The Age of Oprah: Cultural Icon for the Neoliberal Era (Media and Power)
In this wonderfully original and insightful book, Janice Peck explains that Oprah Winfrey is not merely a talk show host and entertainer but the voice of our era, the logical product of the unresolved contradictions of our time. --George Lipsitz, author of Footsteps in the DarkThe Age of Oprah is absolutely fantastic. It's a reminder of what cultural studies and American studies could be and the promise it once held out. It's exciting, theoretically rich and well grounded (which means with the theory woven unpretentiously into and driving the substantive analysis), historically deep, meticulously researched, politically and analytically sharp. It brings to mind the best work that people like the Ewens and Russel Jacoby and others did in the 70s in the Frankfurt School tradition and that people like Leach have done more recently. It should be a very important intervention in our civic understanding. Peck nails Oprah, Clinton and this period's mind cure/self-help therapies as linked expressions/engines of neoliberal ideological consolidation. In doing so, she examines the key missing link that careful cultural analysis can provide that neither opinion-sampling nor resistance studies can't- the complex ways that popular ideologies emerge and evolve as symbolic systems that make sense of the lived social order while evading its contradictions and asymmetries of power and the very concrete ways they operate as the glue that helps to hold that order in place. This book also brings to mind the observation that the emergence of cultural studies as a rarefired, high-tech theoretical practice was accompanied by retreat from the sort of deep, historically grounded and politically clear and substantively focused work that was being produced by the original generation of Frankfurt-influenced American studies scholars, even Jackson Lears et al. The difference also underscores the difference between theoretical mastery, of the sort that underlay Marx s quip about having left his early ruminations  to the gnawing criticism of the mice,  which is embedded in, suffuses and drives substantive arguments and interpretations and the notion of mastery as deftness at reciting and parsing the rules and intricacies of a theoretical grammar in public. --Adolph Reed Jr., Professor of Political Science at University of Pennsylvania