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  1. The disappearing liberal intellectual

    Lott, Eric
    New York : Basic Books, c2006.

    An award-winning scholar challenges the intellectuals of the baby boom generation to shake off a decade's worth of complacency and reclaim the mantle of social justice. What ever happened with that liberal intellectual "boom" of the 1980s and 1990s? In "The Disappearing Liberal Intellectual", Eric Lott - author of the prize-winning "Love and Theft" - shows that the charter members of the "new left" are suffering from a condition that he has dubbed "boomeritis". Too secure in their university appointments, lecture tours and book deals, the once rising stars of the liberal elite have drifted away from their radical moorings toward the political centre. At once a chronicle of recent intellectual life and a polemic against contemporary liberalism's accommodations of the conservative status quo, "The Disappearing Liberal Intellectual" eviscerates the complacency that has seeped into the politics of the would-be vanguard of intellectual thought. Lott issues a wake-up call to the great public intellectuals of the day and challenges them to reinvigorate political debate on campus, in their writing and on the airwaves.

  2. Black mirror : the cultural contradictions of American racism

    Lott, Eric
    Cambridge, Massachusetts : The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2017

    Black Mirror explores the ways U.S. cultural institutions--classic American literature, Hollywood film, pop musical artistry, venturesome social commentary--have relied insistently and repeatedly on racial symbolic capital, including and above all blackface, to reproduce white cultural dominance. In the process these forms have threatened to betray the racial hegemony that generated them and that they exist in order to maintain. Hence the subtitle, The Cultural Contradictions of American Racism. In a series of chapters addressing such arts and artists as Mark Twain, film noir, Joni Mitchell, Elvis impersonators, Bob Dylan, and Barack Obama, Black Mirror locates the symbolic surplus value that accrues to white cultural producers and institutions whenever they traffic in "blackness"--A political economy of the sign that can sometimes surprise us (not least by producing a black president).--Blackness, as the entertainment and sports industries well know, is a prized commodity in American pop culture. Marketed to white consumers, black culture invites whites to view themselves in a mirror of racial difference, while at the same time offering the illusory reassurance that they remain "wholly" white. Charting a rich landscape that includes classic American literature, Hollywood films, pop music, and investigative journalism, Eric Lott reveals the hidden dynamics of this self-and-other mirroring of racial symbolic capital. Black Mirror is a timely reflection on the ways provocative representations of racial difference serve to sustain white cultural dominance. As Lott demonstrates, the fraught symbolism of racial difference props up white hegemony, but it also tantalizingly threatens to expose the contradictions and hypocrisies upon which the edifice of white power has been built. Mark Twain's still-controversial depiction of black characters and dialect, John Howard Griffin's experimental cross-racial reporting, Joni Mitchell's perverse penchant for cross-dressing as a black pimp, Bob Dylan's knowing thefts of black folk music: these instances and more show how racial fantasy, structured through the mirroring of identification and appropriation so visible in blackface performance, still thrives in American culture, despite intervening decades of civil rights activism, multiculturalism, and the alleged post-racialism of the twenty-first century. In Black Mirror, white and black Americans view themselves through a glass darkly, but also face to face.

    Online EBSCO Academic Comprehensive Collection

  3. Love and theft : blackface minstrelsy and the American working class

    Lott, Eric
    20th-anniversary edition. - New York : Oxford University Press, 2013.

    For over two centuries, America has celebrated the same African-American culture it attempts to control and repress, and nowhere is this phenomenon more apparent than in the strange practice of blackface performance. Born of extreme racial and class conflicts, the blackface minstrel show appropriated black dialect, music, and dance; at once applauded and lampooned black culture; and, ironically, contributed to a ""blackening of America."" Drawing on recent research in cultural studies and social history, Eric Lott examines the role of the blackface minstrel show in the political struggles of t ...For over two centuries, America has celebrated the very black culture it attempts to control and repress, and nowhere is this phenomenon more apparent than in the strange practice of blackface performance. Born of extreme racial and class conflicts, the blackface minstrel show sometimes usefully intensified them. Based on the appropriation of black dialect, music, and dance, minstrelsy at once applauded and lampooned black culture, ironically contributing to a "blackening of America." Drawing on recent research in cultural studies and social history, Eric Lott examines the role of the blackface minstrel show in the political struggles of the years leading up to the Civil War. Reading minstrel music, lyrics, jokes, burlesque skits, and illustrations in tandem with working-class racial ideologies and the sex/gender system, Love and Theft argues that blackface minstrelsy both embodied and disrupted the racial tendencies of its largely white, male, working-class audiences. Underwritten by envy as well as repulsion, sympathetic identification as well as fear-a dialectic of "love and theft"-the minstrel show continually transgressed the color line even as it enabled the formation of a self-consciously white working class. Lott exposes minstrelsy as a signifier for multiple breaches: the rift between high and low cultures, the commodification of the dispossessed by the empowered, the attraction mixed with guilt of whites caught in the act of cultural thievery.

    Online EBSCO Academic Comprehensive Collection

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