The Concept of An Alternative Culture
- See also: List of subcultures and History of subcultures in the 20th century
The concept of alternative culture is rooted in the development of new views of adolescence during the 1950s in Western Europe and North America. This development, in conjunction with the emergence of the teddy boy and the release of the US films The Wild One (1953) and Rebel Without a Cause (1955), saw adolescents in North America and Western Europe collectively express a form of rebellion against the values of their parents and authority in general. The reasons for this rejection of traditional social codes and attitudes were usually personal, but were at the same time easier to define when asserted as part of a group.
The current understanding of alternative culture came about in the early 1990s, when strands of youth culture, counter culture, and various subcultures came together prompted by corporate influences. The high-profile exceptions to this have been hip hop culture and the Riot Grrrl movement. The recreational use of time by both women and people of color has been reported upon, but usually with disdain.
Read more about this topic: Alternative Culture
Famous quotes containing the words concept, alternative and/or culture:
“One concept corrupts and confuses the others. I am not speaking of the Evil whose limited sphere is ethics; I am speaking of the infinite.”
—Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986)
“Our mother gives us our earliest lessons in love—and its partner, hate. Our father—our “second other”Melaborates on them. Offering us an alternative to the mother-baby relationship . . . presenting a masculine model which can supplement and contrast with the feminine. And providing us with further and perhaps quite different meanings of lovable and loving and being loved.”
—Judith Viorst (20th century)
“Any historian of the literature of the modern age will take virtually for granted the adversary intention, the actually subversive intention, that characterizes modern writing—he will perceive its clear purpose of detaching the reader from the habits of thought and feeling that the larger culture imposes, of giving him a ground and a vantage point from which to judge and condemn, and perhaps revise, the culture that produces him.”
—Lionel Trilling (1905–1975)