Abstract
This article considers the different media narratives about the 1992 Los Angeles uprising, in order to explain how the genre of tragedy became the most powerful representational form for talking about race and civil society during the 1990s. Three narrative mechanisms were used to shift discussions of race and civil society toward the tragic frame: (1) a change in temporality, (2) the rhetorical failures of politicians, and (3) the emplotment of new events into the dominant tragic narratives. Because most crises get their dramatic power from the tension between romance and tragedy, the shift to tragic discourse led to cynicism, skepticism, resignation, and inaction. The article concludes by arguing that the search for genre imbalance is an important tool for those interested in studying culture and ideology during times of crisis.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
REFERENCES
Alexander, J. C. (1988). Action and its environments. NY: Columbia University Press.
Alexander, J. C. (1992). Citizen and enemy as symbolic classification: On the polarizing discourse of civil society. In M. Fournier & M. Lamont (Eds.), Where culture talks: Exclusion and the making of society (pp. 289-308). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Alexander, J. C. (Ed.) (1998). Civil society I, II, III: Constructing an empirical concept from normative controversies and historical transformations. In Real civil societies: Dilemmas of institutionalization (pp. 1-19). London: Sage.
Alexander, J. C., & Smith, P. (1993). The discourse of American civil society: A new proposal for cultural studies. Theory and Society, 22, 151-207.
Baker, K. (1992). Defining the public sphere in eighteenth-century France: Variations on a theme by Habermas. In C. Calhoun (Ed.), Habermas and the public sphere (pp. 181-211). Cambridge: The MIT Press.
Bakhtin, M. (1994). The Bakhtin reader, P. Morris (Ed.). London: Edward Arnold.
Barthes, R. (1973). Elements of semiology. NY: Hill and Wang.
Benhabib, S. (1991). On Hegel, women, and irony. In M. Shanley & C. Pateman (Eds.), Feminist interpretations and political theory (pp. 129-145). University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press.
Benhabib, S. (1992). In the shadow of Aristotle and Hegel: Communicative ethics and current controversies in practical philosophy. In S. Benhabib, Situating the self: Gender, community and postmodernism in contemporary ethics (pp. 23-67). New York: Routledge.
Bobo, L., Zubrinski, C., Johnson, Jr., J., & Oliver, M. (1994). Public opinion before and after a spring of discontent. In M. Baldassare (Ed.), The Los Angeles riots: Lessons for the urban future (pp. 103-134). Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Bruner, J. (1986). Actual minds, possible worlds. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Dahlgren, P. (1988). What's the meaning of this? Viewers' plural sense making of TV news. Media, Culture & Society, 10, 285-307.
Durkheim, E. (1965). The elementary forms of the religious life. NY: The Free Press.
Eco, U. (1984). The role of the reader. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Eley, G. (1992). Nations, publics, and political cultures: Placing Habermas in the nineteenth century. In C. Calhoun (Ed.), Habermas and the public sphere (pp. 289-339). Cambridge: The MIT Press.
Elsaesser, T. (1981). Narrative cinema and audience-oriented aesthetics. In T. Bennett, S. Boyd-Bowman, C. Mercer, & J. Woollacott (Eds.), Popular television and film (pp. 270-282). London: British Film Institute.
Fiske, J. (1987). Television culture. London: Methuen.
Fiske, J. (1989). Understanding popular culture. Boston: Unwin Hyman.
Frye, N. (1957). Anatomy of criticism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Gans, H. (1979). Deciding what's news. New York: Vintage.
Gibbs, J. T. (1996). Race and justice: Rodney King and O. J. Simpson in a house divided. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers.
Glaser, T. (Ed.) (1999). The idea of public journalism. New York: Guilford Press.
Graber, D. A. (1993). Mass media and American politics, 4th ed. Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly, Inc.
Griswold, W. (1986). Renaissance revivals. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Griswold, W. (1987). A methodological framework for the sociology of culture. Sociological Methodology, 17, 1-35.
Griswold, W. (1992). The writing on the mudwall: Nigerian novels and the imaginary village. American Sociological Review, 57, 709-724.
Hall, S. (Ed.) (1980). Encoding/decoding. In Culture, media, language: Working papers in cultural studies (pp. 128-138). London: Hutchinson.
Herman, E., & Chomsky, N. (1988). Manufacturing consent. New York: Pantheon.
Hunt, D. (1997). Screening the Los Angeles “riots”: Race, resistance, and seeing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Jacobs, R. N. (1996). Civil society and crisis: Culture, discourse, and the Rodney King beating. American Journal of Sociology, 101, 1238-1272.
Jacobs, R. N. (2000). Race, media, and the crisis of civil society:FromWatts to Rodney King. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Jacobs, R., & Smith, P. (1997). Romance, irony, and solidarity. Sociological Theory, 15, 60-80.
Keane, J. (1984). Public life and late capitalism: Toward a socialist theory of democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ku, A. (1999). Narratives, politics, and the public sphere: Struggles over political reform in the final transitional years in Hong Kong (1992-1994). Aldershot: Ashgate Press.
Landes, J. (1988). Women and the public sphere in the age of the French Revolution. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Liebes, T.,& Katz, E. (1993). The export of meaning: Cross-cultural readings of Dallas. Oxford: Polity Press.
Long, E. (1994). Textual interpretation as collective action. In J. Cruz and J. Lewis (Eds.), Viewing, reading, listening: Audiences and cultural reception (pp. 181-212). Boulder, CO: WestviewPress.
Lusted, D. (1996). Social class and the western as male melodrama. In I. Cameron and D. Pye (Eds.), The movie book of the western (pp. 63-74). London: Studio Vista.
Maltby, I., & Craven, R. (1995). Hollywood cinema. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Press.
Neale, S. (1980). Genre. London Film Institute.
Nietzsche, F. (1956). The birth of tragedy. In The birth of tragedy and the geneology of morals (pp. 1-146). F. Golffing, transl. New York: Anchor Books.
Olick, J. (1999). Genre memories and memory genres: A dialogical analysis of May 8, 1945 commemorations in the Federal Republic of Germany. American Sociological Review, 64, 381-402.
Omi, M., & Winant, H. (1993). The Los Angeles “race riot” and contemporary U.S. politics. In R. Gooding-Williams (Ed.), Reading Rodney King, reading urban uprising (pp. 97-116). New York: Routledge.
Press, A. (1991). Women watching television: Gender, class, and generation in the American television experience. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Price, M. E. (1995). Television, the public sphere, and national identity. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Pye, D. (1975). Genre and movies. Movie, 20, 29-43.
Ricoeur, P. (1967). The symbolism of evil. Boston: Beacon Press.
Rosen, J. (1999). What are journalists for? New Haven: Yale University Press.
Ryan, M. (1992). Gender and public access: Women's politics in nineteenth-century America. In C. Calhoun (Ed.), Habermas and the public sphere (pp. 259-288). Cambridge: The MIT Press.
Schatz, T. (1981). Hollywood genres: Formulas, filmmaking, and the studio system. NewYork: Random House.
Smith, P. (1994). The semiotic foundations of media narratives. Journal of Narrative and Life History, 4, 89-118.
Smith, P. (1998). Barbarism and civility as variations on a theme. In J. Alexander (Ed.), Real civil societies (pp. 138-161). London: Sage.
Sonenshein, R. (1993). Politics in black and white: Race and power in Los Angeles. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Steinberg, M. (1999). The talk and back talk of collective action: A dialogic analysis of repertoires of discourse among nineteenth-century English cotton spinners. American Journal of Sociology, 105, 736-780.
Tucker, K.H. (1996a). French Revolutionary syndicalism and the public sphere. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Tucker, K. H. (1996b). Harmony and transgression: Aesthetic imagery and the public sphere in Habermas and post-structuralism. Current Perspectives in Social Theory, 16, 101-120.
Turner, G. (1993). Film as social practice. New York: Routledge.
Turner, V. (1969). The ritual process. Chicago: Aldine.
Turner, V. (1974). Dramas, fields and metaphors. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Twitchell, J. (1985). Dreadful pleasures: An anatomy of modern horror. New York: Oxford University Press.
Wagner-Pacifici, R. (2000). Theorizing the standoff. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wagner-Pacifici, R., & Schwartz, B. (1991). The Vietnam veteran's memorial: Commemorating a difficult past. American Journal of Sociology, 97, 376-420.
Watts, J. G. (1993). Reflections on the Rodney King verdict and the paradoxes of the black response. In R. Gooding-Williams (Ed.), Reading Rodney King, reading urban uprising (pp. 236-248). New York: Routledge.
Weaver, D. H., & Wilhoit, G. C. (1996). The American journalist in the 1990s. Matwah, NJ: Lawrence Ehrlbaum Associates.
Weber, M. (1946). The social psychology of world religions. In H. H. Gerth & C.W. Mills (Eds.), From Max Weber: Essays in sociology (pp. 267-301). New York: Oxford University Press.
West, C. (1989). The American evasion of philosophy: A geneology of pragmatism. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press.
West, C. (1994). Race matters. Boston: Beacon Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Jacobs, R.N. The Problem with Tragic Narratives: Lessons from the Los Angeles Uprising. Qualitative Sociology 24, 221–243 (2001). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1010774209910
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1010774209910