Elite culture, popular culture and the politics of hegemony

In a recent issue of the Journal of Popular Culture, Ray B. Browne (editor of that journal and Chairman of the Popular Culture Department of Bowling Green State University) made an impassioned plea for the educational uti l i ty-and, hence, the academic respectability--of popular culture studies. 1 Such an argument needs to be made, he, and others, imply, because an entrenched and inflexible old guard-the conservative custodians of 'high culture' or, rather, and more precisely, in an academic setting, the humanities and the artswrefuse to take such studies seriously. 'Popular culture', such critics tell us, is naught but escapist and highly conventionalised entertainment and, more importantly, lacking in aesthetic merit. But Browne, in making his case, maintains that 'Popular culture is the practical--pragmatic--Humanities ' and as such can serve as a means of preparing and introducing otherwise uninterested students to the humanities. Still, the critics remain unconvinced and popular culture studies continue to struggle on, the poor step-sister of more respectable 'academic' studies. This impasse, another student of popular culture suggests, is, in large measure, due to the failure of those who study popular culture 'to develop a systematic and intellectually convincing argument about the cultural and aesthetic function of [their] own subject-matter, and, with very few exceptions, [they have] thus not been able to offer an interpretive practice that could be of interest to the humanities in general'. 2 As a consequence, popular culture studies remain on the periphery of academia. As Winfred Fluck has written: