Rethinking Americanization Abroad: Toward a Critical Alternative to Prevailing Paradigms

Abstract

A number of international Americanists and other scholars studying America's impact and resonance overseas have revisited issue of in past few decades. Their interest tended to focus mostly on America's influence abroad.1 This article reconsiders new paradigms and discusses merits and shortcomings of each. Although protagonists of these approaches are certainly correct in rejecting a simple equation of globalization and and in emphasizing active involvement of recipients of American culture, they tend to tip balance too far toward one side as I hope to demonstrate. This leads to a programmatic outline of study of from a more balanced perspective that takes both projections of United States' powers and local reworkings of American influence into account. The starting point is that Americanization-in all of its manifestations and interpretationsrefers to real or purported influence of one or more forms of on some social entity, material object, or practice. Processes of this kind have taken (and are still taking) place both inside and outside United States. The social entity can be a group of people or social category, a region, a nation, or a transnational world or that goes beyond this geographic scale-a specific area, civilization, or even the globe as a whole. The object in question can be any good, product, or artifact and its associated technology or practice. Americanism is provisionally, and therefore less accurately, defined here as a characteristic feature of United States, and refers to principles and practices inherent to American society and (or at least believed to be so by observers concerned). It needs to be emphasized that overseas-by which I mean invariably Americanization (Robertson, Afterword 257)-is deliberately defined broadly here. It refers to processes in which economic, technological, political, social, cultural, and/or sociopsychological influences emanating from America or Americans impinge on values, norms, belief systems, mentalities, habits, rules, technologies, practices, institutions, and behaviors of non-Americans. These diverse influences are conveyed by import in foreign contexts of products, models or exemplars, images, ideas, values, ideals, technologies, practices, and behavior originating from, or at least closely associated with, America or Americans. It should be noted that division between economic, technological, political, social, cultural, and sociopsychological dimensions concerns analytical, as opposed to empirical, distinctions. In reality, various dimensions interpenetrate each other (260), demonstrating all kinds of interrelations and interplays. Current Paradigms of The point of departure for recent scholarship has been to reject thesis of imperialism. Although term cultural had occasionally been used before, it was only in 1960s that this critique came to be formulated as a coherent argument. A revisionist, mostly New Left, historiography of US economic and political imperialism formed its breeding ground. International mass communication research of US media imperialism gave another strong impetus to it, as did UNESCO's increasing concern since 1970s with protection of national cultures and national heritages (Gienow-Hecht 472-75). The 1977 edition of The Harper Dictionary of Modern Thought defines imperialism as the use of political and economic power to exalt and spread values and habits of a foreign at expense of a native culture (qtd. in Amove 2). Applied to United States influence, term in its then prevalent, crude version suggested that should be understood as a process in which an hegemonic America manipulated and ultimately imposed its ways on passive recipients, reducing them to colonized people. …