POPULAR CULTURE

Popular Culture

Popular Culture

“Popular culture commodified and stereotyped as it often is, is not at all, as we sometimes think of it, the arena where we find who we really are, the truth of our experience. It is an arena that is profoundly mythic. It is a theatre of popular desires, a theatre of popular fantasies. It is where we discover and play with the identifications of ourselves, where we are imagined, where we are represented”… (Hall, 1992; 1996 p.474)

Introduction

Popular culture is a malleable concept. It can be thought of as folk culture produced by people as an expression of their values and modes of existence, and it can be the opposite, an ideologically laden product imposed by an elite class in a display of power and social control. Popular culture can be an ordinary part of everyday life as well as a site of intellectual and political struggle.

It can be a participatory form within a community (actual or virtual) that engages the most populous mainstream in society, and it can be a mode of entertainment—an almost universal feature of most known societies. Wall painting, body decorating, singing, and gladiatorial sports from the ancient world can all be regarded as forms of popular culture, as can Rembrandt's cottage industry products and Shakespeare's seventeenth-century theatre. Items for inclusion in the category of popular culture are now so diverse that no single definition contains them. Thus, popular culture refers to any demotic form that appeals to the populace at large, and as such, it can function as a social bond and folk culture that is expressive of the people. In its early form, from the sixteenth century, the popular also implied the lowly, vulgar, and common (Storey 2005:262).

Popular culture can simultaneously refer as well to a mass media dedicated to spreading propaganda and political repression. In the modern era of industrial capitalism, it is an element in a vast commercial enterprise that both co-opts forms of rebellion and sustains an intellectual, creative class that might also be opposing it. When Andy Warhol declared that modern art is “what you can get away with,” he demonstrated the frangibility of the boundaries around art; in much the same way, the products of popular culture now exert similar category pressures, bringing emphasis to the problem of representation in the popular mainstream, of who is being addressed by the products, and who is the populace in popular.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the range of phenomena potentially covered by the term popular culture is such that its study is necessarily interdisciplinary and of interest not just to sociologists but also to a variety of area specialists in fields such as American studies (from which the Journal of Popular Culture has its origins), anthropologists, historians, and literary scholars. It has also generated new academic disciplines, including cultural studies, leisure studies, media and communication studies, and youth studies. It has been a focus of research and teaching in gender studies, where the question of how femininity ...