Radical Legacies by Redding Arthur;

Author:Redding, Arthur;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Lexington Books
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

These tasks, sadly, continue to daunt us a half-century on.

In both his dialectical historiography and his literary criticism, James’s “socially transformative” method, as glossed by Nielsen, was “not only to correct the falsehoods of the dominant and dominating views of history but to provide critical histories that would open up to their readers the reality of revolutionary possibility in the present” (186). Paul Buhle, in his hagiographic 1988 biography of James, laments that Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways “approached an apologia for social life under capitalism” (110). James’s great delight in all—well, most—things American can assuredly be a hard nut to crack for many cultural skeptics on the left then and now. Yet James’s interest in American cultural productions stemmed from his belief that they made manifest inchoate social tensions, and he is rightly today considered one of the founders of the discipline of cultural studies. His sympathetic position regarding popular culture is radically distinct from the cultural elitism of the purportedly Trotskyite Philip Rahv and other critics associated with the Partisan Review, or the anarchist Dwight Macdonald, and in this regard, too, James swam against the current of postwar intellectual conventions. In his notes from his years in America, collected and published in 1993 as American Civilization, James perceptively points out that, since the economic crash of 1929 and with “the perpetual crisis of world war, . . . all the tensions are arising, confusedly but remarkably, to the surface” (117):

These tensions have been the driving force in the extraordinary scope and manifestations of what is loosely called in the United States the entertainment industry. Far from being entertainment it is so far the most striking expression of the tensions and deep crises of American society, occupying a similar relation to the developing society as the writers of 1840–60 occupied in relation to the America of Webster and Lincoln. (117)

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