Charles Colson

6 July 2010

Cultural Hegemony and the Immigrant Narrative

            Examination of the historical origins of America’s dominant culture in my first research post revealed multiple sources, but I was no closer to resolving its “unmarked” nature.  This effort seeks to understand how the dominance of white, English-speaking American culture has been maintained in the face of multiethnic, multilingual immigration and why it is that those who maintain this dominant culture are not more cognizant of their participation.  After an acquaintance with the concept of cultural hegemony through my graduate-level readings for history some years ago, I encountered it once again in the context of literary theory.  Other Marxists had used the term “hegemony” to indicate the political leadership of the working-class in a democratic revolution, but the Sardinian Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) developed it to explain why the “inevitable” socialist revolution predicted by orthodox Marxism had not occurred by the early twentieth century.  Capitalism, he contended, maintained control not simply through the force of political and economic coercion, but also ideologically through a culture in which the values of the bourgeoisie became the “common sense” values of all.  In terms of the immigrant narrative, I posited, a consensus culture developed in which new arrivals (working class) identified their own good with the good of the dominant culture (bourgeoisie), and strove to assimilate (helped to maintain the status quo rather than revolting).  Could I find evidence for this interpretation?

            I looked first to historians.  Though somewhat dated, T. J. Jackson Lears’s appraisal was useful for the specific examples drawn from American historiography to prove the viability of cultural hegemony as a tool for analysis.  He cites Eugene Genovese’s study of slavery that recognized the minority culture’s resources for solidarity and resistance but noted how “elements of the master’s paternalistic worldview penetrated the slave’s consciousness as well . . . powerlessness combined with paternalism to influence the slave’s consciousness in ways that reinforced the master’s hegemony” (574).  Evidently even minority groups might buy into the values of the dominant culture.  Gramsci emphasized the constant formation and reformation of alliances within “historical blocs” and Lears offers the case of a hegemonic culture in transition.  In The Transformation of Virginia, 1740-1790 Rhys Issac “showed how a traditional culture sanctioning deference and display gave ground before a popular evangelical ethos promoting contractual social relations, ascetic self-denial, and domestic privacy” (587).  This seemed to be a matter of contesting social classes from a common British origin.  How did the theoretical model apply to assimilation of immigrants without the common language and nationality?

Paula S. Rothenberg’s collection of short articles, White Privilege: Essential Readings on the Other Side of Racism, yielded several useful insights.  In it, Harlan Dalton distinguishes between ethnicity—“the bearer of culture” which exists independently of others—and race—the social construct and determinant of social position which exists only in relation to others.  “Although the members of a given ethnic group may, for a time, find themselves on the bottom by virtue of their recent arrival, their lack of language or job skills, or even because of rank discrimination, that position usually is not long-term.  Race and hierarchy, however, are indelibly wed” (17).  James R. Barrett and David Roediger point out that Greeks, Italians, and Slavs were initially regarded as “not-yet-white ethnics,” that the “state of whiteness was approached gradually and controversially,” and—perhaps most important for the model of cultural hegemony—that “[t]he authority of the state itself both smoothed and complicated that approach” (33).  Karen Brodkin relates “how Jews became white folks.”  “The twenty-three million European immigrants who came to work in U.S. cities after 1880 were too many and too concentrated to disperse and blend,” and by the 1920s, when racism and eugenics overlapped with the nativism of WASP aristocrats, there was flagrant anti-immigrant and anti-Semitic discrimination in higher education (33).  Education, we have noted in class discussions, was a key mechanism in moving from menial to middle class.  Brodkin attributes the economic mobility of Jews and other European immigrants to the post-World War II GI Bill (preferential hiring, small business startup loans, low-interest home loans, educational benefits) and labels it an “affirmative action program for white males” due to the discrimination against black GIs in various government agencies that administered the program.  In distinction to de jure segregation against African-Americans, Mexican immigrants in the Southwest struggled to overcome de facto segregation.  Neil Foley chronicles the assimilation efforts of urban, middle class Mexican-American members of LULAC (League of United Latin American Citizens) to construct new identities “in order to arrogate to themselves the privileges of whiteness routinely denied to Mexicans, Blacks, Chinese, and Indians” (51).

The dominant culture, represented by the courts and the census, constructed whiteness in conflicting and often contradictory ways.  Foley relates two citizenship cases before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1923:  Japanese immigrant Takao Ozawa, who was denied citizenship on the grounds that he was of the Mongolian, not the Caucasian race (although his skin was regarded as white), and the Asian Indian Bhagat Singh Thind who, though he qualified as Caucasian, was disqualified because he did not have white skin.  The 1930 census was notable enumerating as “Mexican” those born or having parents born in Mexico who were “not definitely white.”  When ninety-six percent were returned as non-White, the Mexican government and many Mexican Americans strenuously objected.  Having their whiteness restored did not prevent Texas public schools from segregating them into a “parallel universe of whiteness” (53-55).  For many immigrant groups, assimilation meant becoming American, which is also to say, becoming White.

Foley notes, “Assimilation, however, is not only about what one leaves behind; it is also about what one is moving toward, what one acquires in the process of cultural exchange and fusion “ (55).  This observation prompted me to look for evidence of the Gramscian model in popular culture.  “The popular,” according to anthropologist Elizabeth G. Traube, “is not produced by imposing a dominant onto a subordinate culture, but by the dominant reaching into the cultural formations of subordinate groups, selectively appropriating elements, and stitching them into new discourses” (134).   She draws from the work of historian Lawrence Levine and sociologist Paul DiMaggio to link the separation of high culture from popular culture to class formation in the United States between the 1830s and the 1890s.  Urban social elites founded symphony orchestras and fine art museums, “sacralizing” those cultural forms and excluding working class people not only by high admission prices but by the amount of “cultural capital” required to appropriate what was displayed.  Commercial popular culture split into “genteel” and “sensational” forms.  The emergent middle classes consumed magazines, sentimental fiction and the respectable theater with a “disciplined self-restraint that became the badge of middle-class identity” (138).  Working class entertainments included “dime novels, the penny press, Barnum’s American Museum, blackface minstrelsy, and melodramatic theater” (138).  Rowdy popular amusements aroused anxiety among the middle classes and intellectuals attacked sensational commercial culture as “immoral and demoralizing, a potentially dangerous influence on so-called savage immigrant workers” (138).  Traube notes the use of hegemony in Eric Lott’s work interpreting minstrelsy as a form of cultural resistance.  The interracial relations of power gave its white middle-class creators control over the means of racial representation, allowing them to produce “blackness” for white consumption.  At the same time, “newly proletarianized ethnic workers lived their whiteness in contradictory ways, in fear of becoming ‘black,’ yet also fascinated by that prospect” (139).

The formation of mass audiences in the twentieth century (movies and television are consumed at comparable rates by all social classes) has eroded the nineteenth-century correlation of culture with class, Traube explains.  Instead of a “manipulative mass culture controlled by its producers,” studies of contemporary cultural forms and practices describe reception as “an active, socially differentiated process of negotiation” (142).  She offers José Limón’s analysis of corridos, a Mexican ballad tradition of the South Texas border expressing the struggle of Mexican workers against Anglo-American domination.  Transposed to urban settings in the 1930s, it was appropriated by Chicano poets in the 1960s and mixed with elements of high modernism to create a new political art associated with the borderland.  Traube also cites George Lipsitz’s use of the border model to argue that “living between different cultural systems gives ethnic minorities a heightened tolerance for irony and ambiguity” (143).  He describes Chicano rock musicians in East Los Angeles between the 1950s and 1980s who mixed “their own folk traditions with musical forms and styles borrowed from other minority as well as mainstream traditions,” concluding that a minority group made itself visible to the mainstream in a form that challenged dominant constructions of ethnic difference (143).  Traube echoes to the materialist basis of Gramscian analysis when she argues that “the culture industries today . . . are more interested in incorporating and marketing diversity than in limiting or suppressing it” (143).

Cultural hegemony not only allows for the “melting pot” of ethnicities, it accounts for the transmission of the cultural construct of race.  European whites’ devaluation of American Indians and Africans created the racialized society to which all subsequent immigrants would come.  Becoming American meant becoming “white” in the eyes of the dominant culture.  Because the newcomers were the “other,” the ones not of the dominant culture, whites tended not to think of themselves in racial terms.  White people, Harlan Dalton explains, exhibit a “race obliviousness” which is “the natural consequence of being in the driver’s seat” (17).  Whiteness, like the dominant culture in America, became the ubiquitous, unremarked norm into which all other races and ethnicities were to be assimilated.  Gramsci’s model also accounts for change.  People cannot live together without some things “rubbing off.”  After 234 years, America has amendments to the Constitution, Civil Rights legislation, diversity training, recognition of multicultural holidays, bilingual and ESL programs, ethnic foods in grocery stores, blues, jazz, rap; Anglo converts to Islam and Buddhism, and even changes in the literary canon.  Despite cultural imperialism and political failures, immigrants still come, attracted by the ideals embodied in the American Dream: opportunities for “life, liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Works Cited

Barrett, James R. and David Roediger. “How White People Became White.” White Privilege: Essential Readings on the Other Side of Racism. Ed. Paula S. Rothenberg. New York: Worth Publishers, 2002. 29-34. Print.

Brodkin, Karen. “How Jews Became White Folks.” White Privilege: Essential Readings on the Other Side of Racism. Ed. Paula S. Rothenberg. New York: Worth Publishers, 2002. 35-49. Print.

Dalton, Harlan. “Failing to See.” White Privilege: Essential Readings on the Other Side of Racism. Ed. Paula S. Rothenberg. New York: Worth Publishers, 2002. 15-18. Print.

Foley, Neil. “Becoming Hispanic: Mexican Americans and Whiteness.” White Privilege: Essential Readings on the Other Side of Racism. Ed. Paula S. Rothenberg. New York: Worth Publishers, 2002. 49-60. Print.

Lears, T. J. Jackson. “The Concept of Cultural Hegemony: Problems and Possibilities” American Historical Review. 90.3 (1985): 567-593. JSTOR. 2 July 2010.

Rothenberg, Paula S., ed. White Privilege: Essential Readings on the Other Side of Racism. New York: Worth Publishers, 2002. Print.

Traube, Elizabeth G. "‘The Popular’ in American Culture” Annual Review of Anthropology, 25 (1996): 127-151. JSTOR. 2 July 2010.