Interview with Greg Dickinson, Ph. D.

"Memories of (Old) Pasadena: The Rhetoric of Postmodern Nostalgia"

Using the landscape of Old Pasadena as text in his dissertation, Greg Dickinson describes the politics behind the current trend to restore run-down sections of towns. By restoring towns using architecture from the past, entrepreneurs are trying to persuade customers that during this ambiguous age there is a safe past to which they can return. Capitalizing on the need for nostalgia is not an easy task in Southern California as most of the old architecture has been replaced by the modern. Thus, the past must be reinvented, and sections of run-down Pasadena are transformed into quaint shops in an attempt to convince modern customers of that all were prosperously living the American Dream "back in the good old days." The visitor to Old Pasadena is bombarded with a 1990s version of the mythic American past as new facades are being sanded to look worn while signs are posted in prominent places to remind the visitor that they are in "Old Pasadena".

The longing to return to the genteel tradition has even infiltrated retail. Dickinson sees the ideal masculinity and femininity of the 19th century exemplified in the clothing stores Banana Republic and Victoria Secret. The safari fatigues and trophy game heads lining Banana Republic stores exemplify the imperialist hunter which was the 19th century eurocentric male ideal while a woman who displayed Victorian morals publicly but privately seduced was seen as the feminine ideal. Dickinson wants to increase awareness of how the use of nostalgia attempts to persuade consumers that a product will enable them to recreate a mythic past.

What kinds of questions do Communications scholars ask and how do they answer them?

The field of Communications is broadly divided into two areas, communication science and humanistic research. Communication science is much like the disciplines of social psychology or sociology and uses hypothesis driven research to answer questions. Humanistic research explores the way language, texts, or other forms work to influence people's behavior. A classic example is a public address, for example, how Bill Clinton tries to persuade people to accept his ideas, and how his message targets a particular audience.

For my dissertation, I used Old Town Pasadena as the form and asked questions about what this space is encouraging people to do and how are people changing Old Town as they interact with it. This was quite challenging as, unlike a speech, Old Town has no single author, no clear beginning and end, is different in the day than at night, attracts different people according to the shops that open or go out of business, as well as theater billings, to name a few factors. Each text, whether it be literature or building facades, has encoded into it inherent values it is trying to persuade us to identify with, and in my research, I discern the types of identities the structures of Old Town are encouraging.

Current Projects?

I am currently turning my dissertation into a book length manuscript, and writing two more chapters, one on Universal City Walk. This spring, I am teaching a class called Topics in Communications, focusing on Landscapes of Pleasure, and we will explore problems of space, rhetoric, and identity. The class will go to Universal City Walk to see how space is used to persuade people that they are having a good time. The other chapter I am working on looks at the problem of style and identity.

I am also working on the idea of comfort food, or how west coast society finds authenticity through food that we literally consume. This involves a close look at where restaurants are located in cities and how menus are constructed. Examples of the types of questions I am asking are, why in Seattle is expresso considered more authentic than drip coffee in coffee houses, what authenticity is gained by drinking beer brewed on cite in microbreweries in Portland, and how types of food, such as Italian, or Southern become familiar. I am looking at the particular reasons why we consume what we consume.

How can the study of communications be helpful to people in other fields?

Communications asks questions about our daily experience. We are continually bombarded with forms, whether they be literature, architecture, comfort food, et cetera., which attempt to influence how we perceive ourselves, and the way we perform our identities by the ways we dress, speak, and use body language. Identity is a cultural construct arising from the messages society gives as to what it means to be a man or woman, and ethnicity within a society. It is imperative to recognize how one is being persuaded to perform an identity through these forms, for once one realizes how these forms tie us together and structure who we are, this enables us to ask better questions about who we are and to create a better life.

Although my discipline is Communications, my scholarship fits into the broader category of cultural studies which asks nontraditional questions about power, identity, gender, ethnicity, and race. I am interested in how these forms persuade us to find an identity within culture and position us in society. These questions of power can be asked in any discipline, and an increasing number of people are incorporating cultural studies into their more traditional disciplines, an example would be the other professors interviewed in Search, Cheryl Koos Ph.D. and Clark Davis, Ph.D. who incorporate cultural studies into their Modern Europe and American History classes. An example within biology would be a study on how medical textbooks describe reproduction in masculine terms.

~Interviewer: Traci Winters

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