Years ago, in a book entitled The Dialectic of Enlightenment, Theodor
Adorno and Max Horkhiemer offered a searing critique of the "culture
industry" that they claimed had drained our society of its capacity to
nourish true freedom and individuality. The modern culture
industry--Hollywood movies, radio/television, mass-produced
journalism,pop music, and advertising--produced safe, superficial,
standardized products geared to the demands of the capitalisteconomy.
Lost forever in the bargain was the possibility of a popular culture
that emerged from and spoke about the needs, wishes, and hopes of the
general public. In contrast to a mass culture that is fed to the
people based on what will sell, popular culture gives voice to the
dreams, nightmares, and aspirations of ordinary people. Graffiti art
and underground comics, hip hop and grunge, body piercing and
dreadlocks, Day of the Dead celebrations, and Lesbopalooza--all
examples of contemporary popular culture--give voice to the marginal
and the subaltern, their oppressions, histories, yearnings, and
struggles for survival.

This course offers a critical exploration of the form, content, and
uses of popular culture in everyday life. Class discussions will be
geared to interrogating how, for instance, popular culture influences
our conceptions of high culture and trash culture, how it shapes our
understandings of race, gender, and civil rights, in what ways,
popular cultural texts help us identify our heroes and enemies, how
popular culture influences our sense of ourselves as citizens of a
nation, as members of a particular socio-economic class, as racial
and gendered subjects. Taking specific examples from contemporary
popular culture, we pose questions about power and resistance within
the global, commercialized exchanges of contemporary popular culture.
What differences might we discern between the mainstream and the
marginal? Can we point to popular cultural production and consumption
outside of the cycle of commodification and appropriation? Where is
there room for a ground-up popular culture that serves, not Western
capitalist interests, but the subaltern voices of the people?
Research essays and pop quizzes are among the course requirements.