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In his noted book Culture Wars, James Davison Hunter referred to a series of linked disputes in late 20th‐century American society, disputes that involve government but are at their root about fundamentally conflicting moral worldviews. This chapter explores the role played by the jeremiad in the American culture wars. It opens by considering two participants in these culture wars—Pat Buchanan and Bill Moyers—and then moves on to a consideration of the ways that cultural politics provide compelling plots for American Jeremiahs to organize their narratives of decline and renewal.

In the midst of the Culture Wars, in which Congressional Republicans and the religious right attempted to defund the National Endowment for the Arts, Bang on a Can expanded and professionalized. Cuts to government funding throughout the 1980s and 1990s shaped how Bang on a Can and their peers navigated their relationship to the marketplace. Other controversies also emerged, as when the New York State Council on the Arts attempted to implement policy around multicultural programming and encourage institutions to seek out audiences, to the chagrin of composers Charles Wuorinen and Milton Babbbitt as well as the Group for Contemporary Music. But Bang on a Can made the most of this moment, carving out new sources of income, diversifying their programming, reaching new audiences, and ultimately starting a new program, the People’s Commissioning Fund, in the wake of the devastating cuts to the NEA passed in the mid-1990s.

In this paper theoretical and historical connections between African and Jewish diasporas are explored through 17^th century Senegambia. Building on the work of Gilroy (1993) and Clifford (1994), and their emphasis of similarities in the histories of both African and Jewish diasporas, and also on Schorsch (2004)'s analysis of African‐Jewish relations in the Atlantic world, this paper illustrates multiple connections in the early modern Atlantic histories of African and Jewish diasporas. The chapter underlines the importance of the work of Bhabha, Young and others in the emphasis of hybridity in the analysis of contemporary cultural discourse, showing how it is also of relevance to the analysis of historical interactions in the past. This emphasis on historical hybridities unmasks the implicit problems in essentialist rhetorics, and modulates the debate on culturalist essentialisms in which the publication of Black Athena has played a part.

In virtually no other developed country are issues like abortion, contraception, homosexuality, and sexual education as controversial as in America. People in almost all other Western nations tend to share the liberal-moderate view of these questions. Few share the Christian fundamentalist position that represents a major side of America’s culture wars. Even though the vast majority of Americans are devout Christians, religion ironically divides them far more than Europeans. America is exceptionally polarized by rival understandings of faith, secularism, family values, gender roles, and sexuality. According to conventional wisdom, religious polarization in America reflects a clash between believers and non-believers. In reality, the divide is mainly among people of faith, as atheists or agnostics remain a limited proportion of the U.S. population. While nearly three-quarters of Americans identify as Christian, their churches are often at odds on basic issues like whether the Bible should be interpreted literally. The chapter particularly analyzes the ultra-traditionalist values prevalent in conservative America and demonstrates how unusual they are in the developed world.

In this chapter, Dominic Sandbrook traces the roots of the political debates of the 1990s and 2000s to the ascendancy of Ronald Reagan between 1981 and 1988. He argues that American politics during the Clinton and Bush years was governed by an underlying, undeclared consensus, in which liberals generally accepted free-market economic principles, while conservatives struck a quiet compromise with the new moral values of a changing society. He questions the myth of a culture war between left and right, showing how most Americans located themselves somewhere in the middle, and sees Bill Clinton as the modern politician par excellence, due to his carefully blurred ideological message and understated conservatism on fiscal issues. Finally, he argues that the American electorate was much less divided than is commonly thought, flickering inconsistently between moral traditionalism and libertarian individualism, and often falling between the two stools.

The memoirs of Egyptian academics Ihab Hassan and Leila Ahmed reveal contrasting ideological positions and conceptions of identity. Ahmed’s Islamic feminism represents a new direction in Arab immigrant writing.

This chapter interprets the archival discourse at the 1993 National Film Preservation Board congressional hearings as an indirect outcome of the Culture Wars and the Christian Right's successful attack on National Endowment of the Arts, the primary funder of film preservation in the United States. Federal funding for preservation had been drastically reduced at the same time that the film archive was increasingly understood as the memoryscape of the twentieth century. Part of the purpose of the hearings (and the report that followed) was an attempt to redirect the federal government's film preservation priorities from Hollywood to orphan films and to shift some of the financial burdens of preservation onto film studios. Paramount to the hearings' discourse was that all American citizens might shape their historical consciousness by accessing a wide array of cinematic genres, and for the first time in archival history orphan films were discursively placed front and center. The successful paradigmatic shift from a Hollywood centered preservation plan to an orphan-centered one served to dramatically expand the type and scope of cinematic histories preserved within film archives.

Of course, there’s no shortage of people who will step in to do your job if you default on it. The corporate world looks to the university for its workforce. Parents want the university to pick up the baton they may have dropped. Students demand that the university support the political cause of the moment. Conservatives believe that the university should refurbish and preserve the traditions of the past. Liberals and progressives would like to see those same traditions dismantled and replaced by what they take to be better ones. Alumni wonder why the athletics teams aren’t winning more. Politicians and trustees wonder why the professors aren’t teaching more. Whether it is state legislators who want a say in hiring and course content, or donors who want to tell colleges how to spend the funds they provide, or parents who are disturbed when Dick and Jane bring home books about cross-dressing and gender change, or corporations that want new departments opened and others closed, or activist faculty who urge the administration to declare a position on the war in Iraq, there is no end of interests intent on deflecting the university from its search for truth and setting it on another path. Each of these lobbies has its point, but it is not the university’s point, which is, as I have said over and over again, to produce and disseminate (through teaching and publication) academic knowledge and to train those who will take up that task in the future. But can the university defend the autonomy it claims (or should claim) from public pressures? Is that claim even coherent? Mark Taylor would say no. In a key sentence in the final chapter of his book The Moment of Complexity (2001), Taylor declares that “the university is not autonomous but is a thoroughly parasitic institution, which continually depends on the generosity of the host so many academics claim to reject.” He continues: “The critical activities of the humanities, arts, and sciences are only possible if they are supported by the very economic interests their criticism so often calls into question.”

Chapter Two contextualizes the Cold War linkage of countersubversion and moralization exploring what, precisely, rightists reacted against, and in what circumstances. I analyze linked cultural histories to uncover the ways in which emergent youth culture, sexual revolution, and radical politics were focal points for broad public debates in 1960s Brazil. Within those debates, right-wing reaction against changing gender and sexual norms represented only one of many publicly permissible viewpoints. The sheer diversity of these viewpoints makes clear several critical contextual factors. First, regardless of how extensively new gender and sexual patterns actually affected women, young people, students, or other demographics on which anxieties focused, moral panic was not the sole possible response to perceived changes in these realms. Second, though counterculture, political radicalism, and nonnormative sex each attracted considerable attention, narratives that conflated these categories did not monopolize public discourse—even those who denounced moral and sexual change did not always associate it with subversion. Lastly, for all of the Right’s insistence on this association, the regime’s fiercest and most visible opponents never embraced sexual liberalization. Many were the voices who constructed “youth,” “sexual revolution,” and “subversion”—and not everyone, least of all those on the political Left, saw direct articulation between the three.

This chapter describes the personality and politics of Arjun Singh who was Minister of MHRD for about nine years in two spells (1991–95 and 2004–9), and left a deep imprint on Indian education policies. It also describes the developments during 1991–6, a watershed in Indian economic and political history which among others marked the end of Nehruvian era and the unquestioned sway of hegemony of the liberal-left ideas about nationalism, identity, and secularism which were regnant from Independence. It outlines how Arjun Singh built his political career around a fiery commitment to secularism, leftist economic ideology, and social justice, and how that commitment served him well in his battles with political rivals including the Prime Minister P. V. Narasimha Rao. It also outlines Arjun Singh’s strategic use of MHRD to cultivate ‘progressive’ intellectuals, and further his political agenda. It elaborates the conceptual underpinnings of the perennial controversy about school history books, and offers a blow by blow account of the controversy during period 1967–1996 which includes the reign of Indira Gandhi, Janata Party, and P.V. Narasimha Rao.

Though LGBTQ people had lived and vacationed in the area for decades, it was not until the mid 1970s that they began to conceive of the region as an LGBTQ vacation destination. Marketing had created “The Sunshine State” and the proliferation of print media coupled with a growing recognition of pink capital begin to craft the “Gay Gulf Coast.” The Fiesta Room Lounge in Panama City became definitively gay, the South’s first chapter of the Gay Liberation Front was established in Tallahassee, and Pensacola again played host to LGBT beach events during Memorial Day. In 1993, as the culture wars raged nationally, gay and lesbian tourists in Pensacola found themselves in the crosshairs of moral entrepreneurs attempting to capitalize on the growing conservative evangelical movement with a return to straight, white, wholesome, family-friendly tourism promotion. The response of local businesses evidences a profound attitudinal shift from earlier decades, a direct result of increasing LGBTQ visibility and their growing status as citizen consumers.

This chapter compares two models of the intellectual, one from the philosopher, Richard Rorty, and the other the cultural critic, Andrew Ross. It looks at a debate they had during the culture wars, surveys their careers, and deciphers what models they present in their actual practice-of clarity but lack of engagement in Rorty, and of a turn toward socially relevant criticism in Ross.

This chapter examines the flowering of explicitly secular culture in the period of independent Arab national states, especially after the Second World War. This was generally critical of religious heritage. It sometimes took decidedly anti-religious turns, and was on occasion libertine, and often deployed religious symbols in profane contexts. The political and ideological templates of political and social thought and criticism in this period, and the issue of women’s emancipation, are discussed in these contexts. All these issues occasioned increasingly concerted polemical and other attacks from religious organisms and parties, now better organised and funded than hitherto. Most of this had been made possible by secularising states which, in moves more firmly to institutionalise religious institutions. The weakening of central Arab states after the war of 1967, and oil wealth, together ushered in a period which made it possible for religious institutions and religious cultures, hitherto marginal, to commence a process of reassertion and a move from the margins to the centre. Muslim reformism tended to take a conservative turn to protect its flank, and Reformism properly speaking was pushed increasingly into marginal positions.