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Writing from Prison
ns 70 | Spring/Summer 2008
 Featuring a special section on prison writing edited by Doran Larson, interviews with Jonathan Culler, Hazel Carby, and Michael Denning, a revaluation of Viktor Shklovsky by David Gorman, and discussion about the future of the welfare state with Amanda Claybaugh, Bruce Robbins, and Jennifer Ruth.
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by Victor Cohen | ns 70
The 1930s are often considered a dull, didactic time in art and culture—falling off from the height of modernism as the US was mired in the Great Depression. Michael Denning's The Cultural Front: Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (Verso, 1998) corrects that view, exploring how the period produced thriving art and culture related to the labor movement. It was not just doctrinaire, didactic art, but heralded what Denning calls a second "American Renaissance."
A student of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, Michael Denning has illuminated modern mass culture and its politics. His first two books, Cover Stories: Narrative and Ideology in the British Spy Thriller (Methuen, 1987) and Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working Class Culture (Verso, 1987), study those lesser, popular genres. More recently, his book Culture in an Age of Three Worlds (Verso, 2004) looks at globalization and takes stock of cultural studies.
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Cohen: To shift to your latest book, Culture in the Age of Three Worlds, how do you see the difference between what you call "the laboring of American culture," which is a key term from The Cultural Front, to "a labor theory of culture," which is one of the central concepts in the recent project?
Denning: I think that the "laboring of American culture" argument is a specifically historical argument: in many ways a rhetoric of labor, a concern with labor and work, powerfully inflects American culture in the middle decades of the twentieth century, partly because of the trauma of the Depression, partly because of the migration of huge numbers of people to this amazing Fordist industrial world, and partly because of the creation of new unions of the CIO. Indeed, as I hope to show in a book I'm working on right now, the US working class becomes a much more significant part of the world working class in the 1930s and 1940s, partly because of the destruction of the organized working classes by fascism in Europe. In some ways, the US working class has a disproportionate world position once the German working class is smashed by Hitler and once the Italian working class is smashed by Mussolini. So the notion of the laboring of American culture, and the subsequent destruction of that laborist culture, particularly in the 1980s under Reagan, is an important historical argument that I would stand by.
The other argument, "the labor theory of culture," is part of the larger theoretical issues that came out of my early Marxist literary criticism project, which is just trying to figure what a Marxist cultural theory would look like. That was half of the work that dominated the next decade, 1997-2007, some of which is captured in Culture in the Age of Three Worlds. I think of this work as moving in two directions. The first is to make more explicit some of the theoretical arguments and directions that were there in the earlier historical studies, and the second is to bend the stick against the Americanism of that work and to think US culture in a more global frame: what it would mean to think through a world Popular Front? What is the place of US workers in a world labor force? What are the specificities of US development in terms of the Americas or in terms of settler colonial regimes around the world?
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Poetry
Fiction
Captive Minds: Writing from Prison
A Special Section Edited by Doran Larson
Interviews
Provocation
Revaluations
Surveying the Field
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