Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Modern architecture was pioneered in the 1920s by architects in Central Europe, but it did not
become prominent in the United States until the 1950s. This late adoption is explained by the
social and spatial transformations of American society. Modern architecture was the ideological
expression of the quest of the professional-managerial class for power, symbolizing the rationality
and technology that this class believed should rule society in the place of capital. This style was
not prominent early in the U.S. because by the 1920s the professional-managerial class had
already become integrated into capitalist corporations and hence needed no independent
ideological expression of its ambitions. The emerging mass market in America forced architects
working for corporations to cater to the demand of working Americans for entertainment in urban
buildings to cover over the rationality and technology of their standardized work. After World
War II, however, the social and spatial arrangements of classes in America changed. The
managerial revolution displaced capitalists and entrepreneurs and gave the professional-
managerial class control of corporations. It thus sought to express its governing rationality in
sober, modernist headquarters. This architectural style was now accepted in urban centers by
working Americans because most had moved to the suburbs, where they used their market power
to demand a landscape of consumer diversion that countered and compensated for the symbols of
technocratic work downtown.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: The Impressionist style is examined in the context of the changing worldview and newer institutional structures for art in fin-de-siecle France. These changes are connected empirically to new patronage groups of art, especially third generation European Jews for whom group identity became salient during the Dreyfus Affair, and Americans, whose social aspirations resisted emulation of an earlier aristocracy.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Based on interviews, participant-observation, and internet data in a local Goth subculture, this paper argues that Goth is an identity strategy with limited liability for the white middle class youth who participate. In this paper, I am concerned with how white middle class youth who self-consciously define themselves against the normal nevertheless reproduce their privileged race and class locations. The Goths in this study provide an example of subcultural participation without conversion. Freakiness is a means of enacting the (often expected) rebellion from the culture of their parents while simultaneously elaborating other aspects of white, middle class identities. In defining themselves against the normal, as “freaky,” Goths gain community, visibility, notoriety, and some form of toughness, but they do all this within an insulated context that buffers them from the potential costs of their identity negotiations. Moreover, they use their freakiness (performed, in this paper, through style and emotions) both to cultivate their cultural capital and to make symbolic distinctions, positioning themselves as especially artistic, creative, and independent. Their strategies allow them to gain some of the benefits of “cool” without incurring the costs.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This paper examines the emerging genre of film that provides a counter-memory to the dominant place-making narratives of partition in Israel/Palestine. Without neglecting reference to the oppressive realities of everyday life, the paper considers the ways in which the cultural transformations associated with transnationalism can enhance the importance of the many everyday acts that refuse to recognize difference as the defining element of encounter.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Flaunting diamonds, mink, and champagne, black popular culture has, in recent years, made an audacious spectacle of conspicuous commodity consumption. Commonly termed "bling," the ghetto fabulous aesthetic has prompted vociferous debate among African Americans about the cultural meanings of black consumerism. These voices have interpreted this latest avatar of consumptive excess in a variety of ways – from a modern version of the "black is beautiful" ethic to "death on display, gussied up to appeal to poor folks desperate for a taste of the good life." These disagreements trace well-worn debates over the cultural meanings of black consumption – whether pathological or subversive, emancipatory or repressive – highlighting abiding questions about the unruly potential and political ramifications of such consumption.

These debates take on growing significance in the current moment of post-civil rights, or as many now term it, the emergent "post-soul" era of racial politics. Here, as hegemonic discourses of neo-liberalism establish "post-racial" rationalities of individualism, thrift, and economic responsibility, they have, likewise, spurred unprecedented attacks on public programs for social and redistributive justice. The rise of the "bling" aesthetic at this cultural moment raises key questions about work, consumption, class, and the significance of race within cultures of advanced capitalism.

Within this context, this paper explores the work of contemporary popular media in marking out proper standards of black engagement with late capitalism, focusing on a series of recents films collected under the rubric of a new Hollywood genre – the ghetto fabulous film – that emerged at the close of the nineties to castigate and congratulate black investments in ghetto fabulous "bling." Drawing on Barbershop (Tim Story, 2002), Barbershop 2: Back in Business (Kevin Rodney Sullivan, 2004), and Beautyshop (Billy Woodruff (2005) – studio films with all-black casts, directed by young African American filmmakers – this analysis shows how popular culture appoints the limits of black consumer imaginaries – how they should buy, what they should contribute, and why – and how blackness itself functions in imbuing the market with a productive sheen, its commodities with a tantalizing allure. Attending to a wistful nostalgia for what the sixties enabled in terms of economic freedom and political autonomy for African Americans, and the absorption of racial subjects into an imagined paradise of productivity and prosperity in recent decades, this paper pursues the implications of filmic reconciliations of post-soul priorities with hegemonic discourses of the market to explore contemporary cultural tensions between race and consumerism.