories
like the Columbia History of American Literature and reduced to
formulas by teacher’s manuals and Cliff’s Notes. Sometimes one
wonders whether this is a truly a paradise of multiculturalism, or a new
orthodoxy of political correctness.
Unfortunately, in this intellectual context, popular culture’s
insistence on vagueness, inclusiveness, and synthesis is not much help,
for it fails to provide an effective framework for studying the cultural
situation of most importance today, the complex interplay in modern
societies and in the world at large of many different cultural traditions.
While it is fascinating to talk in prophetic and McLuhanesque terms of
global villages and international popular culture, or, in more negative
terms about the corruptions of cultural imperialism and coca-
colonization, the actual interplay or dialectic of cultural traditions in
. ~ understand this process more
modem culture is really very c o m p l e ~To
fully is the most challenging and difficult task of students of popular
culture, and it will require more sophisticated theories and methods of
analysis than we usually deploy today. This is an area where we, as
popular culturalists, have a great deal to learn from the new disciplines
of multicultural studies.
To open up the discussion of the relationship between popular
culture and multiculturalism in what I hope is a slightly new way, I’d
like to offer a preliminary sketch of the interplay of popular culture and
multicultural traditions in America from the mid-nineteenth century to
the present. By 1850 Americans had successfully suppressed and
sequestered one alternative to European cultural traditions-that of the
Native Americans-and had enslaved and tried to dehumanize the
descendents of another-the African. There still remained, particularly
in the Northern states, significant enclaves where cultural traditions
 Popular CultureMulticulturalism 7
differing in language, religion, or pattern of behavior continued to pass
on their distinctive ways to new generations. Large areas of German and
Spanish speakers persisted, and there were many smaller areas where
Scandinavian, Dutch, Jewish, and other traditions struggled to survive.
In the 1840s a large Irish immigration had brought in people similar in
language, but very different in other ways to Anglo-American culture.
Later in the nineteenth century there would be waves of immigrants
from very different cultural traditions, including Southern and Eastern
European and Asian. However, at midcentury, one thing was common to
most of these diverse offshoots of European tradition-their
“whiteness”-and in the context of a nation deeply obsessed with the
relationship of “colored” and white, this factor encouraged the mutual
accommodation and assimilation of these diverse groups into a broader
concept of white Americanism. From the middle of the nineteenth
century to the time of World War I, popular culture increasingly played a
significant part in this process of assimilation, a process based
essentially on the assertion of Anglo-American or what used to be called
WASP dominance or cultural hegemony.
One can easily see how the popular culture of that time fitted into
this pattern. As scholars like McLean and Kasson have shown, popular
entertainments like vaudeville, theater, and amusement parks enabled
members of different ethnic groups to come together, and to socialize in
arenas free from the constraints of ethnic traditions. Presumably in such
a venue Abie met his Irish Rose and determined to marry her in spite of
parental opposition. In addition, positive and negative stereotypes such
as those found in the ever-popular racial, ethnic and gender jokes of this
period taught hyphenated-Americans the values and mores of Anglo-
Americanism and the shortcomings, absurdities, and outright badness of
alternative traditions. One learned through popular culture that being an
American meant turning away from traditional attitudes and accepting
the political and cultural leadership of the Anglo-American middle class.
It was here that one could learn, if one was white and Irish, for example,
how to move from the status of “No Irish need apply,” to that of “lace
curtain Irish” in a generation.6
However, the role of popular culture as the major promoter of
assimilation and Anglo-American hegemony, began to change
significantly around the time of world war I. In the 1920s-later referred
to as the Jazz Age by some-popular culture entered a decisively new
phase marked by several changes. For one thing, popular culture became
conscious of itself in a new way. In the mid-nineteenth century, the line
between what we would today call popular culture and canonic culture
was by no means clear. When Hawthorne complained about that damned
8 Journal of Popular Culture
mob of scribbling women whose work sold better than his did, he
thought their novels were bad, but did not think of them as on a different
cultural plane than his own. However, as Lawrence Levine and others
have shown, the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first
decade of the twentieth brought about a major reconfiguration of
American culture in response to the rise of a new industrial elite who
sought to recreate in America many aspects of the European tradition of
high culture. At the same time, the growth of a mass audience and the
emergence of new media like the movies, sound recording, and
broadcasting, created tremendous new opportunities for entrepreneurs to
develop an industrialized popular culture. Out of this emerged the theory
of the brows-highbrow, middlebrow and lowbrow as an expression of
the sense that American culture was now significantly divided between a
high culture with roots in European artistic traditions and a popular
culture more responsive to the everyday needs of Americans.’ The
beginning of popular culture studies also resulted from this major shift in
the patterns of American culture. Gilbert Seldes’ The Seven Lively Arts
(1924) brilliantly analyzed such major phenomena of the new popular
culture as jazz, the comic strip (Krazy Kat) and the silent comedy
(Charlie Chaplin) and probably deserves to be called the pioneer of
popular culture studies, though he was certainly not alone. Many
intellectuals of the tens and twenties were fascinated by the new
phenomenon of popular culture and even such highbrows as T.S. Eliot
and Edmund Wilson wrote about This new configuring of American
culture was solidified at the same time that America’s traditionally
strong and relatively separate ethnic cultures were being rapidly eroded.
By the early twentieth century, the use of European languages like
German, Italian, and Swedish in homes, newspapers, books, religious
services and other places was being discouraged and this process was
intensified by World War I, when anti-German feeling swept the country
and made the widespread use of languages other than English
increasingly suspect. Even the thriving Yiddish culture which had long
been a major feature of New York City began to d e ~ l i n eBut . ~ these
ethnic cultures did not simply fade away. Actually, the increasing need
of material in the new arena of popular culture created opportunities for
talented musicians, actors, writers, dancers, and entrepreneurs emerging
out of the ethnic traditions. Everyone has noticed what an important
Jewish presence there was in the movies, in popular music and in
comedy. This could also be said about the Irish. And it was in the area of
popular culture that African Americans for the first time broke out of the
walls of segregation and discrimination that had been constructed to
reenslave them after the Civil War. Jazz, the blues, spirituals and other
 Popular CultureMulticulturalism 9
musical creations from the rich African American heritage began during
the early twentieth century to enter the mainstream of American popular
culture.
While the continued production and widespread popularity of racist
myths like The Birth of a Nation as well as the widespread use of other
anti-ethnic and anti-Semitic themes and stereotypes indicated that in
many ways the new popular culture would continue to foster white
Anglo-American hegemony as it had traditionally done, there were
nonetheless increasing signs of change in areas like the movies, radio,
and popular music. Popular music showed perhaps the most significant
and important changes. The big band era was an extraordinary
confluence of musical traditions, black, white and ethnic. Through their
gruelling regime of one night stands across the country and their radio
broadcasts and records, white bands like Paul Whiteman, Benny
Goodman, Glenn Miller, and Artie Shaw and black bands like Duke
Ellington, Fletcher Henderson, Louis Armstrong, and Count Basie
played widely to both black and white audiences. As they developed,
their music became more and more interrelated. An important symbolic
moment of this era, almost accidentally preserved for us by the new
technologies of radio and sound recording, represents the synthesizing
and transforming tendencies within the new popular culture. This was
the great 1938 Carnegie Hall Concert of the Benny Goodman orchestra.
Getting to Carnegie Hall indicated a new respectability for popular
music and symbolized its breaking across the highbrow-lowbrow barrier.
Even more significantly this concert involved both white and black
musicians and thus openly revealed the mutual influence which had long
been part of the development of jazz. Benny Goodman, a Jewish
American band leader, whose white musicians were a very diverse
ethnic lot, played together with musicians from the Count Basie band,
one of the great black aggregations of that era, symbolizing in a highly
public fashion the confluence of black and white musical traditions that
had so powerfully shaped the development of swing.l0
One other major cultural shift played a vital role in the development
of this new phase of popular culture. Sometime in the later nineteenth
century youth became something very different than it had been. Once it
had been a brief period of apprenticeship during which young people
learned the skills they would practice as adults. By the ages of fifteen or
sixteen many young people had virtually become adults. With the rise of
public secondary education and of a more affluent middle class in the
later nineteenth century, youth became a much more protracted phase of
life, adolescence was discovered, and young people were increasingly
socialized into the expectation that they would live in a way different
10 Journal of Popular Culture
from their parents. This created the phenomenon of generational revolt,
so characteristic of twentieth century America. The generation which
came of age in the twenties exemplified perhaps for the first time the
patterns that would become so characteristic of succeeding generations:
rebellion against the past; the quest for liberation; experimentation with
new mores and patterns of behavior; and a new kind of immersion in
popular culture. The impetus of successive younger generations which
tended to be increasingly affluent fueled the development of twentieth
century popular culture in a new way, particularly emphasizing its
transformational aspects and increasingly subverting its role as agent for
the traditional Anglo- American hegemony.
Thus, in the period between the wars, popular culture increasingly
became the expression of a new cultural synthesis in America which
foreshadowed the post World War I1 trend toward the integration and
acceptance of women and minorities into a more complex presence in
American culture. The major characteristics of this new phase in popular
culture were confluence, synthesis and transformation. Synthesizing
media, driven by the profitability of attracting increasingly large
audiences, including the newly affluent young people, developed new
modes of organization such as Hollywood studios, radio-television
networks and publishing syndicates which could produce and distribute
material to the largest possible audiences. The content of these media
became more responsive to the interests and values of this increasingly
diverse audience by developing generic traditions which could be
tailored to a great variety of interests as well as creating new genres with
a special appeal to such important components of the audience as
women and young people. The new media also created many
synthesizing images of American culture-the most obvious being those
multi-ethnic bomber crews or infantry squads which became so
important in movies of World War 11-placing the diverse minorities of
America in a new unified constellation." This new unity became
increasingly different from the Anglo-American hegemony which had
played the leading role in the first phase of popular culture. The history
of the complex dialectic between new images of multicultural unity and
the traditional Anglo-American hegemony is one of the central areas in
the history of popular culture that needs to be more fully researched.
When the popular culture movement developed in the late 1960s
and early 197Os, it was at first primarily an acknowledgement of popular
culture as synthesizer and transformer of American culture. In fact, most
of the early leaders of the popular culture movement-like Ray Browne,
Russel Nye, Marshall Fishwick and Leslie Fiedler-came out of
American studies or American literature. But even as such forums as the
 Popular CultureMulticulturalism 11
Journal of Popular Culture and the Popular Culture Association
flourished, popular culture, itself, was beginning another fundamental
shift. It was during this time that such ideas as multiculturalism, cultural
pluralism, and bilingualism began to gain increasing currency.'* During
the 1960s and ' ~ O S ,multiculturalism was first connected with powerful
thrusts toward cultural separatism among African Americans such as the
Black Power and Black Arts movements, the rise of black studies
programs in the universities, and the growth of the Black Muslim
movement and the legend of Malcolm X. There were also numerous
other trends toward ethnic separatism such as those described in Michael
Novak's Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics (1972). Native Americans,
Asian Americans, and Chicanos and other Latinos also sought to
revitalize their own cultural traditions, increasingly demanding bi-
lingualism in the public schools. In addition, these forces of cultural
fragmentation were contemporaneous with a rapidly developing
feminism which made gender separatism an important part of its agenda.
Supporters of civil rights, integration, and equal rights which had
dominated ethnic and gender politics since World War I1 were initially
taken aback by the vehemence and force of this separatist rea~tion.'~ For
a time, the idea of cultural pluralism became itself a contested area; did
cultural pluralism mean increasing tolerance and acceptance of cultural
differences or did it mean separation between different cultures.
Throughout this time the popular culture movement retained its
openness and hospitality to divergent view, but for many younger
scholars devoted to feminism or Black studies or Native American
liberation, openness was not what they wanted and they rejected the
framework of popular culture to pursue their work in the context of
gender studies, ethnic studies, or African American history and culture.
At the same time and for somewhat different reasons, various kinds of
media studies and cinema studies also increasingly pursued different
paths. In this context popular culture lost its claim to universality and
synthesis as well as its position in the vanguard of cultural studies.
To an extent, that is still the case at the present time. However, in
the last decade or so, another important development has taken place in
the shifting dialectic of American culture. During this time there has
been a considerable lessening of the separatist impulse and an increasing
tendency toward mixing and overlapping of hitherto separate ethnic
traditions. Something of the same sort has happened in the area of
gender with the development of new concepts of masculinity and the
emergence of "queer" studies not so much in opposition to, but in a
complex dialectical relationship with feminism. One of the most
knowledgeable observers of this new phenomenon, the English scholar
12 Journal of Popular Culture
A. Robert Lee, describes the contemporary cultural scene in terms of
what he calls the “ethnic postmodern,” a time “in which the vocabulary
is one of hybridity, borderland, margins which have moved to the center,
in every way a new order of cultural self-positioning and reference. This,
indeed, might be called the ethnic postmodern. It entails not only an
extrication out, and beyond, essentialist or one-note identity politics, but
a cultural stance ...which, with uninhibited reflexivity, plays upon,
contemplates, actually vaunts, its own imaginative self-rnirroring.”l4
Lee’s discussion is primarily concerned with avant-garde
postmodern writers like Ishmael Reed, Maxine Hong Kingston, and
Gerald Vizenor, but much of what he says applies on a different level to
contemporary popular culture. With the proliferation of cable, videotape
and now internet and cd-rom, new means of production and distribution
make possible types of diversity and recombination that would have
been unimaginable during the 1950s and 1960s. Correspondingly, there
has been a considerable erosion of such unifying structures of the
traditional mass media as networks, movie studios, and publishing
syndicates. While these changes have also led to huge media
consolidations like the Disney-ABC and Time Warner-Turner
Broadcasting mergers, these megacorporations are conglomerations of
many media enterprises as likely to foster increasing diversity as they
are homogeneity and standardization. The popular cultural scene itself
seems increasingly attuned to recombinations of traditional heritages,
not only in terms of the obvious ways in which new combinations of
white, African American and Latino musical traditions are continually
creating new popular genres, but where this kind of interplay is
spreading to other areas of popular culture like movies and cable
television. In addition, contemporary popular culture has become much
more responsive to the international scene than ever before.
Recombinant lifestyles are becoming more the norm than the exception.
Imagine the very model of a modern urban dweller; dressed in cowboy
boots and a dashiki, she/he nibbles on sushi while listening to the latest
county m u s i ~ . No
’ ~ doubt much of this is superficial and a way of
rebelling against the dullness of contemporary corporate culture, but
there are signs that the ethnic postmodern has a more profound
significance. I was particularly struck a few weeks ago by news reports
about a parents’ movement which wants the public schools to change the
way they record the ethnicity of students in order to register multiple
backgrounds. These parents are not satisfied with the standard white,
African-American, Native-American, Latino and Asian categories used
the schools7 but have sued to make the schools list their children as
African American and white and Native American, for example. This
 Popular CultureMulticulturalisrn 13
suggests a basic transformation of attitudes in a culture which, despite its
official melting pot ideology, has long been deeply split by racial and
ethnic divisions.
In American cultural history popular culture has often expressed
the racism, sexism and white protestant ethno-centrism deeply
engrained in our history, but it has also been more open to cultural
transformations and alternatives than most of our highbrow and
middlebrow culture. Even in the later nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries when America was dominated by a revitalized racism and a
pervasive White Anglo-American cultural hegemony, popular culture,
in areas like vaudeville, popular theater and music, and in new media
like the movies developed far more multicultural motifs than the
literary areas of fiction and poetry which continued to be dominated by
white middle-class writers and in which regional and ethnic differences
were largely portrayed through the stereotypes of race and ethnicity.
Even more avant garde literary movements like naturalism showed
relatively little awareness or interest in the burgeoning cultural
pluralism of American society until the 1920s, when American critics
and intellectuals began tentatively to acknowledge the vitality and
significance of the new popular culture.
During the last quarter of a century, a time of bitterness, separatism
and neoconservatism in which ethnic and gender groups have
increasingly defined themselves against the rest of the culture partly in
response to the way in which a residual Anglo-American “silent
majority” or “Christian conservatism” has tried to reestablish its
hegemony, popular culture has continued to subvert such boundaries and
cross such frontiers. Ironically, while the continued effect of capitalism
on the social and economic level seems to be leading to an increasing
class division between rich and poor a capitalist popular culture industry
seems to operate more in the direction of undercutting and obfuscating
these divisions. It seems to me that this increasingly complex and
volatile cultural situation opens up a host of new questions and inquiries
for students of popular culture and multiculturalism.

Notes

‘What Whitman said was “The writers of a time hint the mottoes of its
gods. The word of the modern, say these voices is the word Culture.” More
Whitmanesque, he went on to say “We find ourselves abruptly in close quarters
with the enemy. This word Culture, or what it has come to represent, involves
by contrast, our whole theme, and has been, indeed, the spur, urging us to
14 Journal of Popular Culture
engagement.” [Democratic Vistas (1 87 I)]. With these comments, Whitman
clearly engages himself with what later became the highbrowflowbrow-high
culture/popular culture dialectic which has recently been tranformed into the
debate between the canon and multiculturalism.
’Raymond Williams in Culture and Society, 1780-1950 brilliantly
analyzed the normative use of culture in nineteenth and twentieth century social
and aesthetic criticism. For the descriptive use of culture see George Stocking,
Race, Culture and Evolution; Essays in the History of Anthropology.
30f course “Western Civilization” is now‘ commonly excoriated as the
ideology of dead white males and canon-bursting forays have led in many
places to the dismantling of the traditional “liberal arts” curriciulum and the
creation of a new “multicultural” education. For an excellent analysis of the
conflict over the canon and a sensible and persuasive defense of
multiculturalism in education the work of Henry Louis Gates has been
exemplary; cf. his Loose Canons. On the other hand, the attack on the
traditional canon has aroused defenders like the two Blooms (Alan Bloom, The
Closing of the American Mind and Harold Bloom, The Western Canon) and
E.D. Hirsch with his concept of “cultural literacy.” So corrosive have attacks on
the canon become that Alfred Kazin, a voice of sense in American criticism
since the early 1930s recently wrote despairingly that “only i n an age so
fragmented, so ignorant of the unlosable past working in us, can presumably
literate persons speak of Dante, Beethoven or Tolstoy as ‘dead white European
males.”’ (Kazin 12)
4Some examples here are Houston Baker’s studies of the blues, Susan
Bordo’s analysis of gender stereotypes in popular culture, or Fred Pfeil’s
discussion of constructions of masculinity in recent popular genres in White
Guys.
5The relatively new field of “cultural studies” with its emphasis on the
study of modes of “cultural production” offers a “radical interrogation of
concepts too often undertheorized within American studies: the utility of
national boundaries as fitting limits for the study of cultures, the reliability of
categories that establish canons of great works or that divide ‘high’ and ‘low’
culture, the ability of art and literature to mirror a unified culture uniting the
intensions and subjectivities of artist and audiences” (Lipsitz 617). This new
field shares a number of interests with popular culture studies and has done
some excellent work in researching and analyzing social patterns of cultural
production and distribution, an area that popular culture studies has too much
neglected. Some of the ideas and bibliography of this movement are presented
by George Lipsitz i n “Listening to Learn and Learning to Listen: Popular
Culture, Cultural Theory, and American Studies.” Unfortunately, the sometimes
dogmatic Marxism of this movement leads too often to something resembling
the old ‘‘hypodermic needle” model of media analysis adapted to culture. In this
 Popular Culture/Multiculturalism 15
approach a powerful capitalist hegemeny “shoots” its message into popular
culture, where it sometimes evokes opposition and resistance. Thus,
multicultural tendencies are largely interpreted in terms of their opposition to
the capitalist hegemony rather than as the outgrowth of their own distinct
traditions. Cultural studies has a lot to offer popular culture but must be taken, I
think, with a sizable grain of salt.
T h e popular culture of this period also developed a number of integrating
myths of Americanism which tried to synthesize regional and cultural divisions.
One of the most important of these was the myth of the West with the American
as heroic pioneer. The western experience was increasingly seen as the great
source of Americanization, a mythical vision given historiographical
respectability by Turner in 1893. Other important myths along similar lines
were those of the gang and union busting detective created by Allan Pinkerton
and the dime novel tradition, the myth of the vigilante avenger such as the
Klansman heroized at the the turn of the century by Thomas Dixon, and the
myth of the heroic newspaper reporter exposing criminals and multicultural
political bosses. Michael Denning has a nice discussion of the nineteenth
century novel as an arena of ideological conflict between the new Americanism
and traditional ideologies of the American republic. Marcus Klein also touches
on these matters in his discussion of the western, the Alger story and the
detective story at the turn of the century.
’Lawrence Levine’s Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultral
Hierarchy in America (1986) is an important recent treatment of the emergence
of cultural levels in America. Some years ago in an essay comparing the two
world’s fairs of 1876 and 1893, I discussed how the different plans and styles of
these fairs reflected an emergent division between highbrow and lowbrow. Cf.
Cawelti 1968. Van Wyck Brooks first promulgated the theory of the “brows” in
a very important 1915 manifesto, America’s Corning-of-Age. Brooks was
strongly influenced in his formulation by George Santayana’s idea of the
Genteel Tradition in America which had many reverberations in the 1920s. The
theory of the “brows” went on to a long career in writers as diverse as the
popular critic Russel Lynes (cf. The Tustemakers) and the intellectual Philip
Rahv who once divided American culture between what he called the palefaces
and the redskins. The “brow” theory was revitalized in the 1950s as the high
culture-popular culture division (cf. Rosenberg and White, Mass Culture). This
was the analysis of American culture to which the popular culture movement
responded in the 1960s.
*Seldes’ “lively arts” included silent comedy, jazz and ragtime, Ring
Lardner, Ziegfeld’s follies, Black musicals, A1 Jolson, comic strips, vaudeville,
burlesque, comedy, etc. Eliot wrote appreciatively about the English music hall
and like many modernist writers used popular cultural materials extensively in
poems like The Waste Land. Wilson praised Seldes’ work and wrote a lot about
16 Journal of Popular Culture
popular culture in the 1920s, especially in the pieces later collected in The
American Earthquake, though he later became a staunch antagonist of popular
genres in essays like “Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?“
91rving Howe’s brilliant history of Yiddish Culture, World of Our Fathers
traces the rise and decline of this hyphen-culture.
IOThis concert was the culmination of Goodman’s own deep involvement
with African-American musical traditions. As a young jazz musician in Chicago
he had been first shaped by white musicians who had been deeply influenced by
the jazz brought up to Chicago by migrating blacks like King Oliver and Louis
Armstrong. Later Goodman often played and recorded in small groups with
black musicians like Teddy Wilson and Lionel Hampton and his band made
extensive use of the talents of the great black arranger and bandleader Fletcher
Henderson, one of the primary creators of the swing band. Still, the 1938
concert was a daring and controversial public acknowledgement of the long
creative relationship between black and white musicians.
“Tracing the development of the multi-ethnic group protagonist would be
one interesting way to discuss the dialectic between popular culture and
multiculturalism. The type seems to have originated in the novels of the 1930s
when writers like Dos Passos tried to present the convergence of characters
from many different classes and cultures in American life as a form of social
analysis and protest. During World War I1 it became a symbol of national unity
in the movies, while in later World War I1 novels like Mailer’s The Naked and
the Dead, James Jones’s From Here to Eternity and Irwin Shaw’s The Young
Lions, the multi-ethnic group protagonist was again used more critically to
expose the regional, ethnic and racial conflicts in American life. I’m not sure
where the pattern goes from there. Perhaps it dissolves into the more separate
traditions of Jewish-American, African-American, Native-American and other
ethnic novels which flourished in the 1960s and 1970s.
I*It’s not that cultural pluralism was exactly a new idea. Even in the early
1920s the philosopher Horace Kallen produced an important series of essays
criticizing the narrowness of the current ideas of Americanism and the “melting
pot” and espousing a kind of cultural federalism that would allow diverse
cultural groups to continue to develop their traditions (cf Kallen, Culture and
Democracy in the United States). Kallen was not alone. Literary critics like
Randolph Bourne and H.L. Mencken also placed a strong emphasis on the
preservation of cultural diversity in America as did John Dewey. Another
important exponent of the preservation of ethnic diversity was Jane Addams,
whose settlement house movement sought to help urban immigrants adapt to the
modern American city without destroying their cultural roots. Unforunately few
of these important early exponents of multiculturalism showed much awareness
of the situation of non-white minorities. Something of the complexity and
ambiguity of the history of multiculturalism in America is made clear in Werner
 Popular Culture/Multiculturalism 17
Sollors’ Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture. More
recently, the Dutch scholar Wil Verhoeven has looked at the ambiguities of
multiculturalism in the Canadian situation in “How Hyphenated Can You Get?:
A Critique of Pure Ethnicity.” Forthcoming.
”In the introduction to his new collection of essays The All-American Skin
Game, Stanley Crouch summed up the sense of this transition between the ideal
of cultural integration and the new separatism as it affected African Americans:
“In the sixties, we rather boldly said that everyone was basically the same, that
if you cut someone, he or she bled, that love was love, hate was hate, hurt was
hurt, evil was evil, courage was courage, and so on and on. The struggle then
was against automatic categories of preference or distance. People were told
that nobody had the right to tell somebody else whom to love or what to try to
become or where to live. The imperatives of human recognition were the most
radical because they gave no quarter to stereotypes or to the superstitions and
policies resulting from them. In the wake of Black Power, we are being told the
exact opposite. Now each group is supposedly so different from every other one
that it needs a special kind of treatment in order to ‘feel good about itself.’ Now
separatist self-esteem is said to be the high road. We aren’t supposed to have
any standards because standards were all developed as forms of exclusion and
oppression” (Crouch xiv-xv).
The two great African American novelists and essayists who Stanley
Crouch considers his mentors, consistently opposed what they considered the
excesses of Black separatism during its heyday. Ralph Ellison and Albert
Murray were also among the greatest and most complex critics of American
popular culture and their work should be required reading for aspiring students
of popular culture.
I4From Lee’s forthcoming paper entitled “Towards America’s Ethnic
Postmodern: The Novels of Ishmael Reed, Maxine Hong Kingston, Ana
Castillo and Gerald Vizenor.” Recently the Salem Press of Pasadena, California
announced plans for an ambitious three volume publication to be called Issues
and Identities in Literature, to “explore the rich tradition in North America of
cultural and ethnic identities, as they are expressed in literature. The list of
topics announced for this projected collection is dominated by matters of
cultural diversity, identity and boundaries.
I5An African-American novelist I know told me that he recently took a cab
from the Greyhound bus station in Chicago to his home in Evanston. The taxi
driver was a black lesbian whose white girl friend was with her and entertained
them during the ride by reciting and pantomimiming every rap song that came
on the radio. When he got into the cab in Chicago it was also occupied by a
young Chinese boy who knew no English, but who had a note pinned on him
directing him to an address in Chicago’s Chinatown. The black cab driver
insisted on safely delivering this boy to Chinatown before driving my friend to
18 Journal of Popular Culture
his destination. This certainly seems to say something new about
multiculturalism.

Works Cited

Brooks, Van Wyck. America’s Coming-ofAge. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1915.

Browne, Ray. Against Academia. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State
University Popular Press, 1989.
Cawelti, John G. “America on Display: The World’s Fairs of 1876, 1893,
1933.” in Frederic Jaher (ed.) The Age of Industrialism in America. New
York: The Free Press, 1968.
Cawelti, John G. “Symbols of Ethnicity and Popular Culture.” Dominant
Symbols in Popular Culture (ed. Ray B. Browne, Marshall W. Fishwick
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Cawelti, John G. “Literature, Race and Ethnicity in America” in W. M.
Verhoeven (ed). Rewriting the Dream: Reflections on the Changing
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Crouch, Stanley. The All-American Skin Game, or, The Decoy of Race. New
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Denning, Michael. Mechanic Accents. London: Verso, 1987.
Gates, Henry Louis. Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars. New York:
~ Oxford, 1992.
Howe, Irving. World of Our Fathers. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,
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Kallen, Horace. Culture and Democracy in the United States. New York: Boni
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Kasson, John F. Amusing the Million: Coney Island at the Turn of the Century.
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Kazin, Alfred. Writing Was Everything. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1995.
Klein, Marcus. Easterns, Westerns, and Private Eyes: American Matters, 1870-
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Lee, A. Robert. “Towards America’s Ethnic Postmodern: The Novels of
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Forthcoming.
Levine, Lawrence. HighbrowLowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy
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Lipsitz, Geroge. “Listening to Learn and Learning to Listen: Popular Culture,
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 Popular Culture/Multiculturalism 19
McLean, Albert F. American Vaudeville as Ritual. Lexington, KY: U Kentucky
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Murray, Albert. The Omni-Americans; New Perspectisve on Black Experience
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Novak, Michael. The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics. New York: Macmillan,
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Stocking, George W. Race, Culture and Evolution; Essays in the History of
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Wilson, Edmund. The American Earthquake: A Documentary of the Twenties
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John G. Cawelti, Professor, English, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY.