Gary McDonogh. Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture

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show

host, Limbaugh’s gruff tirades against

taxes,

big government and

feminism

won

him an enthusiastic public following in the 1990s. Scandals surrounding President

Clinton,

particularly those related to Clinton’s alleged sexual indiscretions, were favorite

targets for Limbaugh’s barbs. Limbaugh’s emergence as a national personality was part

of an explosion in the influence of media that resulted in the blurring of distinctions

between politics and entertainment.

SARAH SMITH

linguistics

Although many Americans consider this an abstract field, the study of

language

and

meaning has, in fact, become a center for interdisciplinary interests and discussion. Its

reach includes fields of communication and information processing linked to artificial

intelligence and

computers,

questions of cognition and development from psychology

and education, questions of meaning and truth from philosophy issues of style and voice

in literature and questions of society and culture. In all these, American scholars and

thinkers have made important contributions to our understanding of language in general,

as well as of its roles within American culture.

Indeed, from the early days of the American nation, scholars confronted questions o

what language and identity meant, even if only to establish American standards for

lexicon (Noah Webster) or education. Descriptive linguists later confronted the unique

linguistic heritage of Native Indian tribes, documenting them in some cases as they

disappeared. Anthropologists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf also drew important

contrasts between the worldviews embodied in these languages and those of Western

Europe. Other approaches stressed function and relation among parts of language, while

American linguistics learned from European structural linguistics in the 1930s and 1940s.

Noam

Chomsky

fostered a revolution in American linguistics in the 1950s and 1960s

with transformational-generative grammar, which has thrived as both tool and theoretical

arena. His stresses on individual effort, mechanisms of production, and grammaticality as

accepted speech all evoke themes of American

individualism

and

community

. Some

critics have argued that his concerns with free will and truth also intersect with his

political activism.

Since the 1970s, linguists have also explored relations of language, society meaning

and change. William Labov used sociological methods to document social divisions and

changes in language; he also worked with black English formations as variations or

alternatives to Standard English, a theme that has drawn conflicting attention from

scholars, educators and families (see Rickford 1999). John Gumperz examined the

strategic construction of conversations. Others have focused on the politics and

ideologies of language, the nature and changes of bilingual communities, and critical

Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture 666

relations of language, gender and power. The last has reached a wide popular audience in

self-help

books and works by Deboran Tannen, as well as feminist and gay critics.

Recent work can be reviewed in central journals of the field, including

Language

and

anguage in Society

Further reading

Chomsky N. (1975)

Reflections on Language

, New York: Pantheon.

Gumperz, J. (1982)

Discourse Strategies,

New York: Cambridge.

Labov, W. (1972)

Sociolinguistic Patterns,

Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania.

Newmeyer, F. (1980)

Linguistic Theory in America,

New York: Academic.

Rickford, J. (1999)

African American Vernacular English,

Malden: Blackwell.

Tannen, D. (1994)

Gender and Discourse,

New York: Oxford.

GARY McDONOGH

Lippman, Walter

columnists

literature, African American

African American

literatures encompass a wide geographic territory which includes the

United States, the

Caribbean

and Central and South America. The time frame also

extends from the emigration and dispersal of peoples of African descent throughout the

diaspora. In his comparative studies of international as well as trans-Atlantic slavery

sociologist and historian Orlando Patterson, in

Slavery and Social Death

(1982), dates the

contact of Africans with the Atlantic world, beginning in the late Middle Ages with the

slave trade in the Atlantic islands of Madeira and the Canary Islands. Traditionally

African American literature was associated with the imaginative cultural products of US

ondsmen and bondswomen, including those manumitted by law or by eseape, and the

freeborn. The almost exclusive focus of those literary studies was the written word. The

genre preferences, moreover, were poetry fiction and drama with the understanding that

songs, folktales, sermons, essays and life stories were outside the realm of

belles lettres

The preoccupation with the written word also excluded the voices and cultural legacies

of at least 4 million Southern slaves in the early 1800s who had no access to literacy as a

result of violent repression, proscriptive legislation or the lack of opportunity Leroi Jones

(Amiri Baraka) offered a significant caution to scholars whose foundation for

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constructing an African American literary tradition depended almost entirely on written

texts. In

Blues People: Negro Music in White America

(1963) Jones/ Baraka insisted that

tracing the line linking the spirituals to

blues

and

jazz

would help provide a more

comprehensive understanding of African American historical and literary traditions, in

art, because it would necessarily include practitioners and commentators from several

economic classes, social communities and mentalities.

Since the critical and theoretical reconceptualizations of the 1960s regarding what

constitutes the “literary” or what qualifies as “text,” African American literatures are now

recognized as embracing a continuum stretching from ancient African oral tradition to

contemporary avatars of hip hop. The elements of that oral culture (praisesongs, epics,

roverbs, riddles, folktales, etc.) serve as underpinnings for traditions transported,

transmitted and reinvented for the specific locales of seventeenth through nineteenth

century

Cuba,

Brazil, Surinam, Barbados, Richmond or

Boston

. The arbitrary

distinctions between “literature” and the bio-mythographies known as autobiography

have also faded. Slave narratives, the earliest of which appear in the 1750s, are no longer

case histories as much as carefully crafted verbal portraits which share, with so-called

fictive texts, as historian Hayden White affirmed, a concern with plotting, voice,

narration, point of view and more. In Paule

Marshall’s

Praisesong for the Widow

(1983)

Avey Johnson, an upper-middle-class Westchester matron who has undergone a kind o

cultural amnesia is reminded by her deceased Great Aunt Cuney, in the middle of a

Caribbean cruise aboard the

Bianca Pride,

of the importance of telling and transmitting

the stories of the ancestors to successive generations. In undergoing an allegorical

Vodoun initiation, Avey returns to her given name, Avatara, and accepts responsibility

for singing the ancient praisesongs of the would-

e slaves who chose to walk home to

Africa after their middle-

assage transport to a place now known as Ibo Landing. She

also rejects the experiential divides, dramatically alluded to in the Versailles Room which

serves as the cruise ship’s formal dining room, that reinforce apartheid notions o

disciplinary generic and cultural boundaries. That border crossing, a thematic and

methodological pivot of African American literatures, surfaces powerfully in

representative works that defy genre categorization: Jean Toomer’s

Cane

(1923), Toni

Morrison’s

oeuvre and Toni Cade

Bambara’s

Mama Day

(1993).

Contemporary scholars such as Henry Louis Gates, Jr., building on the Harlem

Renaissance-era work of earlier folklorist-narrators, such as Zora Neale Hurston, trace

lineage lines which connect, for example, West African insult poetry to tales such as

“The Signifying Monkey” or the verbal duels of Caribbean calypso. There is an even

shorter distance, moreover, between that cultural amalgam and the African American

insult contests known as “playing the dozens.”

In African American literatures, the word is a powerful tool of creation, destruction

and transformation. Fiction-writer Toni Cade Bambara, among others, attests to a

reoccupation with the potency of logos (word/language) as a key characteristic of an

oral and written literature created by the muted and the unlettered. When that word is

written, the cultural legacy of African American literatures usually begins with Lucy

Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture 668

Terry’s 1746 poem, “Bars Fight,” or with the 1773 publication of Phillis Wheatley’s

oems on Various Subjects

. In that volume, a young

teenage

and sickly Boston slave

creates verbal portraits, which are praisesongs in their own right, celebrating English and

American aristocrats. Writing in the poetic meter with much of the classic allusions o

Dryden and Pope, Wheatley suffered for more than two centuries from the calumny that

she had not used her privileged status or education as a slave-

oet to combat slavery

directly In the last quarter century however, there has been a revival of interest in the,

erhaps, too subtle code by which Wheatley offers a stinging condemnation of slavery by

assuring General Washington that the eyes of the world are fixed on its newest

democratic experiment. Her self-deprecation in the midst of a poetic address to the

students of what we now know as Harvard University is part of a pattern of a deliberate

use of code to render opaque to masters and mistresses the subversion that hides behind

the grin and the smile. Wheatley helps to establish a tradition of writing with invisible ink

as a way of offering a scathing critique and parody of institutions that are and were

incongruous in a new democratic Republic which uses “freedom” as a way of describing

and defining its charisma. The immediate legatees of her consciously crafted

dissimulation include writers such as William Wells Brown (

Clotel,

1853), Charles

Chesnutt (

Marrow of Tradition,

1901), Pauline Hopkins (

Contending Forces,

1900),

Ralph Ellison (

Invisible Man,

1947) and Charles R.Johnson (

Middle Passage,

1990).

This use of double voicing functions simultaneously as a defensive and offensive

weapon and as a re-appropriation of the dual consciousness W.E.B.

Du Bois

named in

Souls of Black Folk

(1903) as the albatross of African American experience. Nobel prize-

winning novelist, Toni Morrison, a beneficiary of both oral and written traditions, also

refers to such duality in her collection of 1990 Massey Lectures in the history o

American civilization compiled in a volume entitled

Playing in the Dark: Whiteness an

the Literary Imagination

(1992). Morrison asserts that the canon of American literature

has its roots in the construction of blackness as a foil against which to define whiteness.

She insists that American literature is inconceivable without the omnipresence of this

largely invisible other who helps provide a sense of national identity and cohesion.

LINDA-SUSAN BEARD

literature, race and ethnicity

The decisions about whether and how to generalize about the study of minority literature

are complex because of the history of minorities in the US and the academic study o

their literatures and cultures.

African American

contributions to the literature and

culture of the US are older than the Republic; however, academic institutionalization o

their study came more recently emerging with the

Civil Rights movement

in the 1960s.

Interest in and study of the cultural production of other people of color followed, but

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whether and how they are analogous remains a topic of debate. Do we define minority

cultures by country of origin, as in

Chicano

studies? By language, as in

Hispanic

literature? By broader area of origin, as in

Asian American

Caribbean?

Further, is it

useful or true to focus on similarities among the experiences of ethnic minorities within

and immigrants to the US—a shared history of diaspora, oppression, adaptation,

contribution and resistance? Or is it more important to note the differences within these

histories—slavery for African Americans, centuries of intertwined history for

Chicanos/Latinos, no

immigration

tale to tell for

American Indians

? Further, how do

we talk about and account for the influence of “home” cultures: the difference between,

say Japanese and Filipino culture and history that makes the idea of “Asian American” so

hard to generalize? What difference does it make that many immigrant groups now, in the

age of cheaper global travel, have a transnational identity retaining personal and cultural

ties to home countries rather than largely severing or transforming them upon

immigration? Does a similarity of approach to minority cultures in any way repeat one o

the errors of racism by defining these diverse literatures in terms of their difference from

the presumed center, that is, mainstream white culture? Finally at what point, if ever,

does the importance of minority contributions to literature and literary study lead us to

redefine American culture so completely that to define minority literature separately

stops making sense?

While the movement to abolish slavery saw the publication of slave narratives and

other important cultural documents that form the nineteenth-century canon of African

Americans (the Harlem Renaissance and Black Arts movement are other crucial periods

in an ongoing literary culture), it was the

Civil Rights movement

that established

African Americans’ crucial academic presence and the “recovery” of many. The

existence of programs and departments in Black Studies, Africana Studies and African

American literature and culture attests to the historical emergence of a diversity o

approaches since the 1960s. Fueled by the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s and

Aztlán in

California

in the 1970s, Chicano/

Latino

culture also entered the academy—as

did the study of Native American literature and cultures.

Asian American

Studies also

largely began as a West Coast, indeed a Pacific, phenomenon. By now, minority

literature has become increasingly important among both academic and mainstream

readers, students and critics of American literature in general.

The study of minority literature and cultures has grown, stimulating and stimulated by

roader political events and by the poststructuralist literary theories that refused to see

literary artifacts as aesthetic objects separable from the historical and political context in

which they emerged. Minority critics and theorists noted how putatively “pure” aesthetic

standards had been used by a white-maledominated literary mainstream, consciously or

unconsciously to enforce or explain the devaluation and exclusion of the work of non-

white authors’ politically committed texts and non-traditional forms. Alternative literary

theories emerged to account for the ways in which minority voices and the literary forms

they used shaped, were shaped by and provided insight into the strains of exclusion and

oppression by mainstream culture, demonstrating that literary differences were not

Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture 670

defects but occasions of and for reflection.

Emerging in the 1970s, Ethnic Studies marks an alliance and shared approach among

minority scholars. The idea of Ethnic Studies is a commitment to seeing minority

literature in cultural, historical and political context, and maintaining a sense of the

cultural specificity of different traditions such as Native American or Asian Pacific

Islander, while having a common ground for critiquing mainstream culture from the point

of view of the excluded or forgotten margin.

While an awareness of the richness of minority discourse has reshaped the study o

American literature and culture, many scholars affirm the continuing need for their

separate study. This reflects both an affirmation of the literary and theoretical

contributions they will make, and an insistence that social justice for minorities is far

from having been achieved, either inside or outside the academy

Writers of all ethnicities have enjoyed increased success and recognition, in genre

fiction as well as in serious fiction and poetry. The emerging canons of especially well-

known, popular and widely taught authors grow and change constantly. Dominating the

last years of the twentieth century have been African American novelists Toni

Morrison

Nobel

laureate), Alice

Walker

and Gloria

Naylor

. Among Latino writers and Chicano

novelists and poets are the likes of Sandra

Cisneros,

Rudolfo Anaya and Cherrie Moraga,

while such writers as Cristina García (from

Cuba

) and Julia Alvarez (from the

Dominican Republic) also enjoy a high readership. Asian American writers abound:

among them are

Chinese American

novelist Maxine Hong

Kingston,

and her antagonist

Frank

Chin,

as well as the popular Amy

Tan

and Fae Ng. The late

Korean American

Theresa Kak Kyung Cha, writer and performance artist, is revered by poststructuralist

critics, while, more recently novelist Chang-Rae Lee has had wide critical success.

Among

Filipino American

writers, Jessica Hagedorn is probably best known. There are

also many Native American writers, though Louise

Erdrich,

Michael Dorris, MacArthur

prize-winner Leslie Marmon

Silko

and Sherman Alexie probably stand out.

Organizations exist to foster the study of each tradition. Further, there are important

umbrella organizations, for example the MELUS (multiethnic literatures of the United

States) journal, established 1974, and annual conference established in 1986. As indicated

earlier, no consensus exists about approaches to minority experience and literature. If, for

example, Werner Sollors is associated with a traditional liberal view of

immigration

and

assimilation,

Ron Takaki’s popular approach emphasizes, in contrast, the maintaining o

cultural difference. Within each group are many well-established scholars. A

constellation of high-

rofile African American scholars representing different points o

view and emphases includes, for example, Henry Louis

Gates,

Jr., bell

hooks,

Barbara

Christian and Houston Baker. Well-known Asian American scholars include Elaine Kim,

Sau-ling Wong and Lisa Lowe; Chicano/Latino critics include Norma Alarcón, Alfred

Arteaga and Gloria Anzaldúa.

ALYSON BARDSLEY

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literature and gender

A variety of approaches to the topic of women and literature has emerged in the last thirty

years as Women’s Studies has solidified and expanded as an academic field, building on

the earlier work of women writers and philosophers. While the rise of academic

feminism

in the US coincides to some degree with the

women’s liberation

movement o

the late 1960s and early 1970s, its history both extends back further in time and is also

largely yet to be written.

Much feminist literary criticism and women-and-literature courses take writing by

women as their object of analysis, noting that women have borne witness to their lives

and assumed artistic authority despite patriarchal culture’s prohibitions, its denigration o

female minds and imaginations, and the material difficulties historically facing women

writers, including the demands of wife-and motherhood and the limitations of women’s

education and property rights. But within feminist criticism emphases vary. Some readers

and critics simply affirm the value of women’s texts by according them attention equal to

or greater than men’s texts, looking to balance the historic dominance of the masculine

point of view. Others attempt to identify a female tradition of writing—women writers

consciously examining the status of their sex in their place and time and building upon

the work of literary foremothers in the context of women’s relative silence.

Biographically informed approaches, using paraliterary documents and information in

order to take account of the effect of social pressures and expectations on women’s

creative lives and expression, is held by some to be more effectively feminist than the

more traditional approach of taking the literary object out of its context. Further, in a

gesture critical of aesthetic hierarchies and cognizant of women’s exclusion from their

formation, literary importance and critical attention are accorded to non-traditional and

unpublished writing genres like diaries and letters in this approach. Deriving alternative

criteria from the form and content of women’s writing—criteria that dissent from and

criticize the existing literary canon—is a similar project of feminist criticism. This often

results in the revaluation of popular, sentimental and politically or socially engaged

writing: writing that manifests other interests and seeks out different audiences than does

the high literary culture historically dominated by men. As a consequence of these

approaches, much of literary history is in the process of being rewritten.

Feminist criticism is not limited to women’s writing. Working on the assumption that

gender roles are not a given but that gender is a social construct and gender ideology is

ropounded and reinforced through literature as through other social institutions, gender

critics read literary texts from the masculine mainstream using gender as a lens. They

explore these texts’ unacknowledged gender biases and note their dependence on gender

stereotypes, on the flattening and simplification of women characters and of relations

Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture 672

between men and women. Further, they uncover these texts’ regulation of gender roles

through encouraging identification with normative gender behavior and punishment o

gender deviance. Thus feminist critics extend their project to the examination and critique

of masculine roles, deeming those roles no less constructed, and constricting, than the

feminine; they further note the tacit enforcement of heterosexuality in much mainstream

literature.

Beyond feminist approaches to literary works and literary history is the domain o

feminist theory in which writers work to limn the historical, political, psychological and

linguistic means by which gender ideology has been formed and reproduced over time.

Further, increasingly the work of women writers and critics of color, third-world critics,

lesbians

and

working-class

writers has functioned to extend and critique earlier feminist

criticism. These critics argue, from their various positions, that Anglo-European

feminism has historically been unselfconsciously white,

middle class

and heterosexual in

its approach and focus, and has merely extended masculine individualist notions of the

self to white women. Further, they argue that Western women were and have remained

complicit with such forces as colonialism, racism and classism. While working to include

the literature and history of such doubly excluded women, these critics further break

down the category of “women” and attest to the multiplicity of women’s lives and roles.

Rather than claiming multiple victimization and exclusion based upon both gender and

other categories of identity they work to identify alternative histories and literatures,

including the previously unrecognized traditions, notions of selfhood, and forms of power

and

community,

among, for example, ethnic-minority

queer,

or disabled women.

Gilbert and Gubar’s work in the 1970s was an epoch-making look at an alternative set

of women writers’ practices and traditions. Elaine Showalter and Catherine Stimpson’s

early work is also from this period, while Carol Gilligan’s work on “women’s voices” as

unique continues to have influence among those interested in identifying “women’s ways

of knowing.” European psychoanalytic and poststructuralist criticism by Helene Cixous,

Julia Kristeva and the Lacanian critic Luce Iragaray enjoyed a strong vogue in the 1980s.

American critics doing their own work involving psychoanalysis and gender included

Jane Gallop and Shoshana Felman. In the late 1980s and early to mid-1990s, Donna

Harraway pioneered arguments from a postmodern, post-gender position, while Judith

Butler incorporated poststructuralist philosophy in her work to emphasize that gender is

erformed rather than essential. These theoretical positions have influenced how

women’s work is read, de-emphasizing the idea of an alternative tradition and focusing

instead on the constitutive and critical incoherences of “the subject”—i.e. the self-

conscious individual—constituted under patriarchy and through its language.

Alternatively critics like Janice Radway departing from an emphasis on academic

expertise, have sought to learn and acknowledge what women readers of various class

and educational backgrounds understand about their own cultural practices as readers.

Among the various theorists pointing out the limitations of white feminism’s approaches,

sometimes utilizing, sometimes criticizing its focus on the incoherence or non-existence

of the subject, have been African American critics like bell hooks, Chicanas/Latinas like

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Gloria Anzaldúa and post-colonial thinkers like Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.

The reading and teaching of literature by women is now the norm rather than the

exception. Besides the existence of Women’s Studies classes and programs, mainstream

anthologies (like those from Norton, Longmans, and Heath) now incorporate work by

women side-by-side with that of men as a matter of course, and the anthologies have

grown correspondingly Further, both womencentered presses (like England’s Virago, the

Feminist Press of the City University of New York, or Kitchen Table) and mainstream

publishers have joined in the process of publishing new women’s texts and recovering

and reprinting earlier ones. Mary Shelley’s

Frankenstein

and Maxine Hong

Kingston’s

Woman Warrior

(1976) are among the most-read books in

high schools

and

college

freshman courses throughout the US. The incorporation of feminist approaches into the

academic mainstream does not lessen the importance of feminist academic and para-

academic institutions like the journals

Signs

(established 1975),

Women’s Studies

(established 1972),

Women’s Review of Books

(1984) and

Genders

(1988). These

institutions and others continue to testify to the notion that from women’s history and

literature springs a fount of criticism of the mainstream and a celebration of the many

other forms of seeing and being that exist.

ALYSON BARDSLEY

little-league baseball

Founded in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, in 1939, little-league

baseball

expanded rapidly

into many

suburban

communities during the 1950s. With more than 5,000 leagues in the

US and Canada, by 1960 baseball was easily the leading participant sport in the country

Leagues are divided into different age groups up to the age of twelve (fifteen in the senior

leagues); play is colored by baseball rituals including a little-league pledge. Its world

series in Williamsport, televised on ABC’s

Wide World of Sport,

recently featured teams

from

Japan

and

Latin America

While little-league has sponsored clinics in Latin American countries like the

Dominican Republic (noted for producing major-league players), it has not sponsored

them in the

inner cities

of the United States. Only 15 percent of major leaguers are now

African American,

whereas in

basketball

the figure is closer to 78 percent.

In the 1990s, little-league is losing out to

soccer;

it has not attracted the large numbers

of girls engaging in sport since the 1970s.

ROBERT GREGG

Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture 674

Little Rock Central High School

One of the leading cities of the New

South,

noted for its moderation on racial issues,

Little Rock seemed likely to desegregate after the

Supreme Court’s Brown

decision. In

1957, however, Governor Orval Faubus, previously considered a moderate, who was

facing a difficult bid for a third term, used the race card to help win re-election. In

televised address, Faubus announced that integration at Central High School could not

roceed because it would precipitate violence and sent in the national guard to enforce

this decision. The insistence of the

children,

in the face of virtual lynch mobs, forced the

issue, leading President

Eisenhower

to federalize the Arkansas National Guard and send

in the 101st Airborne Division.

ROBERT GREGG

lobbyists

The term “lobbyist” refers to any person or group that attempts to sway the actions of a

olitical representative through a sustained effort at persuasion. In the British Parliament

of the seventeenth century lobbyists would try to influence members personally as they

walked through the lobby of the legislature to cast their votes, hence the origin of the

term. In more recent times, lobbying is often accomplished through informal meetings

etween lobbyists (or their clients) and politicians, financial contributions, or, more

ublicly through media campaigns and other forms of organized publicity. Although all

political pressure groups try to “lobby”

oliticians in most modern liberal democraeies,

the word “lobbyist” is generally restricted to those whose professional livelihoods depend

on their skill in directly influencing public policy on behalf of interested parties—such as

trade unions, private companies, or industry organizations—who pay them to do so.

Lobbyists have been a part of America’s public life for some time, and probably have

always affected political decisions to some extent. In the 1800s they were often referred

to as “lobbiers,” and were already under attack. The American poet Walt Whitman called

them “lousy combings and born freedom sellers of the Earth.” Then, as now, critics

feared the representative political process—whereby legislators try to consider and reflect

primarily the interests of the people who elected them—was being subverted through the

influence of paid “insiders” like professional lobbyists. In more recent years, opponents

have accused powerful and rich lobbies, such as that of the

National Rifle Association,

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