Interview with Joe Street about His Recent Scholarship

Randall Stephens

The University of Florida Press has just published Senior Lecturer in History Joe Street's Dirty Harry's America: Clint Eastwood, Harry Callahan, and the Conservative Backlash.  In it Joe looks at the iconic antihero and asks what the popularity of the series reveals about modern America.  Dirty Harry's rogue conservatism, and machismo justice appealed to large sections of the American public.  The story also pointed to a powerful backlash against 1960s liberalism, the counterculture, and more.  The rise of Reagan-era conservatism, says Joe, owes something to this new, strident political reaction.

In Dirty Harry's America Joe writes of the 1971 film’s “representation of the counterculture, race, gender, and sexuality” that “must be approached within the context of recent San Francisco and national history. . .”(67)  At the same time Dirty Harry, Joe observes, “is far more complex than simple right-wing propaganda.”

I recently sat down with Joe to talk about why he wrote the book and how it fits into larger discussions about modern American culture.  Among other things, Joe comments on how the debates and skirmishes of two of America's most turbulent decades continue to shape the nation in powerful ways.

In the interview below Joe also discusses his more recent work on the Black Panther Party and the intersection of race and politics in the post-1960s United States.

 

Senior Lecturer in American History Joe Street Publishes Second Book

Congratulations to Joe Street!  The senior lecturer in American history at Northumbria University has just published his second book, Dirty Harry's America: Clint Eastwood, Harry Callahan, and the Conservative Backlash, with the University Press of Florida, 2016.

From the UPF website:

In Dirty Harry's America, Joe Street argues that the movies shed critical light on the culture and politics of the post-1960s era and locates San Francisco as the symbolic cultural battleground of the time. Across the entire series, conservative anger and moral outrage confront elitist liberalism and moral relativism. Paying particular attention to the films' representation of crime, family and community, sexuality, and race, Street maintains that through referencing real events and political struggles, the films themselves became active participants in the culture wars.

Unapologetic carrier of right and might, Harry Callahan becomes America's Ur-conservative: "unbending, moral, incorruptible, and most important, always right." Long after the series, Callahan's legacy remains strong in American political discourse, cinema, and pop culture, and he continues to shape Eastwood’s later political and cinematic career.

Here's what the critics are saying:

"Street provides a crucial critical and cultural service by not only studying Eastwood's individual films in sharp detail but also by providing a close and serious analysis of the cultural and historic times of the films." -Sam B. Girgus, author of Clint Eastwood's America

"By far the most comprehensive, sustained, and detailed discussion of the Dirty Harry phenomenon. A thorough and engaging account of how a fictitious renegade cop became an enduring icon of the angry conservative backlash that sought to halt 1960s liberalism in its tracks." -Nick Heffernan, author of Culture, Environment and Ecopolitics