Published Fall 2006
 
Those Crazy Kids
(on Leerom Medovoi's Rebels: Youth and the Cold War Origins of Identity [Durham: Duke UP, 2005])
Most of us who came of age in the 1980s (or after) are familiar with "identity politics," although what that phrase signifies is often the source of contention. In Rebels: Youth and the Cold War Origins of Identity, Leerom Medovoi provides a check against an easy understanding of this term. For those whose first encounters with identity politics were within the institutional framework of the university, this book challenges campaigns such as Lynne Cheney's attack on canon revision in the 1980s by demonstrating how our need for identity discourse has been a fundamental aspect of everyday life since the end of WWII.
Rebels, however, does not address Cheney and her ilk, but analyzes a surprising array of 1950s teen (or popular) culture to show its necessity for the ways we think about identity. According to Medovoi, "identity" emerged out of the cultural imaginary of the Cold War, and in particular how it began as a way to explain what it meant to "be" a teenager in post-WWII America. The teenager, he shows, was the first proprietor of an insurgent identity, and this population was instructed on its meaning and use via the various forms of popular culture permeating the suburban landscape. The figure of the male (and at times female) teenage rebel was the prime subject of this discourse, and Medovoi examines its development through landmark Cold War texts such as Catcher in the Rye, Rebel Without a Cause, the rock'n'roll of Bill Haley, On the Road, and Imitation of Life.
One thing that is surprising about Medovoi's analysis of identity's origins as a form of social protest is that the teenage rebel did not symbolize a challenge to the post-war socio-economic order, but a means to reconcile its contradictions. In the face of an ever-suburbanizing mass society in a Fordist socio-economic regime, and in the context of US-USSR global rivalry and the various anti-colonialist liberation movements, the teen rebel made it possible for a generation to express disdain for modern American life, without taking a critical position towards its underlying political and economic structures. If the teen rebel provided a means to protest the post-war culture of conformity at the same time that it validated the democratic promise of post-war America, and if we get the notion of identity politics from this contradictory ideological position, then we might say that Medovoi provocatively shows how identity politics began as liberalism's most compelling argument against imagining a different social order.
Medovoi begins by reviewing the work of social theorists, psychotherapists, and other intellectual Cold Warriors to show how the standard "containment culture" theory misses the paradoxical ways the Cold War produced an anxiety about a national character whose energy had been drained by the affluence of the post-WWII economic boom. Rather than fearing the Soviet enemy burrowing from within, many intellectuals were paralyzed by the idea that US mass society had destroyed its citizens' democratic will, and that they were responsible for "[rejuvenating] the sovereign American personality ... in the face of a widespread conviction that it had been compromised" (22). According to Medovoi, from this dilemma sprang the antipodes which have driven the formation of identity as a political necessity and practice ever since. Against the organization man, the parental culture of television, and the suburbs, the teenage rebel embodied a critique of mass society while also "restoring the democratic promise of that order" (34).
As Medovoi points out, this complicates the "other fifties" argument, that the "civil rights activists, beats, young women, rock'n'rollers, [and] gay writers" posed a challenge to the 1950s social and political landscape (50). If we accept the notion that rebellion against the conforming mass was fundamental to the ideological needs of Cold War common sense, then the resistant counter-culture and political movements of the 1950s appear both more central to the practical work of the 1950s nation-state, and more affirmative of Cold War liberalism than we might have otherwise imagined. Medovoi's achievement, then, comes from the way he demonstrates that identity enabled a potent political and social critique in spite of its distinct limitations.
Though he seems equally at home historicizing post-war criticism's turn to J.D. Salinger, the rise of the juvenile delinquency film, or the contradictory articulations of post-war masculinity, Medovoi's argument comes out most forcefully in the chapter devoted to popular music. Locating his work about rock'n'roll in relation to George Lipsitz's "celebratory" analysis, and the "containment" argument of Lawrence Grossberg, Medovoi sees it instead as an instance of the wider reproduction of post-war Fordism. Medovoi describes rock'n'roll, its relationship to radio, the 45 rpm record, and the sonic spaces they called forth in a rich account of the economic and ideological logistics of teen-age rebellion, as opposed to the television, which produced its own distinct imaginary space of domesticity and parental interest.
Rebels is unlike much of the work on the 1950s, which has often viewed this era from the standpoint of the 1930s and the eradication of radical politics under the Cold War. Medovoi instead considers why a transformative class-based politics was frustrated at the most basic levels of affective experience during the 1950s. This adds a cogent picture of the ways post-war Fordism and its structural manifestation, the suburb, naturalized a mode of existence that could frustrate the Old Left's political project of affiliation and social transformation. Of course, Mike Davis' Prisoners of the American Dream, and Lizabeth Cohen's A Consumer's Republic, address this question, and in a rich historical framework. Cohen, for instance, uncovers how consumption was transformed from a site of collective political action in the 1930s to a passive and individualized one in the post-war era, and pays close attention to the intersections of suburban growth, post-war university enrollment, and the racism and sexism of the G.I. Bill which fostered unique parameters of race and gender in the 1950s suburbs and universities. Davis documents the fraught relationship between the CPUSA, the C.I.O., and the Democratic party, which in part led to the success of the Regan administration in the 1980s. What Medovoi adds to this history is a close look at identity's origins in the representations of teenage life in the 1950s, and how this was a crucial component for the post-war redefinition of American liberalism.
Though rooted in a study of the 1950s, Rebels speaks to current appraisals of identity politics. Two critics who represent a significant trend in current American Studies, Michael Szalay and Sean McCann, recently edited a special issue of The Yale Journal of Criticism (Fall 2005) devoted to the literature of the 1960s and the New Left. This is a departure from the historical terrain of both Szalay's and McCann's earlier books on the culture of the 1930s and New Deal politics, New Deal Modernism and the Invention of the Welfare State (Duke, 2001) and Gumshoe America: Hard Boiled Crime Fiction and the Rise and Fall of New Deal Liberalism (Duke, 2000). However, The Yale Journal reflects Szalay's and McCann's longer project of a revisionist history of liberalism. Collectively, the writers in that issue argue that the identity politics of the 1960s unleashed an attack on liberalism which ultimately undermined the democratic process itself. The essays suggest that because of the New Left's turn away from what McCann and Szalay term "organized political life," we find ourselves today without a coherent liberal political movement or a language that could reliably connote its goals (438).
In contrast to Rebels, the Yale issue imagines liberal and identity politics as distinct forms of politics. Their concept of an "organized political life," a phrase I take to signify the practical business of running a representative democracy, is the exemplary notion at work throughout these essays, since it neatly separates the work of liberalism (defined as the running of the state) from identity (located as a wholesale rejection of this work). For instance, Mark McGurl uses The Education of Little Tree's complicated history, the more ambiguous signifying of the Native American for the 1960s counter-culture, and Charles A. Reich's The Greening of America, as a means to get at how the university has become a space for disempowering practical applications of political thought and action (1). McGurl suggests that in spite of the energy bequeathed to present-day literary criticism and history by 1960s radical politics, "the ultimate point is to ask ourselves what sort of diffusions, diversions, and ironic reversals the shift from a politics of access to the politics of identity may have occasioned in our own projects ... [and also] to what extent academic cultural politics can be redescribed ... as an essentially passive, post-political consolation for an evermore evident defeat in the political sphere as such?" (265).
This is a good question. But it is troubling to see this described as a problem we owe to the New Left, perniciously characterized as a turn away from the politics of "access." Certainly, one legacy of the New Left is our ready collapse of "organized political life" and personal experience. Yet, we might take the formation of an academic field such as Women's Studies as a concrete example of how personal identity as political life enabled access to, and the reorganization of, institutional power. We should also remember that Women's Studies' roots in socialist-feminism indicate a direct consonance between a politics of identity (feminism) and a politics of "access" (socialism). Further, Women's Studies was enabled by reorganization of the resources and politics of that bastion of post-war liberalism, the university.
In contrast, Medovoi's work attests to the ways 1950s suburban teenage existence was a profoundly organized political life, and the myriad ways identity worked in concert with Cold War liberalism, suggesting how much farther back we need to push our idea of the origins of identity politics. To imagine identity politics as a counter-cultural attack on liberalism is not dead wrong, but the problem The Yale Journal sets out—how to create an effective progressive politics for 2006—cannot be done without asking how identity and liberalism came out of the particular conditions of the Cold War. The Yale Journal forgets how the Cheney attack on identity politics and its putative co-conspirators, "multiculturalism" and "political correctness," was an attack on the radical political formations of the 1960s and 1970s (socialist-feminism, black power, and gay liberation, to name just three) which articulated necessary challenges to the socio-political landscape. With the idea that the university (and in particular, its English department) has become the primary home to political correctness, identity politics is severed from the realm of political practice and placed into that mystical and distant universe known as Literature, a thing (like Culture) available only to those who can afford to study it. Rebels illustrates the more crucial challenge about the relationship between liberalism, identity, and "politics" as an identitarian practice, which can reach uncomfortably far back into the ideological, economic, and historical roots of the suburbs themselves.
Note
1. Published in 1967, Education was thought to be the autobiography of a Native American boy, Forest Carter, until it was recently shown to have been written by a devoted white supremacist, Asa Carter.
[Return to Text]
|
