by George Lipsitz
about George Lipsitz
George Lipsitz is Professor of Black Studies and Sociology at the University of California-Santa Barbara. His books include How Racism Takes Place, American Studies in a Moment of Danger, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness, and Time Passages. He served as coeditor of the American Crossroads series at the University of California Press and is editor of the Critical American Studies series at the University of Minnesota Press.
Space
In order for history to take place, it takes places. American studies and cultural studies scholars have drawn on the ideas and insights of critical geographers Henri Lefebvre (1991), David Harvey (2000), Yi-fu Tuan (1977), Cindy Katz (2004), Ruth Wilson Gilmore (2007), Laura Pulido (1996), and many others to explore the creative possibilities and the moral meanings attributed to particular spaces and places. The politics and poetics of space permeate the culture of the United States as a nation through moral values that get attached to the open ranges of the western frontier and the far reaches of empire overseas; that contrast the barrio, the ghetto, and the reservation with the propertied and properly gendered suburban home; that juxtapose the finite limits of social space with the infinite possibilities of cyberspace and outer space. In both scholarly research and everyday life, the moral meanings attributed to these spaces and places have often been resolutely and creatively contested. For European political philosophers during the Renaissance, corruption came from time—from the particularity of historical events—while the universality of space was presumed to promote virtue and morality. After the discovery and conquest of the Americas, these ideas helped fuel the hope that the...
Memory
Memory is the modality in which the past is made new again and again. As Donald Lowe explains, “There is no past in itself. It is forever lost. But each present symbolizes a past on its own terms” (1982, 39). Mediated forms of communication shape the meaning of memory through both their form and their content. The technologies of telegraphy, photography, sound recording, radio, motion pictures, and television transformed experiences of time and place by connecting the “here and now” to the “there and then.” The photograph, the phonograph, and the motion picture preserved images, sounds, and performances across time, exposing audiences dispersed over space to memories of a vicariously shared “past” that they had not experienced personally. Mass communication undermined the specificity of local memories and traditions by producing new experiences of temporal simultaneity across spaces (Cooley 1909; Czitrom 1982). Accelerating processes that had been produced initially by the typographic revolution of the fifteenth century, electronic mass media transformed the subjective perception of time and space by circulating cultural texts beyond the historical moments, places, communities, and traditions that imbued them with their original social meanings (Benjamin 1969). This produced a new chronology of discourse, as each item of...