Time Passages

Collective Memory and American Popular Culture

2001
Author:

George Lipsitz

The classic work on collective memory and popular culture in the United States.

Probes postwar America’s complicated relationship between historical memory and commercial culture—popular television, music, and film.

Time Passages is a far-reaching—and perhaps permanent—contribution to cultural studies.

San Francisco Review of Books

Probes the complicated relationship between postwar America between historical memory and commercial culture—popular television, music, and film.

George Lipsitz is professor of ethnic studies at the University of California, San Diego, where he serves as director of the Thurgood Marshall Institute. He is the author of many books, including American Studies in a Moment of Danger, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics (1998), and Dangerous Crossroads: Popular Music, Postmodernism, and the Poetics of Place (1997). He also edited Stan Weir's Singlejack Solidarity (2004).

Time Passages is a far-reaching—and perhaps permanent—contribution to cultural studies.

San Francisco Review of Books

This high take on ‘low’ culture examines the complex web of popular narratives that arise from and create the American collective memory. Studying the period from the end of World War II to the present, Lipsitz inventively explores the popular canon, turning variously to television, rock music, film, novels, and the Mardi Gras Indians of New Orleans.

Publishers Weekly

What really separates Lipsitz from earlier critics of popular culture is that he got his rock diploma from the high-school gym, not the Frankfurt School. Lipsitz knows the color of the labels, the B-sides, the cover versions.

Boston Phoenix Literary Section

In a series of provocative and finely crafted essays on film, rock ’n’ roll, early television, popular novels, New Orleans Mardi Gras celebrations, and other aspects of popular culture, Lipsitz argues that popular culture has been, and remains, an arena of hope, possibility, criticism, and even resistance for millions of ordinary people.

American Studies

With the contemporary language of popular culture, the author offers many insights into the diversity of the American experience.

Journal of the American Studies Association of Texas