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In the United States today many people are as likely to identify themselves by their ethnicity or region as by their nationality. In this country with its diversity and inequalities, can there be a shared public culture? Is there an unbridgeable gap between cultural variety and civic unity, or can public forms of expression provide an opportunity for Americans to come together as a people?
In Public Culture: Diversity, Democracy, and Community in the United States, an interdisciplinary group of scholars addresses these questions while considering the state of American public culture over the past one hundred years. From medicine shows to the Internet, from the Los Angeles Plaza to the Las Vegas Strip, from the commemoration of the Oklahoma City bombing to television programming after 9/11, public sights and scenes provide ways to negotiate new forms of belonging in a diverse, postmodern community. By analyzing these cultural phenomena, the essays in this volume reveal how mass media, consumerism, increased privatization of space, and growing political polarization have transformed public culture and the very notion of the American public.
Focusing on four central themes—public action, public image, public space, and public identity—and approaching shared culture from a range of disciplines—including mass communication, history, sociology, urban studies, ethnic studies, and cultural studies—Public Culture offers refreshing perspectives on a subject of perennial significance.
Preface: Why Public Culture?
—Marguerite S. Shaffer
What Is Public Culture? Agency and Contested Meaning in American Culture—An Introduction
—Mary Kupiec Cayton
PART I. PUBLIC ACTION
Chapter 1. Looking for the Public in Time and Space: The Case of the Los Angeles Plaza from the Eighteenth Century to the Present
—Mary P. Ryan
Chapter 2. Remembrance, Contestation, Excavation: The Work of Memory in Oklahoma City, the Washita Battlefield, and the Tulsa Race Riot
—Edward T. Linenthal
Chapter 3. Public Sentiments and the American Remembrance of World War II
—John Bodnar
PART II. PUBLIC IMAGE
Chapter 4. Sponsorship and Snake Oil: Medicine Shows and Contemporary Public Culture
—Susan Strasser
Chapter 5. Entertainment Wars: Television Culture after 9/11
—Lynn Spigel
Chapter 6. Screening Pornography
—Wendy Hui Kyong Chun
PART III. PUBLIC SPACE
Chapter 7. The Billboard War: Gender, Commerce, and Public Space
—Catherine Gudis
Chapter 8. The Social Space of Shopping: Mobilizing Dreams for Public Culture
—Sharon Zukin
Chapter 9. Gates, Barriers, and the Rise of Affinity: Parsing Public-Private Space in Postindustrial America
—Hal Rothman
PART IV. PUBLIC IDENTITY
Chapter 10. To Serve the Living: The Public and Civic Identity of African American Funeral Directors
—Suzanne Smith
Chapter 11. Denizenship as Transnational Practice
—Rachel Ida Buff
Chapter 12. The Queen's Mirrors: Public Identity and the Process of Transformation in Cincinnati, Ohio
—Mary E. Frederickson
Epilogue: Pitfalls and Promises: Wither the "Public" in America?
—Sheila L. Croucher
Notes
List of Contributors
Index
Acknowledgments