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Routledge is a global publisher of academic books, journals and online resources in the humanities and social sciences.
(born 1944) Film-maker George Lucas envisioned his film series as both a return to the Saturday morning movie serials he had loved as a youth and as a retelling of myths which had taken root long before he was born. As movies, Star Wars (1977), The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and The Return of the Jedi (1983) set new standards in special-effects production. They were especially popular with an audience segment which in the trilogy’s wake would become the film studios’ primary target: the youth market. In 1999 The Phantom Menace became the first installment of three prequels for the original Star Wars, with even more extensive merchandizing and licensing.
Industry:Culture
(born 1944) Novelist and poet, born a sharecroppers’ daughter in Eaton, Georgia. After dismissal from Spelman College for participating in civil rights demonstrations, she transferred to Sarah Lawrence, but went south to Mississippi to participate in the 1966 registration drive. She taught at Tougaloo and Wellesley while publishing short stories (Love and Trouble, 1973). Influenced by Zora Neale Hurston and Flannery O’Connor, Walker focused on the experiences of African Americans in the segregated South. In 1982 she published The Color Purple (which Steven Spielberg filmed in 1985). Her work also explores the interaction between race and gender—the plight of her women characters shaped not merely by racism but by oppressive relationships with men. Since 1985, she has published The Temple of My Familiar (1989), Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992) and By The Light of My Father’s Smile (1998).
Industry:Culture
(born 1944) Vocal critic of affirmative action and bilingual education in the 1970s and 1980s.
Known for elegant, poetic prose, his autobiographical essays are widely used in college composition classes. His coming of age, Americanization apologia in Hunger of Memory (1982) solidified his status as cultural traitor for Chicanos/as and Left critics, but was praised by conservatives and mainstream critics for its courageous and painful reflections on Mexican cultural and Spanish language loss. In Days of Obligation (1992) and other essays Rodriguez intensifies his ironic complications of various cultural identities with his own queer sexual identification and sensibility.
Industry:Culture
(born 1945) Born in Atlanta, GA, Conroy’s autobiographical novels explore, often in glaring and confessional detail, his life in the South. Whether portraying an abusive, military father (The Great Santini, 1976), racist educational practices (The Water Is Wide, 1972), or the harsh discipline and racism of a military academy (The Lords Of Discipline, 1980), Conroy’s poetic prose and evocative images have earned him broad critical recognition.
Conroy has taken criticism for what is perceived as the “therapeutic” effusion of his work, but his characterizations of families in turmoil are almost surgical in their precision and depth. Several Conroy novels have been translated into powerful films.
Industry:Culture
(born 1945) Pittsburgh-born African American playwright and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1987 and 1990. Wilson’s plays often stem from impressions formed growing up during the 1950s and 1960s in the city’s black community known as “The Hill.” In Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (1985), Two Trains Running (1993) and The Piano Lesson (1990), Wilson builds dramas on the words and dreams of working-class African Americans. Recently, Wilson has become embroiled in debate over the representation of African Americans in theater. His manifesto for black artists in the American theater argues that it is the responsibility of theaters to endeavor to understand the culture of non-Europeans, rather than that of non-white artists to transform and compromise their work for white audiences.
Industry:Culture
(born 1946) Beginning with her breakthrough role as Janet in the 1975 cult classic Rocky Horror Picture Show, Sarandon’s characters have had a powerful influence on both popular culture and substantive social debate. Her portrayal of a hardened, but hopeful Southern woman in the 1991 film Thelma and Louise reflected women’s awareness of both their power and vulnerability in modern society Sarandon’s Oscar-winning role as a nun in Dead Man Walking (1996) articulated new complexities in the moral debate over capital punishment. Sarandon’s unusual looks also defied traditional concepts of beauty and sex appeal. Her long-term relationship with Tim Robbins is also part of her political and public persona.
Industry:Culture
(born 1946) Bill Clinton, first baby-boomer US president (1993–2001) and three-time Arkansas governor, defeated incumbent George Bush and the eccentric Ross Perot in the 1992 campaign, despite controversies concerning extra-marital affairs (Gennifer Flowers), charges of financial corruption (Whitewater) and allegations about draft evasion. Clinton presented himself as “a different kind of Democrat,” a New Democrat, more in line with the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, which he had headed.
Clinton’s campaign mantra—“It’s the economy stupid”—embodies his administration’s strengths and accomplishments as the United States’ economy has adapted to globalization more successfully than its competitors in terms of economic growth, low inflation and low unemployment. Clinton’s Secretary of the Treasury Robert Rubin, succeeded in dominating domestic policy over more liberal voices like Robert Reich in implementing moderately progressive tax increases, significant cuts in the budget and, following the 1994 Republican congressional victories, the achievement of budget surpluses.
Clinton, a superlative politician with a seemingly infinite capacity to come to the brink of selfimposed disaster and then rebound and even flourish, began his first administration with impressive appointments to establish “a government which looks like America.” Despite retreats on gays in the military and immigrant-bashing sections on welfare reform, Clinton has remained a cultural liberal, “mending but not ending” affirmative action, making moderate to progressive court appointments, initiating a race dialogue and passing a modest Family Leave Act.
As a “New” Democrat, he has sought to woo white, middle-class, suburban voters with tougher positions on crime, including subsidies for more police, targeted programs in education and protection of middle-class entitlements. In addition, in foreign policy he has attempted to combine a human rights agenda—which led him to send US troops into Haiti—with military responses to Iraq’s evasion of inspections and Serbia’s ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. At the same time he remains haunted, as were his predecessors, by the Vietnam War legacy of an aversion to risking significant US lives in combat and, consequently is subject to charges of inconsistency and ineffectiveness.
The 1994 congressional elections, which produced Republican majorities in both Houses and led to the speakership of Newt Gingrich and his “Contract With America,” brought Clinton to his lowest point, as did in part a response to the defeat of his efforts to pass universal, or at least more comprehensive, healthcare. However, the Grand Old Party (GOP) threat of a government shutdown, skillfully manipulated by Clinton, revitalized his political fortunes, although at the cost of the passage of a welfare reform bill, which recklessly eliminated federal entitlements to the poor in devolving most decision-making to the states through block grants, caps on spending, more stringent work requirements and ceilings on eligibility Clinton’s second term has been a rollercoaster driven by his impeachment following the revelation of an affair with Monica Lewinsky, a White House intern, his continuing popularity as the US economy’s boom continues and a series of international crises, most notably in the former Yugoslavia. Clinton’s “bridge to the twenty-first century” seemed to rest on a not always consistently framed, often opportunistic, blending of old New Deal and “Great Society” economic liberalism with modified, calibrated versions of identity politics, a determination to appear strong both domestically and internationally, a laser-like attention to the now majoritarian suburbs and a comfort with a multi-national, global, confident capitalism, tempered with not “big,” but government nevertheless. His legacy remains problematic: a resilient, if not great, politician with a seriously flawed character.
Industry:Culture
(born 1946) Bly’s Iron John places him at the head of the recent “Men’s Movement” and eclipses his prior eminence as poet, translator and theorist. In either mode, Bly insists that post-Enlightenment culture has gone awry but that we may regain our spiritual and poetic bearings if we refuse to be like (his?) daddy. Editor of The Fifties (and The Sixties and The Seventies). He introduced many North American readers to the world’s great poets (Neruda, Vallejo, Hernandez, Transtromer, even Rilke), yet Bly’s exoticized, loose translations of highly formal poems served him in his local battle against academic formalism.
Industry:Culture
(born 1946) Born in poverty in rural Tennessee, Dolly Parton started her singing career at ten. With her trademark big blonde hair, her often-made-fun-of big bosom and her clear high voice, she reached the top of the country charts as a singer-songwriter with songs like “Here You Go Again” and “Jolene.” She received good reviews when she moved into acting with 9 to 5 (1980), also a crossover hit song for her, and the later Steel Magnolias (1989).
In her home state, a theme park named Dollywood (founded 1986) keeps her legend alive.
Industry:Culture
(born 1946) Controversial and powerful director, writer and producer whose movies since the mid-1980s have probed some of the most sensitive issues of contemporary American domestic and global politics. Stone’s work confronts history, often through profound male struggles with temptation and conspiracy, amid complex atmospheres charged with violence. His initial films, Salvador (1985) and the Oscar-Winning Platoon (1985), scored the moral dilemmas of involvement in Latin America and Vietnam, where Stone returned with the powerful transformations of Born on the Fourth of July (1989) and Heaven and Earth (1989). Equally controversial revisions of domestic issues emerged from the greed of Wall Street (1987), the shadowy powers of JFK (1991) and Nïxon (1995) and the violence of Natural Born Killers (1994)
Industry:Culture
