In the scenes from Grant Park on Tuesday night, I was most struck by the shots of Jesse Jackson and Oprah Winfrey. The former represented the enormous achievements of the civil rights movement that laid the political foundations for Tuesday’s victory. The latter represents something different: the mainstreaming of a black voice in the general culture, largely to and through women, using the medium of television, the charisma of celebrity, and the infinite weight of the “daytime” and “everyday” worlds. Oprah is what Antonio Gramsci called an organic intellectual, a thinker who comes out of a specific working and living milieu and gives voice to a community’s interests outside or beyond the “official” intellectual organs of the university, the church, or the state bureaucracy. “All men are intellectuals,” he wrote, “but not not all men have in society the function of intellectuals.”
Oprah is a media architect, commentator, and taste-maker who has done at least as much to build a new normative discourse of everyday life in this country as Martha Stewart has, though tackling different issues. Oprah’s decision early on to support Obama played a role in his victory over Hillary. Now that he’s going to be President, maybe she’ll get to make over the White House.
— Julia Lupton · 2008-11-06
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THE BOOK