George Lipsitz
Biographic Data
| ID | 105657 |
|---|---|
| NAME | George Lipsitz |
| GIVEN NAMES | George |
| FAMILY NAME | Lipsitz |
| SIGNATURE | LIPSITZ G |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California San Diego |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 119 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 681 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 119 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1977 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 12 |
Housing, Health, and the Danger Zone
In early June 2025, George Lipsitz joined a virtual roundtable with three housing organizers in Connecticut, convened by the statewide coalition Connecticut for All. Like many regions across the country, Connecticut is facing a profound housing crisis. Access to affordable, safe housing has long been sharply stratified along race and class lines. Black and Latina/o residents in Hartford, Bridgeport, and New Haven have historically been confined t…
Composing Community
George Lipsitz reflects on Ajay Heble's ongoing legacy. Lipsitz writes, "When I think of Heble’s impact and importance for the study and practice of improvisation I am reminded of the great Duke Ellington’s role in changing music and its contexts of creation, performance, and reception," going on to explore the similarities between Ellington and Heble's roles as musicians, community builders, and public intellectuals
Theorizing Liberation and Liberating Theory
The death of Gary Okihiro compels us to acknowledge and appreciate how much he did to shape our shared scholarship and civic life.As a program builder, leader, and mentor, he played a key role in establishing the validity and securing the visibility of Asian American studies.His research continues to play a central role in shaping the contours of contemporary scholarship in that field as well as in US history, American studies, and international …
The Danger Zone Is Everywhere
The Danger Zone Is Everywhere
Compellingly argues that good health is as much social as it is biological, and that the racial health gap and the racial wealth gap are mutually constitutive. The Danger Zone Is Everywhere shows that housing insecurity and the poor health associated with it are central components of an unjust, destructive, and deadly racial order. Housing discrimination is a civil and economic injustice, but it is also a menace to public health. With this book, …
FandangObon
The festive celebration known as FandangObon is made possible by workshops and satellite performances that artivistas (art activists) stage throughout the year in a variety of community venues. The event transforms the annual Japanese American Buddhist Obon ceremony honoring ancestors into an antiracist polycultural performance. Through improvisation and invention, colorfully adorned participants blend the dances, songs, and costumes of the Japan…
The Race of Sound, by Nina Sun Eidsheim
Like previous Kalfou symposiums—on race and science, Black and Indigenous alliances for environmental justice, Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s The White Possessive, Black acts and arts of radicalism, and the scholarship of George J. Sánchez and Lorgia García-Peña—this convening brings together serious artists, activists, and academics who know that there is important work to be done, and that it is up to us to do it. For more than a decade authors in t…
A Different Way of Working
Through her art, education, and activism, Shana M. griffin addresses issues that matter. Her projects and publications call attention to racialized sexism and segregation, to poverty and predatory policing, to housing insecurity and homophobia. They illuminate as well, however, the profound wisdom, creativity, and consciousness of generations of Black women whose refusals of unlivable destinies have enabled Black people to survive and even thrive…
The Way We Do the Things We Do
All of the “what” that Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr., shows that he knows in Who Hears Here? On Black Music, Pasts & Present is of enormous value.1 His essays move seamlessly through discussions of a wide range of music and musicians, cultural sites and sensibilities, genres and generations, and authors and art forms. This virtuosity, however, may obscure at first glance what I consider to be the equally important achievement that emanates from the “how…
Rejecting the racial contract
In this article, I explore the deep roots and long history of the attacks on Critical Race Theory in education, while at the same time savoring the equally long and eminently venerable and presently visible traditions forged by “the insights of generations of anonymous ‘race men’ [and ‘race women] who, under the most difficult circumstances” developed ‘the concepts necessary to trace the contours of the system oppressing them, defying the massive…
Shattering Silences
The denial of tenure at Harvard to Lorgia García-Peña is a defeat for academic excellence and for social justice. Yet the mechanisms deployed to enact it are so transparently illegitimate that it holds the potential to be the kind of short-term defeat that points the way toward long-term victory in the future. The tenure denial is an insult and an injury that demands a collective response from antiracist and decolonial scholars. Turning indignati…
Songs That Never End
Songs That Never End (2019) is a fascinating, compelling, and mesmerizing film. It focuses on seemingly small events inside small spaces to pose big questions about how people struggle with the hand that history has dealt them in a time of devastation, dispossession, and displacement. Filmed in cinema verité style, yet brilliantly shot, framed, and paced by director, camera operator, and interviewer Yehuda Sharim, Songs That Never End revolves ar…
Dilemmas of Beset Nationhood
The Poetics of Place and Expressions of Oppositional Memory
The Black Atlantic creation of alternative archives illustrated in Parisa Urquhart’s 2019 documentary Strike for Freedom, which chronicles the unveiling of a historical plaque in Edinburgh to commemorate Frederick Douglass’s activism while he was in exile in Scotland, has a long and meaningful history. People without control over—or even access to—papers of state, conquerors’ memoirs, or officially commissioned histories have carried out the work…
Conjuring Black Freedom
Community-based art making and art-based community making have been key components in the Black freedom struggle. The collective intelligence honed in struggle that Cedric Robinson identifies and honors has often resided in creating objects produced by creative acts. This tradition survives and thrives today as an engine driving many different projects. For Afro-diasporic peoples, survival has required relentless resistance to enslavement, exploi…
A Power that Shakes the World
L'intersectionnalité comme stratégie de mobilisation sociale
L'histoire des Asian Immigrant Women Advocates ( aiwa ou Défenseures des immigrées asiatiques) à Oakland et à San Jose en Californie, sur près de trois décennies, offre un exemple éloquent de l'intersectionnalité mise en œuvre dans un mouvement social et de son utilité pour révéler la dimension diffuse et différentielle des formes imbriquées d'oppression. L'article revient sur les origines du concept d'intersectionnalité, à la fois dans les milie…
Insubordinate Spaces
Scholars and researchers read books and articles whose topics align with the research and theory interests of their main area of work. Hence, within sociology ethnomethodologists tend to read other ethnomethodologists, feminists other feminists, and functionalists other functionalists. Likewise, small group researchers read a lot about small groups, and network theorists consume much of their time reading and ruminating over networks. The reality…
Seeing Race Again
Race as a Relational Theory
Seeing Race Again
Every academic discipline has an origin story complicit with white supremacy. Racial hierarchy and colonialism structured the very foundations of most disciplines’ research and teaching paradigms. In the early twentieth century, the academy faced rising opposition and correction, evident in the intervention of scholars including W. E. B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, Carter G. Woodson, and others. By the mid-twentieth century, education itself bec…
The White Possessive and Whiteness Studies
Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s The White Possessive performs its own important truths through evidence, ideas, and arguments about property, power, and Indigenous sovereignty. Its arguments about the links between Indigenous dispossession and whiteness are compelling in themselves, but they also serve as provocations to think more generally about how scholarly truths are forged through often uninterrogated deployments of temporality, causality, univer…
The Great Uprising
With The Great Uprising Peter B. Levy makes splendid contributions to scholarship on the urban insurrections that took place in hundreds of black communities in the United States during the 1960s. Detailed accounts of battles in the cities of Cambridge, Maryland; Baltimore, Maryland; and York, Pennsylvania, demonstrate vividly his arguments that the rebellions took place in small, medium, and large cities, that they encompassed both commodity and…
No Ordinary Time
The contemporary coalescence of Indigenous and Black peoples as aggrieved, insurgent, and mobilized polities reflects a shared recognition of more than the private, personal, and parochial concerns of members of those groups. The enduring consequences of Indigenous dispossession and what US jurist William O. Douglas aptly described in the 1960s as “the spectacle of slavery unwilling to die” are felt harshly and directly by First Nations and Afro-…
The New York Intellectuals
The Racialization of Space and the Spatialization of Race
A primary goal of landscape architects and other citizens concerned with the built environment should be to disassemble the fatal links that connect race, place, and power. This article shows that the national spatial imaginary is racially marked, and that segregation serves as a crucible for creating the emphasis on exclusion and augmented exchange value that has guided the contemporary ideal of the properly-ordered, prosperous private home. For…
The Possessive Investment in Whiteness
SHORTLY AFTER WORLD WAR II, A FRENCH REPORTER ASKED EXPATRIate Richard Wright his opinion about the in the United States. The author replied There isn't any Negro problem; there is only a problem.' By inverting the reporter's question, Wright called attention to its hidden assumptions-that racial polarization comes from the existence of blacks rather than from the behavior of whites, that black people are a problem for whites rather than fellow c…
Time Passages
Learning from New Orleans
Rethinking American Culture" was a forum featuring the work of George Lipsitz in a dialogue between American Studies and anthropology about the ways in which "new forms of commercial patterns and practices, new movements of people and products, and new communications technologies are producing new ways of studying culture." This dialogue addresses the struggles over the social warrants of U.S. culture in the 21st century and how historians and an…
American Studies as Accompaniment
The future of American studies requires scholars to know the work we want our work to do ; to frame our scholarly relations not as competition but as accompaniment; to insist that we infuse our ideas and activism with moral judgment and wisdom; to clarify the significance of different aspects of our scholarly lives; to acknowledge that our work speaks for us but also for others; and to recognize the dialogic and dialectically related nature of ou…
Listening to Learn and Learning to Listen
ion may forget that is marginal from one perspective may be central to another. In a wickedly clever and perceptive article, Michelle Lamont has shown how the emergence of Jacques Derrida as a philosopher owes a great deal to his ability to benefit from the capital institutionalized in the power structures of academic discourse.'3 Similarly, Judith Lowder Newton notes the disturbing unwillingness among many European cultural theorists to acknowle…
The Meaning of Memory
Research Article| January 01 1988 The Meaning of Memory: Family, Class, and Ethnicity in Early Network Television Programs George Lipsitz George Lipsitz Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Camera Obscura (1988) 6 (1 (16)): 78–116. https://doi.org/10.1215/02705346-6-1_16-78 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation George Lipsitz; The Meaning of Memory: Family, Class, and Ethnicity in Early Net…
Desegregating the Dollar
Capitalism and slavery stand as the two economic phenomena that have most clearly defined the United States. Yet, despite African Americans' nearly $500 billion annual spending power, surprisingly little attention has been devoted to the ways U.S. businesses have courted black dollars in post-slavery America. Robert E. Weems, Jr., presents the first fully integrated history of black consumerism over the course of the last century. The World War I…
The Struggle for Hegemony
Journal Article The Struggle for Hegemony Get access George Lipsitz George Lipsitz assistant professor of American studies University of Minnesota, Twin Cities Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 75, Issue 1, June 1988, Pages 146–150, https://doi.org/10.2307/1889660 Published: 01 June 1988
Walleye warriors and white identities
During the late 1980s and early 1990s white supremacist vigilantes attacked Native American spear fishers attempting to exercise treaty rights in northern Wisconsin. Nearly a decade later, Native Americans organized a coalition that included some of their former white supremacist enemies to stop plans by transnational corporations to pursue environmentally harmful resource exploitation enterprises in the region. Native Americans and their allies …
Sports Stadia and Urban Development
Pressure by civic leaders and sports entrepreneurs led St. Louis, Los Angeles, and Houston to build new sports stadia in the 1960s. The use of public money for private profit-making ventures generated controversy at the time but won acceptance with promises of widely dispersed benefits. This article argues that two long range trends, the Warner Model of urban development and the accumula tion of capital for private enterprise by the state, determ…
Mardi Gras Indians
ore than fifty years ago, alarmed by the rise of commercial culture l and the attendant eclipse of literature and folklore, the great cultural critic Walter Benjamin envisioned a world without stories. Benjamin complained that in such a world, It is as if something that seemed inalienable to us, the securest of our possessions, were taken from us; the ability to exchange experiences.2 Certainly, subsequent events have more than justified Benjamin…
A transformative pedagogy for a decolonial world
The Transformative Pedagogy Project (TPP) at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), is an interdisciplinary and intergenerational learning community seeking to develop ways of knowing
Insubordinate Spaces for Intemperate Times
Abolition democracy and global justice
As new social relations produce new kinds of social subjects, scholars in American Studies and Area Studies experience anxieties about disciplinary as well as geographic borders. The Civil Rights tradition of the 14th Amendment plays an important role within progressive American Studies scholarship, but in the course of seeking equality and exclusion within the USA, this tradition runs the risk of occluding the role of the nation in the world and…
The New York Intellectuals
From Plessy to Ferguson
T he killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, on August 9, 2014, and the callous and cruel ofWcial responses to it repeat what by now has come to be a familiar pattern of events. Like Eric Garner, John Crawford, Tanisha Anderson, Aiyana Stanley-Jones, Amadou Diallo, and countless others, Michael Brown was an unarmed black person killed by a police ofWcer sworn to protect and serve the public. In each of these cases, authorities moved quick…
Cruising around the Historical Bloc
George Lipsitz, Cruising around the Historical Bloc: Postmodernism and Popular Music in East Los Angeles, Cultural Critique, No. 5, Modernity and Modernism, Postmodernity and Postmodernism (Winter, 1986-1987), pp. 157-177
Turning Hegemony on its Head
We argue that Paredes pioneered a new approach to intellectual work through his labors as a scholar-activist, especially through his deployment of what Michel Foucault would subsequently call insurgent knowledge. He explored the dynamics of domination and resistance as they actually happen in history: in particular places and particular times in particular contexts. Paredes recognized the political significance of the dialogic dimensions of expre…
Learning from Los Angeles
The movement of the editorial offices of the American Quarterly from its historic home at eastern colleges, universities, and cultural institutions to Los Angeles and the University of Southern California presents us with cause for celebration.1 This is not a declaration of coastal chauvinism or of local pride. It is certainly not a judgment about any of us as individuals in relation to our professional colleagues elsewhere. The particularities o…
World Cities and World Beat
Research Article| May 01 1999 World Cities and World Beat: Low-Wage Labor and Transnational Culture George Lipsitz George Lipsitz Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Pacific Historical Review (1999) 68 (2): 213–231. https://doi.org/10.2307/3641985 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Get …
Sent for You Yesterday, Here You Come Today
George Lipsitz, "Sent for You Yesterday, Here You Come Today": American Studies Scholarship and the New Social Movements, Cultural Critique, No. 40, The Futures of American Studies (Autumn, 1998), pp. 203-225
Everybody's Lonesome for Somebody
Houston Baker locates the blues at the crossroads of lack and desire, at the place where the hurts of history encounter determined resistance from people who know they are entitled to something better (Baker 1984, pp. 7, 150). Like the blues singers from whom he learned so much, Hank Williams (1923 to 1953) spent a lot of time at that particular intersection. There he met others whose own struggles informed and shaped his music. Williams's voice …
A Life in the Struggle
Class and Culture in Cold War America
Herbert Biberman and the Art of Subjectivity
In recent years Salt of the Earth has acquired a reputation as one of the finest American films ever made about workers' and women's liberation. Yet comparatively little is known about Herbert Biberman, the director and co-producer of the film and one of the most important radical intellectuals in Hollywood in the 1940s. For more than forty years, Biberman wrote plays, essays and screen treatments which addressed the political, moral and aestheti…
Class and Culture in Cold War America
The Drum Major Instinct
One of the most frightening developments of the 1980s has been the reemergence of fundamentalist religion in the United States as the keystone of right wing politics. “Born-again” military strategists boast about their willingness to incinerate the world in nuclear war rather than tolerate the spread of “atheistic communism.” “Christian” senators oppose the Equal Rights Amendment on the grounds that it undermines the family and deprives men of th…
Class and Culture in Cold War America
Sports Stadia and Urban Development
Pressure by civic leaders and sports entrepreneurs led St. Louis, Los Angeles, and Houston to build new sports stadia in the 1960s. The use of public money for private profit-making ventures generated controversy at the time but won acceptance with promises of widely dispersed benefits. This article argues that two long range trends, the Warner Model of urban development and the accumula tion of capital for private enterprise by the state, determ…
Cruising around the Historical Bloc
George Lipsitz, Cruising around the Historical Bloc: Postmodernism and Popular Music in East Los Angeles, Cultural Critique, No. 5, Modernity and Modernism, Postmodernity and Postmodernism (Winter, 1986-1987), pp. 157-177
Blue money
“This ain't no sideshow”
In recent years, challenges from inside as well as outside the discipline have encouraged historians to investigate mass communication processes and texts as primary evidence about the past. Historically grounded inquiries into mass communication have focused on three related areas of analysis: apparatus centered criticism, social history, and textual interpretation. This rich body of scholarship has begun to answer important questions about hist…
Mardi Gras Indians
ore than fifty years ago, alarmed by the rise of commercial culture l and the attendant eclipse of literature and folklore, the great cultural critic Walter Benjamin envisioned a world without stories. Benjamin complained that in such a world, It is as if something that seemed inalienable to us, the securest of our possessions, were taken from us; the ability to exchange experiences.2 Certainly, subsequent events have more than justified Benjamin…
The Struggle for Hegemony
Journal Article The Struggle for Hegemony Get access George Lipsitz George Lipsitz assistant professor of American studies University of Minnesota, Twin Cities Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 75, Issue 1, June 1988, Pages 146–150, https://doi.org/10.2307/1889660 Published: 01 June 1988
The Meaning of Memory
Research Article| January 01 1988 The Meaning of Memory: Family, Class, and Ethnicity in Early Network Television Programs George Lipsitz George Lipsitz Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Camera Obscura (1988) 6 (1 (16)): 78–116. https://doi.org/10.1215/02705346-6-1_16-78 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation George Lipsitz; The Meaning of Memory: Family, Class, and Ethnicity in Early Net…
A Life in the Struggle
A Life in the Struggle
A Life in the Struggle
America's First Black General
A Life in the Struggle
A Life in the Struggle: Ivory Perry and the Culture of Opposition. By George Lipsitz. Philadelphia: Temple University Press and The Rest of the Dream: The Black Odyssey of Lyman Johnson. By Wade Hall. Lexington: University Press Get access Robert A. Slayton Robert A. Slayton Chapman College Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 76, Issue 4, March 1990, Pages 1323–1324, https:/…
Everybody's Lonesome for Somebody
Houston Baker locates the blues at the crossroads of lack and desire, at the place where the hurts of history encounter determined resistance from people who know they are entitled to something better (Baker 1984, pp. 7, 150). Like the blues singers from whom he learned so much, Hank Williams (1923 to 1953) spent a lot of time at that particular intersection. There he met others whose own struggles informed and shaped his music. Williams's voice …
Listening to Learn and Learning to Listen
ion may forget that is marginal from one perspective may be central to another. In a wickedly clever and perceptive article, Michelle Lamont has shown how the emergence of Jacques Derrida as a philosopher owes a great deal to his ability to benefit from the capital institutionalized in the power structures of academic discourse.'3 Similarly, Judith Lowder Newton notes the disturbing unwillingness among many European cultural theorists to acknowle…
Music Matters
Time Passages
Journal Article Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture. By George Lipsitz. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990. xviii + 306 pp. Cloth, $35.00; paper, $14.95.) Get access Roy Rosenzweig Roy Rosenzweig George Mason University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 78, Issue 1, June 1991, Pages 392–393, https://doi.org/10.2307/2078240 Published…
High Culture and Hierarchy
Monuments and Memories
The Politics and Pedagogy of Popular Culture in Contemporary Textbooks
What is the place ofpopular culture in United States history textbooks? Inside these unified chronologies about the public exercise of political, military, and economic power, is there room for the ways that ordinary people make meaning for themselves in their everyday activities
The Sidewalks of St. Louis
Journal Article The Sidewalks of St. Louis: Places, People, and Politics in an American City. By George Lipsitz. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1991. x + 142 pp. $16.95, ISBN 0-8262-0814-2.) Get access Steven A. Riess Steven A. Riess Northeastern Illinois University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 79, Issue 3, December 1992, Pages 1126–1127, https://doi.org/10.…
American Studies in Black and White
Journal Article American Studies in Black and White: Selected Essays, 1949–1989. By Sidney Kaplan. Ed. by Allan D. Austin. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1991. xviii + 260 pp. $39.95, ISBN 0-87023-469-2.) Get access George Lipsitz George Lipsitz University of California, San Diego Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 79, Issue 2, September 1992, Pages 619–620, h…
Sociology (67 works) · Political science (55 works) · History (53 works) · Law (45 works) · Art (39 works) · History (33 works) · Politics (33 works) · Art history (30 works) · Law (28 works) · Race, History, and American Society (28 works)