| This dissertation examines the development and transformation of alternative cultural formations by analyzing the relationships between cultural values, affects, practices of everyday life, and canons in such formations. Specifically, it examines two film-centered cultural formations in New York City–the 1960s underground cinema and 1970s No Wave Cinema–by theorizing them as "undergrounds" cultural movements manifesting the structure and organization of subcultures with some of the goals and values of avant-gardism. It describes the ways that these formations developed formal and informal institutions and regimes of value, regimes based in foundational ways on the valorization of affect and everyday life. It analyzes ways in which those institutions and regimes were articulated to alternative and/or oppositional cultural, social, and political values and perspectives, and how they were also articulated to hegemonic values, perspectives, and institutions. These latter articulations emerge clearly in the canonization process, a process that each formation underwent in different ways. The dissertation examines these canonization processes, their relationships with the formations' regimes of value, and their effects on the historical development of the formations. It demonstrates the ways in which canonization, frequently understood as an inherently hegemonic, conservative process, has multiple effects on underground cultural formations, directing tastes and facilitating cooptation while also encouraging continued underground cultural practice and aiding in the introduction of such work, practices, and regimes of value to new audiences. By examining underground cultural formations through the lens of the canon, the dissertation rethinks conventional ideas about the ways hegemonic forces appropriate or incorporate alternative and oppositional cultural movements, rethinking the received historiographies of such movements, the ways in which conceptions of belonging and mappings of difference are constructed by and for underground formations, and the lessons canonization processes teach us about the role of culture in social and political opposition. |
