Buffalo Bill in Bologna: The Americanization of the World, 1869-1922 Review

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Buffalo Bill in Bologna: The Americanization of the World, 1869-1922 ReviewThis slim volume offers an elegant, useful overview of the scholarship on mass culture in the US. It extends the picture of American mass culture to include forays into Europe and the reception of European audiences and critics.It doesn't offer much in the way of new archival work; it largely relies on the studies by other historians on separate areas of mass culture, from Wild West shows and amusement parks to world's fairs and early cinema. But this is what makes the book particularly useful: it brings this work together in order to think through the larger questions of mass culture as a whole.
Does mass culture ultimately represent a regressive ideological force, one that has united Americans by disseminating an implicitly white nationalist idea of what America is? Or is it a more equivocal force through which consumers have sometimes been able to refashion their own meanings and spaces? The authors examine these questions in a fairly even-handed way, and recognize the arguments on both sides. They don't go into these questions in great depth, however. But there is an extremely helpful bibliographic essay at the end of the book that maps out the major critical arguments, from the early 20th century to the present, and that includes both American thinkers and European intellectuals. I would recommend this essay for anyone wanting to get a quick overview of this scholarly terrain.
My one reservation about this bibliography, however, is that it doesn't give any attention to the important scholarship on mass culture and the public sphere that has been produced in the wake of Habermas's book on the public sphere. There is a whole area of scholarship, from Negt and Kluge's response to Habermas, Miriam Hansen's work on Kracauer, and Michael Warner's work on counter publics, that is vital to thinking through questions of mass culture. The authors of this book have too quickly classified the Frankfurt School as one of "pessimism" about mass culture, but the picture is more complicated than that.Buffalo Bill in Bologna: The Americanization of the World, 1869-1922 Overview

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