Additional Information
Popular Culture/Cultural Studies
by
Krys Douglas
Popular Culture is represented by the performing arts (theatre, film, television, and music), genre fiction, and mass circulation publications. For the student of history, culture, demographics, etc., it is the fusion of text and context, wherein the thing studied and the studier reflect and shape each other. As an academic subject, Popular Culture draws on all disciplines, from the social sciences to literary criticism, from the fine arts to business, all to the end of exploring and explaining groups of people, both broad and narrow. Some expressions of popular culture explore the experiences of specific groups.
Two films, Hester Street and Daughters of the Dust, serve as exemplars of this. The first of these offers insights into the Jewish immigrant experience, especially as a confrontation between old and new worlds and values. The second examines the lives of three generations of African-American women while reveling in the joy of African story-telling. Certainly the value of such works should not be underestimated in courses which focus on specific groups, for they allow students to enter unfamiliar worlds and experience the textures of those worlds.
Other elements of popular culture offer ways through which students may become aware of the extent of discrimination, bias, and prejudice within cultures and the clash of values between dominant and non-dominant groups. The film Gentleman's Agreement, for example, has as its theme unwritten rules of acceptance and was Hollywood's first major attempt to deal with discrimination.
Even when discrimination is not the central theme of a work, it may be useful in exploring the issue. A case in point is the television series Space: Above and Beyond. A space opera about marines fighting alien creatures, this series also offers, quite consciously, opportunities for analysis of prejudice. Producer James Wong, wanting to explore prejudice outside the obvious situations, created a world in which the marines (black, oriental, white, male, and female) live, work, and fight together in equality. He also created a new being, an "artificially gestated human," a being created solely to do the hardest, most dangerous jobs. These characters are fair, so they look like the dominant group in the viewing audience; however, they are subjected to all degrees of discrimination, and aid the program in fulfilling one of the Formalist requirements of art: "to make the familiar strange." That is, a circumstance (in this case prejudice) so common it often is not recognized by some, suddenly becomes apparent because it is put in a new context.
In these ways, and others, Popular Culture allows the student to explore the vagaries and variations of society, and come to an understanding of diverse groups.
