American Pop Culture Research Articles

Introduction: SHAFR 2000 and North American Culture(s)

Several weeks after the academic conference where the five following presentations were first made, the Canadian edition of Time magazine (10 July 2000) carried a cover story with the provocative title, What Border? The article described the economic links that were growing between Canada and the United States, and the new political relationships that were being forged between states and provinces on both sides of the border. The statistics are certainly impressive: during 1999 Canadians invested more than C$91 billion in the United States and nearly C$118 billion of capital flowed the other way; each minute the two countries conduct more than C$1 million in cross-border trade; and each year more than two hundred million Canadians and Americans cross the border for personal or professional reasons. There are probably no two nations that better symbolize the benefits of the current trends towards increasing economic integration and globalization. The 11 September terrorist attacks and their aftermath reminde d us, as never before, of the costs. National frontiers are disappearing in the realm of North American academic scholarship as well. In recent years, even U.S.-centric organizations such as the Center for the Study of the Presidency, The Modern Language Association (MLA), the Organization of American Historians (OAH), and the American Studies Association (ASA) held their annual meetings in Canadian cities. During the summer of 2000, the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR) joined that trend when they held their conference at Ryerson Polytechnic University in Toronto. It was the first time in the organization's twenty-six-year history that its members met outside of the United States. Such organizations have been drawn north by more than the cheaper Canadian dollar or the opportunity to visit a popular tourist destination. Scholars recognize the growing sense that the academic communities in both countries are becoming consolidated into a greater North American whole. The steady growth of organizations such as the Association of Canadian Studies in the United States (ACSUS) is further evidence that the parochial frontiers of academic disciplines and nationalities are breaking down in the face of a broader and more dynamic and inclusive community of scholars. Anticipating the June 2000 meeting of SHAFR in Toronto, some of those involved decided that it would be a good idea to take the opportunity to highlight the topic of bilateral cultural relations. To that end, leading economists, sociologists, historians, government officials, consultants, and journalists from both sides of the border were invited to participate in a series of four panels that examined the current state of Canadian-American cultural relations. As the recent Time article asserted, manufactured goods, investment dollars, and private citizens of both nations are intermingling at an ever-growing pace. Given this, a variety of questions seemed worth examining: As national frontiers disappear as a barrier to commerce, what will be the impact upon the social identities and cultural institutions and distinctiveness of both nations? Have Canadians become too preoccupied with the growing influence of their closest neighbor, while ignoring the globalizing influences that are being exerted on both North A merican nations from overseas? Are there lessons to draw from the North American experience for other nations that also face the challenges of economic interdependence and globalization? Do the successes of Quebec diva Celine Dion and the acrobatic troupe Cirque du Soleil in both the U.S. and the wider global market indicate that French Canada has been able to develop a formula that actually turns the table on the apparent omnipotence of American pop culture? Is there any remaining role for governments in a field of commerce that is so incredibly responsive to changing consumer tastes and market forces? The first roundtable at SHAFR 2000 was an attempt to better define the terminology of the topic. …

American Pop Culture Invades Germany: Some Love It—Some Don't

A specter is haunting Europe, the specter of Americanization. Neither Adenauer nor De Gaulle, Italian chefs or French farmers have been able to stop it. Some, especially in Germany, apparently have not even tried. It has been claimed that Germany is beyond question the most Americanized country outside America.'1 A casual tourist walking through the streets of Frankfurt would probably agree. Advertisements for anything from automobiles to airlines may be addressing the viewer in English as likely as in German. Popular music blaring out of radios is probably sung in English. While France has made headlines with legal attempts to block such subversive terms as weekend or sandwich from polluting the purity of the Gallic tongue, few such stories have ever emanated from Germany. After the unconditional surrender of its military in 1945, it seems the country has raised the white flag to all imports wrapped in red, white, and blue. West Germany permitted coca-colazation without a whimper. Obviously, the story is not that simple. While lots of popular music is indeed imported from the Anglo-Saxon countries, the Berlin Philharmonic still exists. Mercedes-Benz has not surrendered to Detroit. On the contrary, it has spread its wings across the Atlantic and it is not the only one. German companies regularly invest in the United States, and U.S. companies reciprocate in Germany. Both countries are prime actors in our global economy. Nevertheless the strong degree of of Germany cannot be denied. The question may be raised: why Germany, and why to that extent? A closer look at the issue will show the incredible material and psychological imbalance between the two countries after the Second World War, but it will also show considerable resistance to the blind adoption of cultural imports from the United States. More often than not, Americanization carries a negative connotation. It is frequently being used as a metaphor for a variety of different phenomena. They include materialism and material prosperity, mass culture or the cheapening of high culture, convenience, reliance on technology, social mobility, political equality, and social egalitarianism. Sometimes Americanization may simply imply modernism and social, political, or economic progress. Before the Second World War, the contact Germans had with American popular culture was largely sporadic and indirect. The New World, literally, was still worlds apart from the old one. The way to get there was by ocean liner. Tickets were expensive, travels were long, while average earnings were low and vacations short. After 1945, the picture changed dramatically. On May 8, 1945, the war in Europe came to an end. Germany was not just defeated, it was crushed. It ceased to exist as a sovereign nation. Towns, cities, and industries were destroyed; the population was decimated; housing, clothing, food-basic necessities to sustain life-were in short supply. Germany had become a moral outcast among nations. Its entire political and social system, even its very culture had become suspect in the eyes of the world. Germans refer to the collapse of their state as Stunde Null-Zero Hour. Where there used to be a country and a nation, there was now a void, a deep psychological vacuum. Something new had to fill it. What were the choices? In contrast to Germany, the United States had reached the zenith of its prestige and power. It was the very symbol of democratic stability, -its national pride steeled by victories in two global wars. The United States seemed to have it all: a victorious army, a humming economy, a political and social system that successfully resisted the onslaught of the world's two most formidable military powers simultaneously. Even the most unreflective and unpolitical Germans, who may not have cared about the relative merits of political systems, had to be struck by the images of the well-fed American soldiers while they themselves lacked all necessities. …

Global media/local meanings

ABSTRACT In this article the author argues that qualitative investigations into the consumption practices of local audiences provide an important counter to the pessimistic claims of the media imperialism theorists, limited as they are primarily to institutional and textual analysis. In particular, the author argues that qualitative studies of how local audiences interact with global media provide an important corrective to the assumption that cultural homogenisation and synchronisation (Schiller 1976; Hamelink 1993) is following in the wake of the spread of global (primarily American) media and that this is necessarily something to be deplored. This article first outlines some of the main tenets of the media imperialism thesis. Next it considers some of the more important critiques of this thesis. Finally, it draws on an interview the author conducted with a student at Rhodes University in order to clarify some of the important theoretical considerations we need to take into account when trying to assess the impact of global media on local audiences. Indeed after years of anti-apartheid sanctions … South African is a country awash in American consumer goods, colonised by American pop culture, and obsessed with American celebrities. (Bill Keller, New York Times, September 25, 1993:5) Choices [pertaining to media consumption] are constantly being made … But the questions of what those choices might mean, and how they work their way into the lives of those who make them, separating those lives from others perhaps just down the street, and linking them perhaps with others who share everything but locality; these questions remain. (Roger Silverstone 1990:186)

Trickster in American Pop Culture

Trickster in American Pop Culture

The Case of California (review)

Reviews395 female narrator. The erotic, autobiographical novels of the 1980s and 1990s, such as TL· Lover, adapt these complex cinematic techniques to literature. By focusing the reader's gaze through the eyes of a woman character and by recounting the story in a female voice that alternates between first and third persons, Duras asserts her right as both woman and writer to control our understanding of desire, absence, split subjectivity and the coincidence of public and private catastrophe, the preoccupations of her entire career. Schuster's study is useful in explaining problems in Duras's work, such as her appearances in her own films, which Schuster interprets as a positive assertion ofauthorial control, or the overtly personal character of the later novels, which Schuster sees as a means of experimentation with "the self-conscious play between fiction and confession, fantasy and memory" (p. 117). MargueriteDuras RevuitedWAl help Durasophobes and Durasophiles, both ofwhom, according to Schuster, often hold their opinions for the wrong reasons, gain a new understanding of Duras's importance in French fiction and in feminist studies. Whitman CollegeMary Anne O'Neil The Case of California, by Laurence A. Rickels; 373 pp. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991, $45.00 cloth, $13.95 paper. According to Derrida, America is deconstruction. Laurence Rickels helps clarify Derrida's sound bite by relocating California within the analyses of group psychology and mass culture offered by psychoanalysis and the Frankfurt School. In a series of tightly written "cultural clips," Rickels deconstructs "Kalifornien," and by extension "Amerika," as the outer limit of Central European thought. Some highlights from Rickels's analysis of California: It was not only the practice of embalming the dead that had its modern rebirth in California. Out west, popular music, like the horror film, turns on ritual sacrifice: the replacement oflove and war by friendship and suicide. The increasingly drastic assertion of sexuality in popular culture is one of many desperate attempts to deny death: sex is no longer the subtext, it is the pretext. Since it is not very friendly to dig up the death cult underlying culture, California shifts its attention to undying adolescence. Group-think meets its match and maker in the teenager, who "likes to be different like everyone he likes to be like" (p. 165). The group's denial of death only means that death will come back later with renewed energy. Jonestown is the logical living end for the teenage gang. At the very least, these arguments are plausible, usually they are convincing, 396Philosophy and Literature and at times compelling. Occasionally, though, one wonders about Rickels's friends—what kind of a creepy gang is he hanging out with? Adorno's association ofpopular music with Africa and Africa with human sacrifice might seem to fit more easily into a history of European racism than any other analysis. Nor does the Frankfurt School's analysis of the masses as feminine stand up to a feminist critique. Freud's concern about the "rule of women in America" and his conclusion that Woodrow Wilson's breakdown was caused by an American society allegedly consisting primarily of women and effeminate men isn't reassuring either. Along the same lines, psychoanalytic commentary from the 1950s about "clinical" imposters and schizophrenia seems to emerge from a homophobic, as well as sexist, discourse about passive, feminine men, who are the children of absent fathers, and "possessive mothers." But Rickels's point is that one can't distinguish between that racist, sexist, and homophobic tradition and American pop culture. He occasionally ironizes these voices from the past as he channels them—for instance, when he suggests that "mature heterosexuality is designed to rotate perpetually on low like some libido lawn sprinkler" (p. 282). And just when you think he's calling for the return of the Führer, or at least the idealized nuclear family with a strong father, he slips—accidentally on purpose—in a parenthetical remark, and lets you in on a secret: Daddy isn't going to take the T-bird away—the adolescent state he critiques so powerfully "is, after all, here to stay" (p. 286). In fact, his constant use of Californian speech patterns—"totally radical," "tubular...

The Silver Age Actress as Unruly Woman Starring Lidia lavorskaia as Madonna

“And as for ‘art,’ well, philosophers differ. But it's widely believed by wise people that art and ego sit uncomfortably together.” Joseph Sobran, The National Review, 1991.Just when Madonna, the performer one critic recently referred to as a “schlockmistress,” seemed doomed to a future as the subject of scholarly articles on pop and post-modern aesthetics, she's in the news again with a coffee table best seller on the joys of sex with anything that moves and some things that don't. Madonna, the high priestess of American pop culture, has constructed a multi-million dollar performance empire, the success of which rests primarily on her extraordinary ability to behave outrageously and market it. Though pre-pubescent females are Madonna's most ardent and uncritical admirers, her concerts and films attract a heterogeneous crowd of men, women, gays, and straights–most of them under thirty. In spite of (or perhaps because of) her immense popular following, the press loathes her. Mainstream critics deplore her dissipated lifestyle, sexual athletics, and public exhibitionism, while avant-garde critics regard her performances as trendy schlock rather than legitimate art. This has little effect on Madonna except to increase curiosity about her (and therefore sales of the book and videotapes) among ordinary citizens who might otherwise be completely indifferent to the Madonna phenomenon.

Celluloid Serenades:

Movies are a major part of American pop culture, and the songs, love themes, and dance numbers that have accompanied them have often remained indelibly fixed on our consciousnesses long after the film source has been forgotten. Each year since 1934, some of the best songs of our musical heritage-as well as some of the most forgettable-have been nominated for Hollywood's highest honor, the Academy Award. All of the winners, nominees, and composers are here gathered together in one place both for easy reference and for a notalgic look back at some movie memories.

The Impact of American Pop Culture in the Third World

The steady expansion of American media products overseas has led to charges of media imperialism and the establishment of a global culture. This paper analyses the nature and scope of the so-called ‘global culture’ and the nature and content of American popular cultural products and their impact on the Third World audiences.