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Michael Denning is William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of American Studies at Yale University

Verk av Michael Denning

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Encyclopedia of the American Left (1990) — Bidragsgivare, vissa utgåvor105 exemplar

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1954-10-24
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In this book Michael Denning studies the working class of 19th and early 20th century America through an unusual medium – the books they read. He views young factory workers of both genders as the main audience of the mass-produced “dime novels” of the era, the action-adventure and rags-to-riches tales in which appealed to readers not as escapism but for the allegories they offered for their own often difficult lives. In this respect, he sees the consumption of the novels not as an act of escapism but as a way of mitigating the capitalist injustice which pervaded their readers’ lives. Though his own writing can be dense, Denning’s explanation of the production process of dime novels and his insights into their audience make this a valuable book for anyone interested in learning about the development of mass culture in Gilded Age and Progressive-era America.… (mer)
 
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MacDad | Mar 27, 2020 |
Michael Denning’s The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century synthesizes much of the historiography of the Popular Front into a larger narrative, drawing upon Lizabeth Cohen and others’ work. Denning argues, “The cultural front reshaped American culture. Just as the radical movements of abolition, utopian socialism, and women’s rights sparked the antebellum American Renaissance, so the communisms of the depression triggered a deep and lasting transformation of American modernism and mass culture, what [Denning] will call the laboring of American culture” (pg. xvi). Further, Denning writes, “The culture of the Popular Front represented a larger laboring of American culture, which political adversaries often shared in shaping” (pg. 26). He continues, “The state of popular culture was the state of the culture generally, particularly in the United States, which had an overdeveloped set of culture industries and an underdeveloped established high culture: indeed, for Europeans, Americanism was mass culture” (pg. 43). According to Denning, “The cultural apparatus became a contested terrain between the Popular Front and the Advertising Front, as working-class styles, stars, and characters emerged alongside the sales plug” (pg. 47). Denning argues, “The cultural front is thus the terrain where the Popular Front social movement met the cultural apparatus during the age of the CIO. From that conflict and conjuncture came the Popular Front ‘flavor’ of American mass culture, what [Denning] will call the laboring of American culture” (pg. 50).
Denning writes, “By the mid 1930s, the cultural front was sustained by a movement culture, a world of working-class education, recreation, and entertainment built by the Communist Party, the new industrial unions, and the fraternal benefit lodges, particularly those of the International Workers Order (IWO)” (pg. 67). He continues, “It was the peculiar combination of the corporate liberalism of the media corporations, the internal labor relations of the culture industries, and the working-class audience of the film, broadcasting, and music industries that resulted in a remarkable and contradictory politics of mass culture, producing the phenomena of left-wing ‘stars’ and ‘socially conscious’ nightclubs, radio broadcasts, and picture magazines” (pg. 83). Denning further argues, “The aesthetic innovations of the cultural front wrestled with the cultural contradictions of modernity, and led to a laboring of American culture. The characteristic narratives, tropes, and forms of the cultural front – the satiric newsreels, ghetto pastorals, proletarian grotesques, and cabaret blues – informed the most powerful and lasting works of twentieth-century American fiction, music, theater, and film, as well as the cultural criticism and theory that surrounded them” (pg. 118). He adds, “The politics of the Popular Front social movements were rarely populist; rather, the Popular Front combined three distinctive political tendencies: a social democratic laborism based on a militant industrial unionism; an anti-racist ethnic pluralism imagining the United States as a ‘nation of nations’; and an anti-fascist politics of international solidarity” (pg. 125).
Addressing literature, Denning argues, “The renaissance ignited by the proletarian avant-garde was responsible for two key developments in American literary history: the emergence of a generation of plebian ethnic writers who represented – in several senses of the word – the new working-class cultures of America and who were to transform American letters in the decades to follow; and the creation of a genre – the ghetto or tenement pastoral – that is still at the heart of the American novel” (pg. 201). Of theatre, Denning writes, “The cabaret blues of Café Society was the product of a complex alliance between jazz and the Popular Front that had its political origins in the campaign to free the Scottsboro Nine and its social origins in the working-class musical culture of hot jazz and swing. This alliance between jazz and the Popular Front movement permanently altered the shape of American music” (pg. 323-324). He continues, “Café Society represented a remarkable synthesis of the radical political cabarets of Belgium and Paris with the African American jazz clubs and revues of Harlem” (pg. 324).
Denning concludes, “The Cold War anti-Communist purge of the culture industries and state cultural apparatuses left a deep cultural amnesia, as radical intellectuals were jailed, lost jobs, were deported or went into exile, were unable to publish, reedited their earlier work and downplayed their earlier affiliations, or, in some cases, killed themselves” (pg. 425).
… (mer)
 
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DarthDeverell | Nov 23, 2017 |
Democratizing Music

Just as content is king on the internet today, so it was when high tech In the 1920s was the phonograph. Competing companies scoured the world for music no one in America had access to, and of course the jazz and blues of the US south. It brought fado from Portugal, tango from Argentina, raga from India, and jazz from New Orleans from the lowest street music to the highest socio-economic classes in the west, making stars out of performers in their own countries and in the USA.

We now have music on demand, but until the phonograph, music happened at a specific time and place. And it only happened once. There was no album to listen to a hundred times until you knew all the words. If you were lucky enough to hear Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto even once, you had to internalize as much of it as possible that night alone. The odds were overwhelming you would never hear it again. Much of Bach was only performed once. Phonographs changed all that, as they popped up everywhere around the world, from coal mines to brothels to cafes and doctors’ waiting rooms. The ubiquity of the phonograph led some to criticize the noise, suffering a kind of early future shock. More controversial was American jazz, which, like American English today, was accused of corrupting native music around the world.

It not only made names for the performers, but certain dive bars became famous worldwide. The music inside them was not the traditional folk music of the land, but new “vernacular” reflecting lower class life in the major port cities of the world, which were the places musicians could make (something resembling) a living.

Unintentionally, colonizers brought along the seeds of their own destruction in the phonograph. National pride spread and swelled with the circulation of native street music. Protests and uprisings incorporated songs that could never have spread so far and wide without technology. This was not lost on colonial governments, which moved in to suppress the music wherever it popped up, arresting musicians and dancers on any convenient charge, usually noise or vagrancy, but even attempted loitering – in a public park.

Denning’s book is foremost an attempt to register everything for posterity. It is packed with performer names, instrument descriptions, critics’ comments, references and label histories. There are chapters on reverse engineering the music itself, the advent of World Music in the 70s, and copyright wars today. For me, the socio-political impact is the most interesting. Like any ecosystem, there are untold quantities of parts in history we have yet to even account for, let alone understand.

David Wineberg
… (mer)
 
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DavidWineberg | Apr 3, 2015 |

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