Review essay: social history and the arts

Journal of Social History, Summer, 2006 by Julia L. Foulkes

Berlin: The Symphony Continues: Orchestrating Architectural, Social, and Artistic Change in Germany's New Capital. Edited by Carol Anne Costabile-Heming, Rachel J. Halverson, Kristie A. Foell (New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2004. x plus 328 pp.).

For the Millions: American Art and Culture Between the Wars. By A. Joan Saab (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. 227 pp.).

Ghana's Concert Party Theatre. By Catherine M. Cole (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001. xi plus 196 pp.).

Hello, Hello Brazil: Popular Music in the Making of Modern Brazil. By Bryan McCann (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004. ix plus 296 pp.).

The arts are a realm of experience most often noted for their thoroughly qualitative and subjective nature and their tie to a wealthy and powerful elite. Given the emphases of social historians, then, perhaps it is not surprising that scholarship on popular culture outweighs that on the "high" arts. Popular culture offers a way in which to talk about large groups of people, many of whom have been overlooked, such as the poor and oppressed, and give their actions and pleasures some political impact. This interest, however, has resulted in less scholarship on the high arts from historians interested in the social forces embedded in and propelling the arts. That scholarship still largely resides in other places in the academy: literature, art history, music, theater, and dance departments. Scholars in these departments have also been greatly influenced by the now decades-long attention to the social context of the arts and regularly produce research that furthers that approach. But formal analysis and disciplinary dialogue still tend to shape research so that historians know little of this work, or, at least, it has made relatively little impact on most historians' pedagogical or research agendas. Most often, the difference between how a dance scholar and a historian examines the work of Martha Graham, for example, is primarily a question of emphasis, and one that may make sense to perpetuate even as these lines of inquiry are converging; historians tend to pay less homage to aesthetic accomplishments and more to the power of social and political currents.

This emphasis is now dominant, but it is not new. Social history of the arts is, perhaps, bound to Arnold Hauser s The Social History of Art, first published in 1951, and a massive four-volume, thousand-page effort that spans the Neolithic period to the mid-twentieth century. With a history of visual arts at its core, the volumes covered the social context of artistic creativity by concentrating on the philosophical and intellectual trends of an age that influenced painting, sculpture, literature, music, and even film. Over the last fifty years sociologists and historians have followed Hauser in examining the arts as social practice, embedded in productive social relations beyond intellectual trends to forces of economics, politics, racialization, nationalism, religion, and gender, and constituted in these relations rather than mirroring or transcending them. This approach of the arts as social practice is now a truism and serves as the starting point, whether from the perspective of sociology, anthropology, cultural studies, art history, or history. So, then, is there anything to be learned from social history? Are the lessons of social history firmly incorporated in the approach of cultural history now? How does this line of inquiry extend beyond popular culture? Four recent books offer an opportunity to think through these questions.

Catherine M. Cole, in Ghana's Concert Party Theatre, analyzes the meanings and impact of theatrical troupes begun in the 1920s that traveled throughout West Africa for most of the twentieth century. These troupes performed a collage of material drawn from American movies, music from the Caribbean and South America, Ghanian highlife, and minstrelsy, all in comic variety shows with elaborate characters and costumes. Troupes primarily performed to working-class, urban and agricultural, audiences. This popular entertainment has been the subject of previous scholarly inquiry, primarily in analysis of the texts of performance and its impact on contemporary Ghanian culture. Cole, on the other hand, intends to mark the historical change of the form, noting the change in audiences, troupe size, use of music, and venue. She calls her approach a "cultural history of performance form and a social history of the people who created and consumed it." (3) Her nomenclature, associating text with cultural history and people with social history, adopts the distinction that she is intent upon transcending. She wants to integrate performance, text, and people to go beyond a reliance on theories, particularly postcolonial theory, and move toward conclusions grounded in historical evidence. For instance, in an introductory section on postcolonial theory, Cole argues that "the subaltern" is not a silent, suppressed group; instead, by being more attuned to non-verbal communication and the variety of African languages, Cole intends to expose the ways in which Ghanians spoke to each other. Cole, then, incorporates the lessons of social history in showing how an examination of popular culture that goes beyond textual analysis can pierce the sureness of the latest theory or the accepted political narrative.