Tara Brabazon - Thinking Popular Culture: War, Terrorism and Writing

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THINKING POPULAR CULTURE

Tara Brabazon has ushered cultural studies out of the drawing room and prodded it back onto the streets, where it matters more than ever.

Justin OConnor, Queensland University of Technology, Australia

Brabazon is a war writer, grappling not with the culture wars but with war itself, including the wars within. She offers a cultural studies appropriate to the period between 9/11 and the present. Her elegiac essays range widely. Brilliant Brabazon is an antidote to the Bush war presidency and its dispiriting denouement. She makes cultural studies matter again.

Ben Agger, University of Texas at Arlington, USA

Tara Brabazon has written a beautiful, passionate, and political book about popular culture in which the learning of pleasure is matched by the pleasure of learning, critique, and civic engagement. One cannot think about politics without engaging popular culture as a powerful educational force, and Thinking Popular Culture is one of the best books available to confront this crucial question with great insight, enormous courage, and sense of social responsibility.

Henry Giroux, McMaster University, Canada

Dedicated to my dancing mother Doris, my fashionable father Kevin and my husband Steve, the Levon Helm of Cultural Studies.

A special dedication must go to the 10,000+ students in three countries who have shared their education with me since 1992. Through war, terrorism, darkness and fear, you have shown grace, intelligence, humour and empathy. Whatever distance separates us, I cherish the moments of thinking and dancing, laughing and writing.

Finally, thanks to the Popular Culture Collective for support, advice and sharing a kind and respectful international community.

Thinking Popular Culture

War, Terrorism and Writing

TARA BRABAZON
University of Brighton, UK

First published 2008 by Ashgate Publishing

Published 2016 by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

Copyright Tara Brabazon 2008

Tara Brabazon has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Notice:
Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Brabazon, Tara
Thinking popular culture: terrorism, war and writing
1. Popular culture
I. Title
306

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Brabazon, Tara.
Thinking popular culture : war, terrorism and writing / by Tara Brabazon.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 978-0-7546-7529-7
1. Popular culture. 2. Terrorism in mass media. 3. War in mass media. 4. Mass media and public opinion. 5. Digital media. I. Title.

HM621.B73 2008
306.0917'521--dc22

2008028449

ISBN 9780754675297 (hbk)

Contents

Introduction
Interventions in/denial

Like most stories of writing, this tale begins with reading. Irvine Welsh is a famous writer, one of the select few whose name is larger on the dust jacket of books than the title. He is also aggitatively creative: he has built new vocabularies and graphologies, transforming how words appear on the page. But I did not realize the scale of his importance, relevance and generosity until I read his foreword to Paul Vasilis The First Black Footballer where he outlines the social costs of a ruling class dominating the voices and attitudes of a time, spewing out values and ideas that create a narrow and damaging view of history and culture.

The point is that while a well-funded cultural system exists to spew out ruling-class culture, any culture, art and history promoted outside of this system relies largely on concerned maverick groups or individuals. The society is only liberal or pluralist to the extent that it tolerates those different voices which are generally let in to spice up the mainstream only when it becomes intolerably bland. In the meantime, we lose so much of our culture.

Welshs support for this book was crucial. Vasili had crafted an important project of historical recovery. He rebuilt the life of Arthur Wharton, the first black British footballer. Such a valuable manuscript rarely attracts an audience, with sports fans drawn to season reviews and hagiographies. Irvine Welshs name on the cover granted the book a wide audience. He used the space in his foreword to enact a precise and pointed attack on those in power and the political apparatus they use to keep it. He recognized that the powerful, the white, the ruling class take what they want from disempowered lives and experiences to freshen up the marketing of popular culture, but tolerates little sharp critique or resistance. The ignorance of black history in supposedly quintessential British sports is merely one symptom of a blind ignorance of difference and the fear of change and criticism.

At a time where university research is defined as that which corporations, pharmaceutical companies and conservative governments pay us to do, those of us who think, read, write and create have some choices to make. For me, becoming a McDonalds Professor of Nutrition or the Body Shop Professor of Alternative Therapies holds little appeal. It is Irvine Welsh and writers like him who crash through the mediocre, the meaningless and the banal. Through his non-fiction even more than his fiction, he reminds us about class and its consequences on peoples lives.

Inequalities in society are what the rich reward themselves with. And these inequalities not only have to be maintained but justified.

What we really need is freedom from choice.

In a time when choosing a mobile phone ring tone is a political statement about identity, Irvine Welshs attack on choice and inequality is more accurate and incisor sharp than has emerged from political parties in years. At some point in the last two decades, most citizens in post-industrial nations made a decision that choice (in shopping centres) was more important than equality (in society). Welsh reminds readers that there are other ways of thinking, being and writing.

The power and passion in Welshs work emanates from non-fiction, rather than his fiction. But how is his writing to be categorized: political diatribe, literary journalism, ficto-criticism, auto-ethnography? Many of these labels are destructive, involving journalists and critics who cannot write putting labels on those who can. Publishers are mindful to keep their fiction and non-fiction lists as separate as skin after a post-wax Brazilian. Those who write between categories and move between fashion and the archive, university and community are living in the wrong time for publishing and politics.

Irvine Welsh gave many of us the permission to write, think and create, even though we were not born into the right class, the right country or had the accent, name or university degree that was meant to create the network to permit publishing and critical review. Instead of reeling off famous literary influences, he stated that:

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