George Lipsitz

“What's Race Got to Do with It?” Remembering Ike Turner (1931–2007)

Ike Turner is dead and nearly everything about his life is in dispute, except his talent. He died on 12 December 2007, properly reviled as one of society’s most famous wifebeaters, yet wrongly forgotten as one of its greatest musical innovators. Both of these aspects of Ike’s complex, chaotic, and tormented 70+ years on earth have something to teach us, not only about Ike, but also about the rest of us who either condemn or admire him without reckoning with the vexed contradictions and conditions that shaped his life and deeds. It is not easy to see Ike Turner in a sympathetic way. By his own admission, he spent some eleven million dollars over the course of his life on cocaine. He served several stints in prison for drug offenses. Although Ike denied ‘‘beating’’ his wives (as many as thirteen of them by some counts), he freely admitted ‘‘hitting’’ them. He punched Howlin’ Wolf and reportedly shot at a newspaper delivery boy who made the mistake of leaving the evening paper in a place on the porch that did not meet with Ike’s approval. Turner insisted on receiving a full writer’s credit on Tina Turner’s recording of ‘‘River Deep, Mountain High,’’ even though he had nothing to do with writing or recording the song. Ike kept for himself the royalties that the Ikettes earned on a series of records he produced. When the Ikettes tried to salvage something from their hits by going on tour to perform them, Ike stopped them from using the Ikettes name, which he had copyrighted, forcing them to tour (unsuccessfully) as the Mirettes. Ike Turner’s name became synonymous with wife-beating at the precise historical moment when decades of feminist mobilization finally succeeded in giving domestic abuse the stigma it deserves. As one of the most widely recognized symbols of the indecency of gendered familial violence, his shaming served positive social purposes, making him surely one of the most unlikely and most unexpected contributors to women’s rights and human rights ever. Yet he never seemed to understand the reasons for his obloquy and disgrace, never expressed remorse for things that he had done. Tina Turner’s 1986 autobiography I, Tina disclosed repeated incidents of domestic abuse by Ike Turner. The man who profited most from Tina’s artistry as a vocalist on stage routinely assaulted her off stage. She reports him striking her with a shoe stretcher, sticking a cigarette all the way up her nose, and beating her repeatedly. In Popular Music and Society Vol. 32, No. 1, February 2009, pp. 117–121

Carmen Teresa Whalen, From Puerto Rico to Philadelphia: Puerto Rican Workers and Postwar Economies. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001. 336pp.

For nearly a century, scholars, politicians, and social service workers in the United States have attributed high levels of poverty among Puerto Ricans, on both the island and the North American mainland, to deficiencies in the behavior, beliefs, and values of the Puerto Rican people. Carmen Teresa Whalen presents an exhaustively researched and carefully argued rebuttal to these “culture of poverty” arguments in From Puerto Rico to Philadelphia: Puerto Rican Farm Workers and Postwar Economies.

74.50 cloth;

The present moment of social and cultural transformation requires us to develop trans-national and post-national ways of knowing. We now see in retrospect that industrialization, nationalism, and the Cold War were not just historical events, but also epistemologies and ontologies. They directed our attention toward investigations of national identities and national cultures. They encouraged us to define politics in terms of citizenship and the state. They led us to look for universality, uniformity, and sameness as preconditions for social justice. Yet our experiences in the post-industrial, post-nationalist, and post-Cold War eras confront us continuously with cultural practices that cannot be pinned down to any one place, with political projects that go beyond demands by citizens on states, and by struggles for social justice that rely on partial, perspectival, and differential consciousness. We encounter unexpected allies and enemies; our political and cultural projects proceed through principles of identification and affiliation, rather than through identicality and coalition. This special issue of Cultural Values brings together scholars from the U. S. and the U. K. to explore the nature of national identity in the U. S. at the start of a new century. They present a composite picture of intercultural conflict and creativity, of the seeming compression of time and space, of the rapid emergence of new identities and the ghostly return of old ones. Contemporary cultural production in the U. S. does not erase older narratives of national identity, citizenship, and subjectivity, but rather recontextualizes them in light of emerging understandings, ideas, and identities. They underscore the contradictory processes at the present time that make it equally impossible for us to either embrace or to evade the national identities that we inhabit, but instead make it necessary for us to fashion new ways of knowing. The rapid movement across the globe of people and products that characterizes the present era influences nearly every aspect of contemporary culture and politics. Traditional assumptions linking culture to place have been disrupted by the emergence of new modes of production and distribution, new communications technologies, and new alignments of private and public power. In the United States today, emerging patterns of migration, trade, investment, and military intervention affect everything from the national origins of babies