Inventing Popular Culture from Folklore to Globalization

Faulk, Barry J.

Modernism/modernity, Volume 12, Number 2, April 2005, pp. 353-355 (Review)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: 10.1353/mod.2005.0055

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/mod/summary/v012/12.2faulk.html

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 book reviews
the Anglican church and becoming a British subject, rediscovered culture as a national category, 353
one rooted in a conception of race but also in a form of grounded temporality.
The last chapter translates these concepts of the local, the island, and the nation into economic
and sociological terms. In an unexpected but highly suggestive move, Esty argues that Keynes’s
General Theory supplies the economic version of national culturalism, just as his theory of a
national economics anticipates the nation-bounded welfare state. The cultural version of this
new nationalism turns out to be cultural studies. E. P. Thompson’s notion of the British work-
ing class and Williams’s epistemology of Englishness thus appear as the critical consequences
of imperial retreat. This genealogy of cultural studies may also explain why cultural studies,
in both its British and U.S. version, continues to gravitate toward a study of national and local
phenomena at a time when comparative or even global circulation and flows have moved to the
center of critical attention.
The striking re-thinking of late modernism undertaken in this book is made possible, in part,
by a suspension of the standard narratives of literary decline. Accordingly, and wisely, the book
takes the fantasies of its authors on their own terms even and especially when dealing with the
more reactionary forms of this new Anglo-centrism. There is a small price to be paid for this
method, namely that it becomes difficult to address the fact that the inward turn and its pre-
sumed insular autonomy was, at least in part, a grand illusion. The loss of empire did not lead
to cultural, economic, or military isolation, let alone autonomy. The empire continued to write
back, World War II was won through the sacrifices of the Red Army and American industrial
might, and after the war, NATO, the EU and other international organizations shaped the fate
of Great Britain as much as the empire had done before. Esty knows and mentions this, but I
would have appreciated a fuller account of the divergence between perceived insular autonomy
and actual interdependence.
Despite or rather because of its explicitly insular subject matter, however, Esty’s book serves
as a convincing paradigm for how to study a national culture in an international context. He does
not take the island nation as a default category, but theorizes its parochial nature. A national
literature emerges that is not natural, but the product of international forces that are variously
fractured and absorbed by a national literature in distress. A Shrinking Island is an innovative
and compelling study, written by a sharp and analytical mind, and is bound to leave lasting marks
on the study of British modernism.

Inventing Popular Culture from Folklore to Globalization. John Storey.

Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 2003. Pp. 149. $61.95 (cloth).

Reviewed by Barry J. Faulk, Florida State University

Inventing Popular Culture is part of Blackwell Publishing’s “Manifesto” series, which provides
prominent scholars an opportunity to summarize the cutting edge of research in their area of
study to a broad audience, as well as take a polemical stand on debates in their field. John Storey
has a history of producing monographs that clearly outline major arguments in cultural studies;
here he surveys a generation’s worth of scholarship on one of the key topics of cultural studies,
the history and political significance of popular culture. The book promises to provide readers
with the cultural-studies interpretation of the history of middle-class interest in popular culture,
and it delivers on this promise.
Specifically, Storey draws on the work of Stuart Hall, Raymond Williams, and Antonio Gramsci
in order to provide a historical overview of the career of the concept of popular culture, in mo-
dernity and beyond. Historically, Storey argues, the story has been deployed in a manner that

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 M O D E R N I S M / modernity

354 reinforces pre-existing prejudices of intellectual elites toward “the masses.” Inventing Popular
Culture details the construction of intellectual chauvinism toward non-intellectuals beginning
in the Romantic era, escalating in modernity, and still prompting the condescension of elites
in our own time.
Storey also details the creation of a trope governing scholarly discussion of popular culture
for a century, where pop culture is valued provided its artifacts or popular audiences are on the
verge of disappearing. Repeatedly, Storey explains, the discourse of professional intellectuals
constructs a feckless mass as it delineates the ways of the folk, a mass that can’t be fully trusted
with its own cultural heritage.
At this point, in steps the intellectual, in the form of the middle-class collector, like folksong
archivist Cecil Sharp, whose procedures Storey details in chapter one. Sharp the archivist
preserves the relics of the people, and thereby earns the right to criticize the taste of his work-
ing-class contemporaries, and their predilection for contemporary popular song of the music
hall over “Tam Lin.”
Inventing Popular Culture moves from a history of late Victorian and modernist proclama-
tions on pop culture into a programmatic discussion of how, since the 1950s, cultural studies
has endeavored to reorganize the field of popular culture as an object of study. As Storey ex-
plains, the major contribution of cultural studies to the academic study of popular culture was
two-fold. Cultural-studies work presumed that cultural difference isn’t essential or intrinsic to
cultural production, but a construct, inevitably linked to the broader project of reproducing
class hierarchy. The other plank of the cultural-studies platform insists that the proper analysis
of popular culture demands a balanced account that weighs both the redemptive and repressive
character of pop-culture production. The political project of cultural studies made it difficult
for cultural-studies scholars to accept the account of the duped consumer of culture-industry
product presented by modernist critics like Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno as a working
hypothesis. In fact, insofar as academics know about cultural studies, they probably are familiar
with the work scholars such as Dick Hebdige, Janice Radway, and scores of others, produced to
confer pop-culture consumers with dignity and political legitimacy.
Storey’s final position on popular culture rephrases the conclusions of Antonio Gramsci and
his master interpreter Stuart Hall on the need to resist reading popular culture as either capitalist
conspiracy or as a practice totally remade by the creative agency of the people. As Storey puts it,
“Gramscian cultural studies insists that to decide these matters requires vigilance and attention
to the details of the production, distribution, and consumption of the commodities from which
people may or may not make culture” (53). Storey concurs, and his take on the politics of pop
culture is reasonable, and feels, in its dialectical breadth, like the last word on the topic.
But why should modernist scholars care about cultural studies and the relation to popular
culture? Modernist studies has been interested in the notion of the high/low divide in moder-
nity, and over the last twenty years its scholars have produced adept analysis of how canonical
figures constructed or resisted producing this divide. In so doing, it overestimated the ability of
lone-wolf intellectuals to produce the high/low partition. Storey’s survey of the popular-culture
concept does include the work of academic intellectuals; but his account of the shifting fortunes
of opera in this century, the careful construction of the form as high art in the first part of the
century and current efforts to make opera popular again by featuring it prominently in Hol-
lywood film, points to social and economic structures much bigger than the solitary intellectual.
Cultural studies reminds us that good and bad taste requires nothing less than a class to make
it, or make it hegemonic.
The book’s concluding polemic on debates over the effects of globalization is less satisfying.
Storey links modernist and pre-modernist disdain for popular-culture forms with the critiques
of a hegemonic Americanization of culture achieved through globalization. Storey unmasks most
resistance to globalization as fronts for the exercise of first-world nostalgia, longing for a time

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 book reviews
when third world goods weren’t on display in the imperial metropolis. Unfortunately, globaliza- 355
tion as phenomenon and scholarly topic is too large to bring on board at the end of a primer
on popular-culture study. The book’s format doesn’t allow Storey the room to elaborate this
argument fully, let alone to persuade. Naming the forces behind the globalization process, and
imagining a pedagogy capable of instructing citizens on how to resist the corporate takeover of
civil society, seems more urgent work. In his conclusion, Storey drops the connection between
cultural-studies work and socialist politics, which encourages him to imagine globalization as
simply another construct, or discourse. In so doing, he goes back on the main lesson he expounds
about cultural studies and popular culture: that cultural hierarchies are class projects, honor-
ing an economic logic. Without an account of the corporate forces behind globalization, Storey
produces a bloodless version of an economic structure with material consequences: uprooted
labor forces, enforced poverty, and entrenched social hierarchy.
Yet, as previously stated, the oversights in Storey’s conclusion seem the consequence of the
book’s format, rather than a slight on the author. Inventing Popular Culture stands as an ex-
tremely useful casebook on its topic, and mounts a powerful argument for the continuing value
and efficacy of cultural-studies methods in regard to pop-culture study.

At the Beach. Jean-Didier Urbain. Catherine Porter, transl. Min-

neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. Pp. xi + 362. $54.95
(cloth); $19.95 (paper).

Reviewed by Stephen P. Hanna, University of Mary Washington

Sociologist Jean-Paul Urbain’s At the Beach is a representational history of the beach as a

vacation space in Western societies and of the bodily practices/rituals that reproduce this space.
In the work, originally published as Sur la plage in 1994, Urbain takes issue with the dismissal of
beach vacationers in tourism studies as lazy or sedentary tourists. Of particular concern to Urbain
are two ways the beach vacation, one of the most popular forms of leisure, is typically classified.
First and foremost, he argues that residential vacationers cannot be placed in a subcategory of
tourists. Using the literary metaphors of Robinson Crusoe (the residential vacationer) and Phileas
Fogg (the tourist), he demonstrates that vacationers travel only to reach a destination of refuge
and repose, while a state of temporary nomadism is the tourist’s goal. Secondly, Urbain provides
detailed evidence that beach tourism or vacationing is anything but natural. The broad, clean
sandy beach of today’s vacation dreams is a carefully contrived setting and Westerners have had
to learn to enjoy the shore and sea.
Following a preamble which introduces the Crusoe and Fogg metaphors, Urbain lays out
his argument in the introduction. Nine chapters, divided into three parts, contain the history of
the beach (part I), an exploration of the beach as a social space (part II) and his examination of
the contemporary vacation beach society (part III). Urbain concludes with an epilogue that suc-
cinctly summarizes his major point; collapsing the residential vacation within the broad category
of tourism hides the meanings of this decidedly sedentary collection of cultural practices that
occur on and reproduce the beach.
The introduction begins with a call for a reversal of the leisure categories “tourist” and “va-
cationer.” Urbain argues convincingly that the vacation is the generic activity and that tourism
is one possible form that a vacation may take. He then works to counter scholars and critics
who believe that the summer beach residential vacationer is either uninteresting or should be
considered negatively as responsible for the overcrowded conditions plaguing “formerly pris-

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