Reframing the Study of American Visual Culture: From National Studies to Transnational Digital Networks

Abstract

American culture in the twenty-first century is conceptually fraught with problems: new communications and media technologies make the visual imagery of American culture instantaneously accessible globally; the consumption of American goods and imagery is frequently a metonym for wealth, status, and power; and yet, just as often, American culture is seen as a polluting and contaminating force that threatens the integrity and viability of other cultures (see Figure 1). Even American scholars have flattened and oversimplified the idea of American culture as something fixed and stable. But American cultural identity is neither singular nor unitary; rather it is a constantly mutating social construct and the result of multiple of transcultural connections, transactions, negotiations, and exchanges. And its borders are permeable and porous; its mutating identity is elastic and slippery. This article considers the problems presented by a singular unitary construct of American visual culture specifically in today's world of exponentially expanding production and consumption of digitally produced visual images, of transactual global visual communications and transcultural identities. It argues for a reframing of the intellectual platforms of American (visual) culture studies in light of the fact that the primary sites of American transcultural transactions are increasingly visual. Moreover, the article explores how the history of American art and visual culture has already reframed its scholarly discourse to embrace a more relativist and complex conceptualization of American visual culture as a network of imbricated transcultural transactions. Finally, it proposes a new scholarly and pedagogical platform upon which future American (visual) culture studies might be built. Reframing American Visual Culture for the Twenty-First Century Many scholars argue today that the idea of a fixed or unitary consideration of culture(s) needs rethinking owing to the global transactions facilitated by communications technologies in the twenty-first century. Nicholas Mirzoeff, for example, argues that culture is less a fixed entity than a hybrid of networks in which the process of cultural exchange is perpetually (re)negotiated among cultures. Mirzoeff approvingly cites Fernando Ortiz who claimed that in any transaction among cultures, weak or strong, the cultures are changed and that accordingly all culture is (41). Additionally, the change is constant: transculture is a perpetual process of deculturation and reculturation of both the weak and strong (41). Thus, meaning in culture is a result of constant ongoing (re)negotiation of cultural identity as cultures reimagine and regenerate themselves. Cultures continually possess, alter and assimilate aspects of other cultures into their own. Mirzoeff thus concludes that all transculture is plural because transculture has no beginning or end and is always in transformation (43). Within this conceptual framework cultural meaning is located less in a search for a singular authenticity in culture than in transactions among (trans)cultures. Cultural meaning (transcultural narrative) cannot be comprehended either from a singular authoritative viewpoint or as a static entity; it can only be comprehended as moving and mutating, and it can only be observed in fragments from a transverse or oblique perspective and with an implicated eye. Within today's hybrid, global, visual communications networks, the construction of visual cultural identity is not monolithic. Rather, it is a constantly morphing multiplicity of transcultural transactions. Just as mechanical technology fundamentally transformed communication in the nineteenth century, digital technology is proving to be equally transformative in the twenty-first century. Digitally produced visual images have become America's most pervasive and widely consumed good. Those with access to digital technologies increasingly read, think, and communicate visually. …