In the TimeSpace1 (Blommaert, 2010) of the modernist America of the 1950s and the
1960s, ‘hipster culture’ was a counterculture of avant-garde values and a style that
explicitly distinguished itself from the dominant mainstream (white) culture. This took
shape in the context of the post-WWII period, characterised by capitalist Fordism with
its consumerism, colonialism and imperialism. It was a time of mass production, but also
of rising standards of living for the American middle class. Parallel to this emerged the
multicultural society and especially the flowering of Black subculture, and jazz in particular
(Arsel and Thompson, 2010; Greif, 2010a; Mailer, 1957; Reeve, 2013)