Wanda Rushing

Rushing takes a truly interdisciplinary approach to understanding how the global and local intersect in Memphis. The way she illustrates how a traditionally maligned Southern city like Memphis is the result of both insular attempts to resist external mediums of change and expansive attempts to introduce change to a struggling city is really refreshing. This intersection of local traditions and global trends is obvious when one thinks about any slightly urbanized city in the world. In the United States, even rural regions are feeling the effects of globalization through broad access to the internet, television, and other means of mass communication. Upon starting the book, I felt that she would be able to elucidate this modern phenomenon, providing commentary on what it might mean for global and local trends. But, though many examples are given to prove her point, she leaves many troubling aspects unexplained.

Memphis seems to be caught in an ebb and flow of globalization that will seemingly culminate in a loss of newly created culture, as well as rapid exploitation and commercialization of its past cultural exports. She illustrates this through the modern renovation (or some could argue reinvention) of Beale Street and other historical sites. Memphis is turning its musical history into a blues Disney World, but Rushing suggests that true creative culture could still exist through the works of filmmakers like Craig Brewer and rappers like Three 6 Mafia. She weakly suggests that local culture can still thrive under global pressure, which may have been true in the past, but there is little evidence, in Memphis or other cities, that this is possible in our modern global world. It seems even larger cities that traditionally have more space to fly under the cultural radar, like New York City and Los Angeles, are becoming ersatz versions of their former selves. All the creative arts move farther away from city centers as they’re gentrified and homogenized.

Rushing leans heavily on case histories to render the paradox of local and global flows creating a place. Her sources are interesting, albeit at some points redundant. Her theory that a sense of place has always taken into account local concerns for tradition and societal norms, in addition to global modernity and progress, is well supported by her case study of Memphis, but I would like to know how modern metropolitan centers can sustain a relevant form of local culture endangered by the homogenizing influences of modern globalization. Secondly, would we even want a perpetuation of certain local cultural traditions that run counter to global sensibilities? If Memphis had resisted globalization, the blues may have retained some authenticity, but segregation and other antiquated local norms would have been upheld until internal change was instigated. These complexities are left unexplored by Rushing, but that is not to discount the good work she did dispelling the myth of southern exceptionality.

Memphis and the Paradox of Place builds on themes from James Cobb’s work on the Delta’s interdependency with external forces, and it’s fitting that Memphis serves as the northern boundary to the Delta on the Mississippi River. Money from outside the Delta guided the culture within it, and in Memphis the same is true. When it was not seen as economically viable, places like Beale Street and Overton Park are left to local influence, but when a global tourism market or federal transportation funds are at stake, the local will almost inevitably clash with global trends. This book reinforces my belief that no place in the modern United States can evade the reach of globalization, and many places thought of as particularly resistant to global coercion have actually been under its influence for centuries.

Rushing writes that the “paradox of tourism is that it supposedly promotes opportunities for visitors to see something different; yet cities that re-create themselves to attract tourism seem to become more alike." Every major tourist attraction becomes a stop in our national Disney World of historical places. Cities like Clarksdale are just moving towards what Beale Street has become: a hyperbolized, inauthentic, overpriced commodity to be sold to those who want to see an idealized version of culture. Therefore, blues on Beale Street is $20 barbecue, $30 blues compilations, and tired musicians rehashing an electric version of the blues that was actually made popular in Chicago, not Memphis. No one wants to pay to see seedy bars, low income destitution, and debauchery, which are arguably more reflective of historical Beale Street.… (meer)