Culture in the Age of Three Worlds

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by Michael Denning

Verso

Due/Published February 2004, 224 pages, paper

ISBN 1859844499

Before the midpoint of the twentieth century, culture as a subject was routinely relegated to the background of any period's study. From the 1950s on, however, it moved very clearly to the foreground. Suddenly culture was everywhere: no longer the property of an elite, the masses had a culture and culture had a mass. Accordingly, the study of culture and the critique of culture became an increasingly central part of political and intellectual life--the cultural turn, as it came to be known in the humanities and social sciences. This book is a product of and a reflection on that cultural turn, which Michael Denning argues was a fundamental aspect of the age of three worlds, that short half-century (1945Ð1989) when it was imagined that the world was divided into three--the capitalist first world, the communist second world, and the decolonizing third world.

Recasting the legacies of British cultural studies and the radical traditions of the American studies movement in a global context, Denning analyzes the political and intellectual battles over the meanings of culture, addresses the rise of a distinctive "American ideology" based on this short "American century," and charts the lineaments of the global cultures that emerged as three worlds gave way to one.