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

From the Archives: A Trip to the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin

Megan Hunt

Arriving at the University of Texas at Austin for the first time this August, I was in awe.  They say everything is bigger in Texas, and this was certainly the biggest campus I had ever seen. One of the largest universities in the U.S., UT Austin has 51,000 students and employs around 24,000 people. The campus boasts seven museums and seventeen libraries, while its stadium, pride of place in the middle of the campus, is bigger than Wembley.

Campus view, snapped by Megan Hunt.

The sheer size of the campus meant that my first day was mainly spent exploring the architecture, fountains, and the main student drag Guadalupe Street, where stands the Co-Op where you can literally buy anything and everything with a UTexas logo on it. And I mean anything…

By the time I actually stumbled across the Harry Ransom Center, where I would be conducting my research, I was ready to drop. The heat was intense, averaging around 39°C, and feeling hotter as the Texas sun bounced off the concrete. Once inside the beautifully air conditioned library, I was amazed by how easy it was to register, and how quickly staff were prepared to let me rummage through the papers of one of the most famous and significant actors alive today—Robert De Niro.

The collection was expansive; the research materials and correspondence held in Austin is a testament to the actor’s meticulous preparation for some of his most challenging and

culturally significant roles. Focused on Cape Fear, a remake De Niro persuaded Martin Scorsese to direct in 1991, I sifted through script drafts, annotated by De Niro, as well as a considerable number of research materials relating to prison culture, Pentecostalism, southern poverty, tattoos, and Bible concordances, all of which helped shape the redevelopment of villain Max Cady.

The collection demonstrated just how involved De Niro was in the remake process, and has provided numerous insights for my PhD work, which questions how Hollywood projections of southern religiosity are used to indicate a South that is ostensibly removed from the American mainstream. Examining De Niro’s papers, I learned that Cape Fear’s attempt to unravel the apparent security of white middle-class American suburban identity is deeply rooted in the same ideas concerning education, class, race, and gender that have shaped the direction of southern studies.

Megan Hunt is a second year PhD candidate in American Studies at Northumbria, working with Brian Ward and Randall Stephens.  She is interested in representations of the American South in popular culture. Her PhD research highlights the ways in which southern religious stereotypes intersect with the racial and class-based distinctions that have been used to indicate the region in post-war Hollywood film.

Humanities Postgraduate Research Seminar Series 2014-15

Megan Hunt

Join us for a chance to meet fellow PGRs and see them present on aspects of their research.

Seminars take place on alternate Thursdays, and we usually continue our discussions in the pub. If you have any questions, or would like to present your work next semester, please email megan.hunt@northumbria.ac.uk

All postgraduate students welcome!

Semester 1 Programme

16th October: Tracey Iceton, "Guest Starring...Using Real People as Characters in Creative Writing," 5pm Lipman 334.

30th October: Megan Hunt "'A Monster of the South': Cape Fear, 'White Trash', and the Oppositional Region," 5pm Lipman 334.

13th November: Allan Symons, "'Woman’s Been After You Ever Since’: Country Music and Misogyny in 1920s America," 5pm Lipman 334.

27th November: Lyndsey Skinner, "Keatsian Magazines," 4pm Lipman 303.

11th December: Jonathan Coburn, "'The Jakarta Problem': the Tyranny of Consensus in Women Strike for Peace," 5pm Lipman 334.