Review essay: social history and the arts.

Berlin: The Symphony Continues: Orchestrating Architectural, Social, and Artistic Change in Germany's New Capital. Edited by Carol Anne Costabile-Heming, Rachel J. Halverson, Kristie A. Foell (New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2004. x plus 328 pp.).

For the Millions: American Art and Culture Between the Wars. By A. Joan Saab (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. 227 pp.).

Ghana's Concert Party Theatre. By Catherine M. Cole (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001. xi plus 196 pp.).

Hello, Hello Brazil: Popular Music in the Making of Modern Brazil. By Bryan McCann (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004. ix plus 296 pp.).

The arts are a realm of experience most often noted for their thoroughly qualitative and subjective nature and their tie to a wealthy and powerful elite. Given the emphases of social historians, then, perhaps it is not surprising that scholarship on popular culture outweighs that on the "high" arts. Popular culture offers a way in which to talk about large groups of people, many of whom have been overlooked, such as the poor and oppressed, and give their actions and pleasures some political impact. This interest, however, has resulted in less scholarship on the high arts from historians interested in the social forces embedded in and propelling the arts. That scholarship still largely resides in other places in the academy: literature, art history, music, theater, and dance departments. Scholars in these departments have also been greatly influenced by the now decades-long attention to the social context of the arts and regularly produce research that furthers that approach. But formal analysis and disciplinary dialogue still tend to shape research so that historians know little of this work, or, at least, it has made relatively little impact on most historians' pedagogical or research agendas. Most often, the difference between how a dance scholar and a historian examines the work of Martha Graham, for example, is primarily a question of emphasis, and one that may make sense to perpetuate even as these lines of inquiry are converging; historians tend to pay less homage to aesthetic accomplishments and more to the power of social and political currents.

This emphasis is now dominant, but it is not new. Social history of the arts is, perhaps, bound to Arnold Hauser s The Social History of Art, first published in 1951, and a massive four-volume, thousand-page effort that spans the Neolithic period to the mid-twentieth century. With a history of visual arts at its core, the volumes covered the social context of artistic creativity by concentrating on the philosophical and intellectual trends of an age that influenced painting, sculpture, literature, music, and even film. Over the last fifty years sociologists and historians have followed Hauser in examining the arts as social practice, embedded in productive social relations beyond intellectual trends to forces of economics, politics, racialization, nationalism, religion, and gender, and constituted in these relations rather than mirroring or transcending them. This approach of the arts as social practice is now a truism and serves as the starting point, whether from the perspective of sociology, anthropology, cultural studies, art history, or history. So, then, is there anything to be learned from social history? Are the lessons of social history firmly incorporated in the approach of cultural history now? How does this line of inquiry extend beyond popular culture? Four recent books offer an opportunity to think through these questions.

Catherine M. Cole, in Ghana's Concert Party Theatre, analyzes the meanings and impact of theatrical troupes begun in the 1920s that traveled throughout West Africa for most of the twentieth century. These troupes performed a collage of material drawn from American movies, music from the Caribbean and South America, Ghanian highlife, and minstrelsy, all in comic variety shows with elaborate characters and costumes. Troupes primarily performed to working-class, urban and agricultural, audiences. This popular entertainment has been the subject of previous scholarly inquiry, primarily in analysis of the texts of performance and its impact on contemporary Ghanian culture. Cole, on the other hand, intends to mark the historical change of the form, noting the change in audiences, troupe size, use of music, and venue. She calls her approach a "cultural history of performance form and a social history of the people who created and consumed it." (3) Her nomenclature, associating text with cultural history and people with social history, adopts the distinction that she is intent upon transcending. She wants to integrate performance, text, and people to go beyond a reliance on theories, particularly postcolonial theory, and move toward conclusions grounded in historical evidence. For instance, in an introductory section on postcolonial theory, Cole argues that "the subaltern" is not a silent, suppressed group; instead, by being more attuned to non-verbal communication and the variety of African languages, Cole intends to expose the ways in which Ghanians spoke to each other. Cole, then, incorporates the lessons of social history in showing how an examination of popular culture that goes beyond textual analysis can pierce the sureness of the latest theory or the accepted political narrative.

Cole proceeds to interrogate the typical story of colonial oppression, starting with minstrelsy. Here she jumps directly into a thicket of scholarship that is both heavily theoretical and very influential, such as Eric Lott's Love and Theft, but notably lacking in attention to the genre's international dimensions. She sets the frame for her discussion of minstrelsy by recognizing that North American scholars are far more interested in this aspect of the concert party than Ghanians themselves, primarily because minstrelsy's racial dimensions are far more overt in the United States. Blackface performance in Ghana (called "tranting") was more about artifice and creating the necessary spectacle of theater. African rituals of body painting were at least another tradition, in addition to colonial racial conceptions and the influence of American culture from A1 Jolsen to Ethel Waters, that led to different meanings of blackface. These varied, even contradictory, influences expose the importance of the diaspora in forming identity among Ghanians and the use of performance in the social and cultural transformations of colonialism. Cole suggests, in fact, that the concert parties mediated the African and western worlds, first for western-educated audiences in coastal cities until the 1920s, and then for working-class and rural audiences in the 1930s and beyond.

Exactly what kinds of mediation, with what results, and which members of the audiences experienced what? These are the perennial, largely unanswerable problems of performance history and the ones that social historians are often keen to know. Cole works hard to analyze what she can--newspaper reviews, some letters from early troupe members--to get at audience response, and the possible reactions she offers make sense. For instance, "youngmen," defined by social position rather than age and identified with new western education, growing economic power, and autonomy, constituted the bulk of the audience of concert parties in colonial Gold Coast. Cole claims that they were attracted to the concerts because they provoked laughter and a self-conscious recognition of their ambiguous, and changing, social positions. (70-71) This seems likely, and yet there is little definitive evidence to prove it. There is just more to investigate about production: transcripts of the plays themselves, audio recordings beginning in the 1960s, and interviews with longtime performers. So her conclusion that the concert parties subverted the Anglophilia of colonialism is most convincing in terms of the troupe members themselves; "concert party practitioners stress not what they borrow, but rather how they transform it." (112) Cole goes on, however, to argue that an analogous transformation occurs amongst those participating in the concert party theaters, whether on stage or in the audience, but it is a much harder task to demonstrate this broad societal impact. This, of course, is what social historians want--and are still trying to figure out how to prove.

One of the ways in which historians judge impact is by popularity of the cultural form, with popularity most often understood as the numbers of people involved. Since social history began by attending to the mass of people left out of the conventional political narrative of rulers and elite, popular culture is the logical corollary for this concern. The wealth of inspiring, ground-breaking scholarship on popular culture in the 1970s and '80s, such as that by Kathy Peiss, Roy Rosenzweig, and Lewis Erenberg, serves as evidence for the new understandings that resulted from new questions and a new approach. (1) Focusing on dance halls, cabarets, amusement parks, dime novels, and movies gave voice (and body) to previously undistinguished masses. And that knowledge has altered the conventional political narrative to such an extent that Warren Susman, for example, could ask in 1973--and inspire dissertations, articles, and monographs even now--whether Mickey Mouse or Franklin Delano Roosevelt was more crucial to understanding the United States in the 1930s. (2)

But it is useful to re-visit just what popularity means in the arts (whether high or low), and what we learn from it. Cole argues that the concert party theatre in Ghana was popular in the sense that the people performing and watching these shows constituted the majority of the population, even if not its base of political and economic power; the shows themselves garnered large audiences who consistently professed their enjoyment; and the form has had tremendous impact on Ghanian artists of all kinds, in the past and present. (2) Much of the scholarship on popular culture argues (or assumes) that its numerical weight (the number of people involved) is enough to justify--and explain--its importance. Cole reminds us that there are other barometers of influence: enjoyment and traceable effects on other artists and cultural forms. All three factors do not necessarily prove larger societal impact, and, more often, whatever perceptible impact there is may reinforce common conceptions rather than alter or decode them. This task of reinforcement, particularly by encompassing groups of people often unconsidered, is still a useful one.

In Hello, Hello Brazil, Bryan McCann continues the investigation of the impact of the popular arts by considering one of its institutional forms: radio. McCann covers the music scene of Rio de Janeiro during the reign of Getulio Vargas, from the 1920s to the 1950s, and looks at the ways in which different musical styles, such as samba and choro, were attempts at defining a national culture. This effort involved governmental regulations of the radio industry, marketing and packaging of musical styles and stars, the creation of fan clubs, and a transnational dialogue with North American culture. Radio facilitated this conversation, one based in Rio de Janeiro but extending throughout the nation as radio technology and signals became stronger. In addition to the wider audience radio could attract, it also signaled the growing industrialization and urbanization that Brazil was undergoing. The music of samba and choro, in particular, encompassed these vast social changes by moving older, rural musical traditions into the city, adding saucy lyrics here, sharpening rhythms there, and then distributing the re-packaged, nationalist music back to the city and the heartland.

This story carries shades of co-option by a dictatorial regime in promoting national unity, and control by commercial interests in pursuit of profits, but McCann insists that popular music in Brazil existed between these two poles. In his account of two early radio stations, he shows how government control of Radio MES (instigated by the Ministry of Education and Health), with programming based on ideals of erudition--recorded classical music--led to a small number of listeners. Radio Nacional, on the other hand, drew large audiences by primarily playing samba, which appealed to a broad range of people and also depended on and promoted a commercial market of recordings. As the glow of samba as Brazil's "authentic" music blosso0med, Radio Nacional received resources and protection from the government that strengthened the musicians, the radio station, and the music it favored.

If government intervention had its beneficial aspects for popular music, McCann uses the history of samba to show how market interests supported the tie of samba to favelas, the hill communities heavily populated by Afro-Brazilians. Samba had no pure tie to the favelas because it developed in a more fluid exchange between the favelas and the working and middle-class, white and mixed race neighborhoods of Rio. The promotion of the favelas as the origin of samba was a part of the rhetoric of racial democracy that began to cohere in the 1930s. As Radio Nacional and advertisers picked up and began promoting this rhetoric, Afro-Brazilian sambistas gained economic sustenance, national prominence, and often a means by which to challenge the rhetoric of racial democracy. By the late 1940s, lyrics to samba often lamented the failures of integration and racial equality.

In addition to radio, advertising, and government, McCann concentrates on the producers and artists of music, although his chapter on fan clubs and auditorium programs is the most evocative portrayal of the larger impact of popular music. Auditorium programs consisted of variety shows performing before a live studio audience and then broadcasted on radio; fan clubs developed in the wake of popular singers, such as Emilinha Borba and Marlene, the two singers with the largest clubs and the most bitter rivalry. Both auditorium programs and fan clubs came about from a shift in radio audiences to the working-class and poor in the suburbs. Fan clubs, in particular, created a sense of community and purpose for those involved, and often these were people pushed out of other communities--gay men, working-class and poor women. These clubs were similar to populist political organizations and sports clubs in that they were "hierarchical, zealous, characterized by a sense of mission, and given to noisy public display." (211) And all of these groups signaled the emergence of a political voice for the working classes, although one that was confined to narrow channels.

For McCann, then, popular music in Brazil was a movement of democracy, pulling people into the market economy and political process, if only partially and with inconsistent results. The most significant impact of popular culture is its democratizing possibilities, even though scholars may overstate its effects. In this, McCann parallels others in this emphasis and overstatement. If the profession's predisposition to the liberating potential of popular culture is not surprising, is it translatable to the high arts?

Joan Saab applies this question of democratization to the visual arts in the 1930s in the United States in For the Millions. Largely a kind of institutional history that focuses on the Federal Arts Project (FAP) of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), Saab argues that the visual arts underwent a "desacralization" during this period, by which she means that artists, politicians, and arts' bureaucrats moved to remove (or at least burnish) the halo of genius around artists and their artworks. Initiatives like the FAP likened the artist to a farmer or bricklayer--another worker in need of relief. Similarly, the arts were pushed as something for all to participate in, not a separate realm of special talent or skill. The FAP instituted both parts of this desacralization movement, in the proliferation of murals in public places and the formation of Community Arts Centers, for example. Desacralization encouraged democracy, or so the FAP argued, and Saab is attuned to the contradictions of this movement. For art rested on definitions of uniqueness, the distinctiveness of individual creativity and skill, and special insight; democracy, in contrast, promoted the equality of all.

In many ways, some of these contradictions could be resolved through consumption. The Index of American Design, for instance, another project of the FAP, employed over 300 artists to make hand copies of 22,000 objects, most of which were considered American crafts. Not only did this project expand the category of art to include "folk" art, it promoted the distribution of these images to a wider audience through purchase for personal display. Saab also explores the connection between MOMA and department stores in promulgating modernism. An exhibit on housing design at MOMA featured furniture from Macy's and essentially taught consumers what to buy--how to find products both "modern" and "useful." The 1939-40 World's Fair in New York crystallized the efforts--and portended the failures--of democratization of the arts during this era. The fair dedicated two pavilions to art: one for "Masterpieces of Art," which featured foreign artists, and another for "Contemporary Arts," which presented the work of living American artists. This combination manifested the contradictory elements of democratization of the arts: the Masterpieces pavilion reified the sacredness of the objects inside but allowed for appreciation by all classes and peoples. The Contemporary Art pavilion, on the other hand, advocated public participation by setting up a working studio, offering demonstrations, and emphasizing the value of folk art and handicrafts. In many ways, the fair posited the contradictions and increased visibility of the arts. But Saab finds little silver lining in this when she looks at the planning and architecture of the fair itself as another kind of art to examine, because it is here that the transition of democratization via participation to consumption is most obvious. The fair featured corporate art, if you will, such as a large cash register that worked as a kind of sculptural top to the National Cash Register Building that tallied the day's visitors. Marketing and souvenirs occupied the planners and structured the fair as a buying experience. Saab concludes that "[u]ltimately, the Fair presented a vision of democracy intimately tied to consumer capitalism and a version of aesthetic experience linked to looking rather than doing." (156) By the end of 1940, even the WPA sponsored a "Buy American Art Week," signaling the turn from art-making to art-buying.

This attempt to examine democratization of the arts works particularly well in the Depression-era of the U.S. and in scholarship on popular culture, but perhaps not much beyond these areas. The high arts remain tied to the wealthy or, at least, the bourgeoisie, and democratization is not necessarily the goal. Many artists do not seek a widely diverse audience or claim a political role for their work. But this should not deter social historians from investigating the high arts, if only because our understanding of the dispossessed will be enhanced by better knowledge of how exclusion--in a variety of realms--works.

What framework beyond popularity and democratization, then, could social historians pursue? The obvious answer is the one that is drawing interest in other topics: that of places and spaces--cities, in particular. The tie of the arts to urban locations and processes is one that is accepted as commonplace, inevitable, eminently understandable--but largely unexamined. Recent economic studies focus on the financial benefits the arts provide; histories expose the intertwined lives of artists in particular places; analyses of architecture and urban planning map the visual and material changes of a city; public art arouses debate. (3) But relatively few histories take an in-depth look at how the arts structure urban planning, how changes in demographics affect arts institutions, how arts institutions have altered neighborhoods. This is one area in which social historians could contribute significantly to understanding the arts.

A new anthology of essays, Berlin: The Symphony Continues, attempts to put the arts in place. And, indeed, the recent history of Berlin may be one of the most provocative case studies of the intermingling of arts and urbanization. Organized into three sections--physical space, experiential space, and representation--the anthology draws together a variety of scholars in German Studies to examine the recent and ongoing changes in Berlin. Essays on film and literary representations of the contemporary moment outweigh those that focus on social transformations beyond individual artists. But two essays, in particular, point to the ways in which a keen attention to place may substantiate our understanding of the arts. An essay by Karein Goertz and Mick Kennedy traces the route of the Stadtbahn (S-Bahn), the elevated railroad that circles Berlin, through its eastern and western sections, which was constructed over one hundred years ago and re-connected in 1990. Goertz and Kennedy focus on this rail line to shift attention away from the architectural transformations of recent years in the center of Berlin, particularly Potsdamer Platz and Friedrichstrasse, and toward the spatial changes that Berliners encounter in daily, less grandiose, and more private ways. On the S-Bahn views are within sight and then gone, the rear windows of buildings are more prominent than the architectural facades, and spontaneous human moments animate the material, physical dimensions of the city. The authors "propose the term spationarratives to describe the hybridized understanding of body and memory, phenomena and text with which we describe and navigate urban space." (96) In this, they do more to reveal the potential insights of such an approach than offer actual definitive statements about significance. They examine film segments, poems, and novels that exemplify this kind of movement through urban spaces rather than determining a specific set of experiences. But the theoretical model based on an actual rail line offers a way to think about movement through the city that is less about migration or demographics and more about the social rituals of anonymity, contact, changing neighborhoods. This kind of framework of space, narratives, and movement through the city could serve as a particularly compelling way in which to ground the aesthetic experiences of city dwellers (such as an examination of graffiti, but beyond that as well).

Elizabeth Janik's essay on the battles in re-unified Berlin over its two Academies of the Arts and three public opera houses demonstrates the significance of the arts in Berlin. Given the longstanding, telling role of music in German nationalism, these battles have been heated and deeply political. The fusion of the two Academies of Arts sparked controversy over standards of artistic achievement, and, in particular, the extent of political engagement, with the western politically autonomous stance winning out. The status of three opera houses in one city caused even more rankling since it entangled money, an international star (Daniel Barenboim), taints of anti-Semitism, political wrangling, and the place of music in Germany's past and future. And the decision to keep all three opera houses--and fund them with public monies--indicates their centrality in city life. Janik's institutional account could be enhanced by more "spationarratives," however, by attending to the opera houses on their streets, as leisure destinations, places of work, and spaces inhabited. Adding the movement and fluidity of people who ride the S-Bahn would enliven the institutions to include those who pass through in addition to those who sustain them.

These books prove that the lessons of social history are enduring. They privilege social forces embedded in the arts over formal analysis of aesthetics; they go beyond individual artists or artworks to examine audience members, government officials, arts administrators, and institutions; they give political clout to people outside the political machinery or elite classes; they reveal and attempt to synthesize a variety of forces at play, such as economics, racialization, politics, and nationalism; and they ground theoretical concerns by adhering to evidence and the specifics of time and place. They prove, too, that there is a category of scholarship on the arts that falls neither into sociology nor cultural studies. The books do not attempt to create structural or theoretical models; rather, they remain tied to individual voices (in bulk, as much as possible) in a particular place at a particular time. They start from--and end with--that specificity. So, then, are they exemplary of the category of "social history of the arts"? Emphatically yes. But I believe that claiming the category is far less important than claiming the lessons. That is: most of these authors would probably call themselves cultural historians over social historians, and, as recent articles in this journal have noted, the envelopment of social history by cultural history may have been nearly complete (although, perhaps, temporary). (4) More important is the recognition of that achievement, which includes featuring more articles on the arts in journals such as this one, and the continual production of work that adheres to the lessons learned. The subtle, if contentious, differences in methodology or conclusion may make the scholarly world go 'round, but they also mask the overarching agreements.

But it is useful to recognize what these books do not do, and what this approach lacks. In general, our understanding of the effects of the arts is not as convincing as our understanding of the forces involved in the production of the arts. As with Cole and McCann, scholars tend to overstate the social impact of the arts, giving popular culture political influence and theatrical performances mediating authority beyond that which the evidence proves. If historians of the arts overstate large social effects of the arts, however, they may understate the individual, even ephemeral, transformations of the arts. By smashing the halo of artists with the weight of economics, politics, demographics, institutions, we may overlook aesthetic pleasures and powers, both for the artist and the audience member. Some may see this as a necessary slight, one in keeping with an emphasis on material concerns. But the neglect has harmful results, perhaps most of all in the case of the arts of oppressed peoples, such as those of the African diaspora. As the literature scholar Eileen Julien has pointed out, novels of African writers become used as sociological and historical texts to such an extent that we neglect their aesthetic achievements. (5) It may now be less a matter of neglect than blindness: we have trained ourselves to scrutinize the arts as products of social processes so that we cannot even see--much less believe in--the aesthetic dimensions and their meanings in people's lives. The harm, then, comes in perpetuating the ills of identity politics by reducing imaginative, transcendent possibilities to determinative social categories, and thereby further tightening the noose on these categories rather than loosening them.

Scholars of every ilk need to remain skeptical of the transformative powers of art. Art will not solve the problems of the world nor unlock the mysteries of the past. But we must reckon with that possibility. It is hard to resist--nor should we--the pleasure in expressiveness and the freedom in creativity. If we cannot pin down the arts' precise effects, we still need to leave room for inspiration, imagination, and the transgression, if not transcendence, of social boundaries. John Dewey compared the lessons of philosophy and the arts in a way that points to the subtleties of the task for scholars of the arts: "Philosophy is said to begin in wonder and end in understanding. Art departs from what has been understood and ends in wonder." (6) Understanding does not diminish the arts, but it is a necessarily partial picture. Our close analyses of lyrics, compiling of demographic and structural effects of urbanization, institutional histories, and pieced-together biographical details of performers and fans substantiate the broad place and impact of the arts in current and past lives. But if we drain the arts of wonder, we fail to honor the fragile hope that they offer.

Department of History

New York, NY 10011

ENDNOTES

1. These books are only the most well-known examples of this fruitful moment in scholarship on popular culture: Lewis Erenberg, Steppin' Out. New York Nightlife and the Transformation of American Culture, 1890-1930 (Westport, CT, 1981); Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in turn-of-the-century New York (Philadelphia, 1986); Roy Rosenzweig, Eight Hours for What we Will: Workers and Leisure in an Industrial City (New York, 1983).

2. Warren Susman, introduction to Culture and Commitment: 1929-45 (New York, 1973): 13.

3. The newly defined arena of cultural policy is generating a wealth of scholarship on contemporary issues in the arts, particularly in delineating the economic benefits that the arts provide. Three places, in particular, function as clearinghouses for this information: The Center for Arts and Culture (http://www.culturalpolicy.org/); Americans for the Arts (http://ww3.artsusa.org/); and the University of Chicago's Cultural Policy Center (http://culturalpolicy.uchicago.edu/).

4. See the special issue of this journal in Fall 2003, especially the article by Paula Fass, "Cultural History/Social History: Some Reflections on a Continuing Dialogue," Journal of Social History, v.37 #1 (Fall 2003): 39-46.

5. Personal conversations with Eileen Julien at the David Driskell Center for the Study of the African Diaspora, University of Maryland, 2002-03. See also her discussion and references in Eileen Julien, "Reading 'orality' in French-language novels from sub-Saharan Africa," in Francophone Postcolonial Studies: A Critical Introduction (London, 2003): 130.

6. John Dewey, Art as Experience (1934; reprint Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989): 274. For an extension of Dewey's insights into the contemporary realm of popular culture, including rap, somatics, and country music, see Richard Shusterman, Performing Live: Aesthetic Alternatives for the Ends of Art (Ithaca, 2000).

By Julia L. Foulkes

The New School