Paul Lauter argues that ‘the globalization of American culture seems to require an increased localization of its study’ (From Walden Pond to Jurassic Park, Duke UP, 2001, p. 18). Act on this suggestion and assess the transit through any specific location of your choice of one of the following: a) American music; b) American fashion; c) American food; d) American sport.
The US film producer Walter Wanger described the copies of Hollywood movies circulating in the world as ‘120,000 American Ambassadors’: ‘Millions of hands of every hue extend clutched earnings. Every tongue – outdoing Babel – says for American pictures, “Two tickets, please”’ (‘120,000 American Ambassadors’, Foreign Affairs, vol. 18, no. 1, October 1939, p. 45). Do you think of Hollywood films now in similar terms, i.e. as emissaries of American power?
The process we call globalization is characterized by the conflation of cultural and economic forms. When commodities travel, culture travels, and cultural forms are nothing if not commodities’ (Paul Jay, Global Matters, Cornell UP, 2010, p. 34, emphasis in original). How bound up with the commodity form, with making profits, is American culture as it travels the world?
‘The Yankees have colonized our subconscious’ (Bruno in Kings of the Road, dir. Wim Wenders, West Germany, 1976). Would you agree that even our dreams and fantasies now are American?
‘The United States does not, and indeed no nation-state can today, form the center of an imperialist project. Imperialism is over. No nation will be world leader in the way modern European nations were’ (Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, Harvard UP, 2000, xiii-xiv, emphasis in original). Are Hardt and Negri right not to think of the United States now as an imperial force?
In Paul Giles’s words, ‘we should read the United States itself as one of the objects of globalization, rather than as merely its malign agent, so that all the insecurities associated with transnationalism are lived out experientially within the nation’s own borders as well’ (The Global Remapping of American Literature, Princeton UP, 2011, p. 23). Evaluate Giles’s proposition, with your choice of examples.
Study Activities
We begin the chapter itself by reading the start of Willa Cather’s novel O Pioneers! (1913) in the light of Arjun Appadurai’s five-part model of globalisation, as developed in his book, Modernity at Large (1996). Begin your own work on global America by researching what Appadurai has in mind by the five interrelated ‘flows’ across national boundaries he calls ethnoscapes, technoscapes, financescapes, mediascapes and ideoscapes – a helpful overview is offered here by Jason L. Powell and Rebecca Steel – and then consider where they can be seen, and with what effects, in two pieces of American culture of your choice. To observe dizzying increases in the pace and reach of global exchanges, you might take your materials from different periods: e.g. a pairing of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) and Lee Sung Jin’s Netflix series Beef (2023-), or of Chapter 1 of Henry James’s novel The American (1877) and Jon Watts’s film Spider-Man: Far From Home (2019).
Go to the nearest town or city and photograph signs of its Americanisation. Good sources of evidence will include billboards and posters; supermarket shelves and retail parks; leisure sites and fast food outlets. Organise the images you capture into a photo-essay, in which you uncover the extent and effect, locally, of American cultural inputs.
Take one of the following iconic objects from American culture: a) the Big Mac; b) the Coca-Cola bottle; c) the Statue of Liberty; d) the Stars and Stripes; e) blue jeans; f) Mickey Mouse; g) Bart Simpson. Then explore how it currently travels across the world. Does it signify the same thing in each non-US location that you consider, or is its meaning modified according to place? Does it straightforwardly exhibit American dominance (making it an agent of cultural imperialism, to reference a concept we discuss in the chapter), or is it met in at least some destinations by resistance of various kinds (e.g. critique or parody or melding with indigenous cultural forms to make a distinctive new object)?
In The Uses of Literacy, his book diagnosing the state of British culture after the Second World War, Richard Hoggart offers a bleak pen-portrait of the young people – men, especially – who frequented one of the new ‘milk-bars’: ‘Many of the customers – their clothes, their hair-styles, their facial expressions all indicate – are living in a myth world compounded of a few simple elements which they take to be those of American life’ (Transaction Publishers, 1998 [1957], p. 190, emphasis added). Though published some eighty years ago, Hoggart’s book usefully prompts us to ask which versions of America we get when encountering cultural imports from the United States? Explore this question, taking as evidence your own acts of reading, viewing, listening, clothes-buying, eating and drinking, etc.
‘It’s hard to be abroad right now,’ lamented Chelsea Clinton, the former ‘First Daughter’, late in 2001, following the 9/11 attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C., and the subsequent initiation by President George W. Bush of military action against Afghanistan. As Clinton continued: ‘Every day I encounter some sort of anti-American feeling’ (‘Chelsea takes offence at Oxford classmates’, The Guardian, 9 November, 2001, n.p.). Such anti-Americanism has a long, unfinished history. In the chapter we consider its varied manifestations in the mid-twentieth century, extending across the world from Britain and France to Egypt. But since Clinton spoke, animus against the United States has continued to be expressed in many locations. Consider, then, contemporary anti-Americanism: what, exactly, is it that people in different countries are fiercely ‘anti-’ about?
Online Resources
Yale Center for the Study of Globalization – valuable strand of Yale University’s research, with particular focus on ‘the core issues of global development, financial globalization, multilateral trade, and the provision of key global public goods’
Understanding Globalisation – series of succinct talks on aspects of globalisation, prepared for the Open University, UK by Susan Segal: the series’ cultural dimension nicely complements the economic and policy foci of the Yale and Peterson sites
The American Rejection of Globalization – report presented by American Compass, an organisation explicit, according to its own website, in ‘charting the course for conservative economics’
Naomi Klein – a political alternative to American Compass: website of the Canadian journalist, activist and climate justice professor, whose work, generously sampled here, engages issues such as US economic and cultural power in the world
Cultural Imperialism – succinct but very helpful exposition of this concept, supplied by the US information services company EBSCO
Coca-Cola Company – statistics & facts – information gathered by Statista: very helpful in providing a statistical underpinning to abstract assertions about the global extent of Cocacolonisation
The NFL’s International Impact – internationally directed website hosted by the NFL itself, helpfully evidencing our chapter’s discussion of the NFL ‘International Games’ played in major cities around the world
International Affairs – this strand of the Pew Research Center’s work is global in remit (rather than narrowly US-focused), yet very helpful in its up-to-the minute documentation of how the United States is seen around the world
Remembering 9/11 – documents and images held by the National Archives, valuable for researching the events of September 11 which prompted reflection in the US about the nation’s place in the world