Document Type
Reconsideration
Abstract
[First paragraph]
The tenth anniversary of Michael Denning's The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century is a fitting occasion to revisit a work posing questions that remain fresh today and probably will as long as there is a need to analyze the relationship between dissident cultural movements and a non-egalitarian social order. Encyclopedic in scope, the book is a study of the "cultural production" of the Popular Front of the 1930s and 40s that moves eruditely through a wide range of objects, including proletarian literature, popular music, theater, film, cartoons, and cultural theory. Denning makes substantial interventions into each of these fields - without simply collapsing them - and shows how each was connected by a broader historical impulse. The book at once celebrates the depth and breadth of politically left culture, interprets its texts, recovers neglected works, and reminds us of the once suppressed and forgotten ties many famous popular culture figures had to the left. Denning not only offers interpretations of a remarkable number of primary texts, but also intervenes in the scholarly debates at multiple levels. Especially impressive is his command of the secondary scholarship both of the individual fields and of the overarching movement. The book's footnotes expose us to the prodigious reading that undergirds his primary narrative and succinctly articulate theses that for other writers would be books in themselves. That The Cultural Front was the subject of substantial symposia in the journals Labor History and Intellectual History Newsletter suggests that it has reached beyond the more familiar disciplines of literary and cultural analysis.
Repository Citation
Cunningham, Charles D.. "The Dialectics of Hope: Marxism and Method in The Cultural Front." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 8, no. 1, 2008, pp. 1–19. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol8/iss1/28