Cultural Impact
The phrase "radical chic" has entered into the political and cultural lexicon to describe the adoption of radical or quasi-radical causes by members of the wealthy high-society and celebrity class. Both essays were later reprinted in Wolfe's collection The Purple Decades, indicating that he considered them among his best work.
The "Radical Chic" essay was seen as exploring the complexity of race relations, much like the 1967 film Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, which examined the superficiality of race relations when social-segregation was still the norm. With "Radical Chic" interracial harmony was only achieved through complete white submission.
Read more about this topic: Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing The Flak Catchers
Famous quotes containing the words cultural and/or impact:
“The sickly cultural pathos which the whole of France indulges in, that fetishism of the cultural heritage.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)
“One can describe a landscape in many different words and sentences, but one would not normally cut up a picture of a landscape and rearrange it in different patterns in order to describe it in different ways. Because a photograph is not composed of discrete units strung out in a linear row of meaningful pieces, we do not understand it by looking at one element after another in a set sequence. The photograph is understood in one act of seeing; it is perceived in a gestalt.”
—Joshua Meyrowitz, U.S. educator, media critic. “The Blurring of Public and Private Behaviors,” No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior, Oxford University Press (1985)