TV Reed: Aesthetics and Social Movements
TV Reed is is the Lewis E. and Stella G. Buchanan Distinguished Professor of English and American Studies at Washington State University. Reed teaches classes on cultural theory, on contemporary American fiction, on social movements, and on popular culture. All of Reed's work deals with the relationship between cultural forms and social change. He is the author of Fifteen Jugglers, Five Believers: Literary Politics and the Poetics of American Social Movements (Univ. of California Press) and The Art of Protest (U Minnesota).
What are you working on now?
I am working on two books. The first is about the cultural politics of cyberspace(s). This work grows out of my teaching of Engl/DTC 475 “Digital Diversity.” I found that while there is a rich proliferation of excellent digital cultural studies scholarship out there, there is no book that lays out a full array of issues entailed in computer-mediated communication in a complex but accessible way. My book will introduce and dissect key issues of race, class, gender, sexuality, colonialism and transnationality using the Web as the focal point. It will move from a material analysis of the hardware and software production to textual analysis to the political economy of the media to issues of identity formation in online environments like Facebook. Central to my task is expanding discussion of the limited concept of the “digital divide” to include the range of issues from division of labor in computer factories to the material-discursive production and commodification of ethnic identities online.
I have completed also a full draft manuscript on novelist Robert Cantwell, a neglected Northwest writer who was a figure of considerable importance in the literary scene of the 1930s (as attested by writers and critics like Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, and Edmund Wilson, each of whom described Cantwell as the best young writer of his generation). Cantwell’s fascinating tale of rise from the lumber mills of Aberdeen, WA to the literary scenes of New York, and eventual mental breakdown and fall during an extreme political switch from left to right in the late thirties (under the sway of his colleague Whitaker Chambers), has yet to be fully told. I place Cantwell’s work within the larger literary context of the Depression, and the ambition, as he put it, to “bring the subtlety Henry James brought to the analysis of the upper classes to the illumination of ordinary working people.”
Much of your work seems to deal with the relationship between culture and social movements. Can you talk about that?
Yes, most of my work deals with the role of cultural forms (literature, music, film, etc.) in promoting or resisting social justice. Where many critics work by reducing cultural texts to some narrow notion of their political meaning, I work in the opposite direction – my goal is to bring the complexity, nuance and openness of aesthetic texts into the context of social movements in order to break up ideological rigidities and dogmatism. My first book, Fifteen Jugglers, Five Believers: Literary Politics and the Poetics of Social Movements (UC Press) promoted rich texts like Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and Invisible Man as alternatives to reductive understandings of class and race, respectively. And my most recent book, The Art of Protest (U Minnesota), seeks to look at a wide variety of artistic/cultural production within social movements (Black freedom songs, Chicano murals, environmental justice poetry, etc.) to better understand the ways in which aesthetic texts complicate and illuminate difficult questions facing social change agents. The central principle in all my work is this: all cultural texts, from a Shakespeare play to a comic strip, can (and almost inevitably will) be put to political use by left, right or center, but those uses never exhaust the meanings of that given work. Conservative New Critical close readings are no less formulaic than New Historical or New Marxist ones. Only the imaginations of reactionary critics suggest that ordinary folks don’t know the difference between a Shakespeare or Brecht play, and a satirical skit on the factory floor. The trick is to understand the very different cultural work done by each, and, in my case, to argue that social activists may have something to learn from Brecht about how to stage a successful demonstration.
You have also been very active in creating Websites and as a “public intellectual” commenting in the media. How does that work fit into your writing and teaching?
Way back in 1997, just when the Internet was going public, I began building what became a half dozen Websites centering around my academic work. Each site seeks to offer a critical introduction to a field of cultural study of use to students, teachers, and anyone else interested in the thematic areas: popular culture, social movement cultures, environmental justice, cybercultural diversity, and cultural theory. I am right now involved in an exciting project to update and upgrade the sites with the assistance of Jeff Kuure, one of the WSU library’s web makers. The popular culture site in particular really took off. It comes up now as the number one or two site on a Google search for “popular culture” (when it comes in second, it is bumped by wikipedia, which generally comes in first in every search these days). That popularity has led to weekly, and sometimes daily requests for expert commentary from newspapers, television and radio.
One story from a couple of years speaks volumes about US media. I got a call one morning from CNN’s Mary Snow, a correspondent on Wolf Blitzer’s show, wanting to know if there were really “gay cowboys.” She was working on contextualizing story for the then just-released film, Brokeback Mountain. I told her I didn’t know much about the topic, but that I had a colleague, Joan Burbick, whom I thought had some real expertise in the area. Both Ms. Snow and I tried all day to contact Joan, who it turned out was in the wilds of the West without cellphone access. During the day, Ms. Snow and I would chat, and she kept pressing me to answer her questions, and I’d say things like “My colleague would probably say, ‘Yes, of course there are gay cowboys, just like there are gay stock brokers, gay teachers, and gay football players, and there were gay cowboys in the 19th century too.’” Finally, as the day wore on and we had more of these exchanges (and Joan was still nowhere to be found), Ms. Snow said to me, “You know, I think you know enough about gay cowboys for CNN.” And soon after I was rushed down to Murrow Hall where I was interviewed under hot lights for 15 minutes about gay cowboys. Later that night about 15 seconds of my comments were broadcast around the world (one colleague reported seeing me on air while in Malaysia!).
In any event, thanks to my website, I get requests every week for comments from everywhere on everything, from the Baltimore Sun asking about Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction” to the Associated Press interviewing me about her recently deceased brother’s cultural legacy. It’s fun, and if I ever doubt that I have anything significant to say, I always tell myself, ‘Well, you knew enough for CNN!’ More seriously, I always set myself the challenge of sneaking some useful commentary about US cultural politics into the often silly questions.
TV Reed's Popular Culture Website