Mainstream American Culture Research Articles

Family in the Woods

Captain Fantastic, an independent drama written and directed by Matt Ross in 2016, and starring Viggo Mortensen, addresses several themes that are central to utopian studies: the viability of an intentional community removed from mainstream civilization, the possibility of living in harmony with nature, as well as the ambition to inculcate alternative cultural values by a radical educational program. The main character, Ben Cash, decided to raise his entire family of 6 kids in the dense forests of Washington state. While training them to survive under extreme circumstances in the wilderness, he also undertakes their entire education, encouraging individual thinking and a strongly critical attitude to mainstream American society and culture. The sudden suicide of his wife forces Ben to return to ‘normal America’, confronting him with both the consequences of his parental decisions and his potential responsibility in his wife’s death. The essay interprets the movie in the context of the American utopian tradition, particularly its individualist variety exemplified by the myth of the American Adam and the ideas of Thoreau's Walden (1854). Captain Fantastic fulfils a crucial generic criterion by skillfully satirizing some of the characteristic features and attitudes of mainstream American culture through the eyes of the children who experience it for the first time, subjecting the conventional ‘American utopia’ to a trenchant criticism. At the same time, it also questions the possibility of radical alterity: can a single family defy society by re-enacting a mythical American pattern and abandoning civilization to raise their kids in the woods? Do parents have the right to experiment on their children after their utopian hopes of opposing American capitalist society have been dashed? The clash of utopias is ultimately resolved by Ben's decision to admit his responsibility for his wife's mental illness and death and to give up the backwoods utopia and settle on a farm, conforming to another fundamental American symbol: the pastoral ideal of the garden.

Shifting Moods and Shifting Discourses: Hopelessness at the Intersection of American Catholicism and Psychology

ABSTRACT: In his 1971 book, Out of the Depths , William Collins, CSS, recounts his long struggle with anxiety and depression. For Collins, as for other American Catholics in the twentieth century, the experience of hopelessness was influenced by religious and medical discourses that shifted in relation to each other over time. Early in the century Catholic ideas of hope were expressed in the precise categories of neo-Scholasticism. By the end of the century there were multiple Catholic approaches to hope. The same time period saw the integration of psychiatry and psychology into mainstream American culture. As these disciplines were defining themselves and striving for recognition from the scientific and medical establishments, the categories used for mental illness were also changing. From nervous problems and neurasthenia early in the century to schizophrenia, anxiety, and then depression, the vocabulary of emotional and mental problems changed as ideas about their nature and causes developed. Collins's narrative of alternating hopelessness and hope gives insight into how his experience was shaped by his suffering, the social expectations he had internalized, and the institutional frameworks he was navigating. It also gives broader insight into how American Catholics viewed emotional problems in the middle of the twentieth century.

Radio-Lect: Spanish/English Code-Switching in On-Air Advertisements

The 2020 census reports that 61.2 million Latinxs live in the US, totaling around 19% of all residents, forming the country’s largest minority population. With the growing number of Latinxs, there has been a higher level of contact between Spanish and English leading to language mixing or code-switching (CS) in mainstream American culture. This paper examines the Spanish/English CS in radio advertisements on Los Angeles’s 96.3 La Mega, a bilingual radio station geared towards today’s youth. Using Derrick’ 2015 sentential framework for the linguistic analysis of multilingual sentences, I carry out a sentence-by-sentence analysis of the linguistic nature of the on-air bilingual advertisements. I explore both national advertisements, as well as DJ-endorsed advertisements, to discern whether they follow the patterns previously pointed out in the literature for positive consumer evaluations of Spanish/English bilingual advertisements. Furthermore, I am interested in if these advertisements are in line with the ethos of 96.3 La Mega, which prides itself on being fully bilingual. This research will shed light on the linguistic nature of contemporary strategies being used in bilingual advertisements for the US Latinx community and marketing tactics designed to encourage their consumerism.

Identifying changes in popular news media articles about the transgender community from 1990 to 2023

In the past few decades, newspaper articles about transgender people and the transgender community have become increasingly more common. At the same time, language used in this type of media has continued to evolve. In order to better understand the way public discourse around the trans community has changed, this study uses a linguistic analysis of newspaper articles from the ten most widely circulated newspapers in the United States. A sampling of articles from each year from 1990 to 2023 was analyzed using the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) program to capture the authors’ attitudes. Correlation analyses were used with the LIWC categories to explore if any of the linguistic terms changed over the study period. In addition, change in the use of the terms “transsexual” and “transgender” was tracked over the same 34 year period. Results showed a statistically significant decrease in negative language used in articles about transgender people over time and a significant change in the use of the terms “transsexual” vs. “transgender”. Linguistic changes in these newspaper articles parallel changing attitudes about the trans community in mainstream American culture at large.

Ego Quest from Impoverishment to Reconciliation in Velina Houston’s Japanese American Play Kokoro (True Heart): A Freudian Reading

Japanese Americans’ struggle to achieve integration into the American mainstream culture has its powerful impact on their psychological well-being. Socially reserved and family oriented, the Japanese are challenged to cope with the mainstream American individualism and independence. Signs of melancholia, based on Sigmund Freud’s theories, are investigated in Kokoro (True Heart) (2004) written by the Japanese American playwright Velina Hasu Houston. The Japanese American protagonist, Yasako Yamashita, battles with cultural nonconformity and social remoteness which have provoked an aggressive superego incorporated in her mother’s ghost to govern and manipulate her world. The study aims to interrogate how the domineering superego succeeds in exhausting Yasako’s stranded ego driving her to commit parent-child suicide “oyako-shinju.” Although the suicide attempt has highlighted the problematic cultural gaps within the American society, nevertheless it has pinpointed the importance of resolving Japanese minority cultural differences. Velina Houston’s Kokoro (True Heart) does not only offer an astounding psychological insight into Japanese Americans’ battles with a melancholic ego fragmentation and deprivation indicated in symptoms of ambivalence, anxiety, compulsive repetition, sense of guilt and sense of inferiority, but it, also, advances solutions for ego reconciliation and self-conformity.

“Time Meant Nothing”: A New Reading of Pietro di Donato's Three Circles of Light beyond Autobiography and Stereotypes

“Time Meant Nothing”: A New Reading of Pietro di Donato's <i>Three Circles of Light</i> beyond Autobiography and Stereotypes

Cultural differences in earliest memory reports by European and Chinese American university students born in the United States

ABSTRACT Grounded by the ecological systems perspectives proposed by Bronfenbrenner (1977, 1979) and Fivush and Merrill (2016), the present study was conducted to examine whether autobiographical memory (AM) and self-construal differed in young adults raised in the same macrosystem, but with unique microsystems. European American (EA) participants were born in the United States to mothers who were born in the United States (n = 61) and Chinese American (CA) participants were born in the United States to mothers who were born in China (n = 47). Participants completed an online study in which they reported on and rated aspects of their earliest memory; they also completed measures of self-construal and acculturation. EA participants identified more with mainstream American culture relative to CA participants, who identified to a greater extent with their heritage culture. EA participants also talked and thought more about their earliest memories relative to CA participants; interactions between group and sex were found for social words. Group differences were not observed on measures of self-construal. These findings indicate that microsystem-level factors are associated with differences in AM in young adults even when individuals are born and raised in the same macro-level cultural environment.

Big Sur: Kerouac’s Spiritual Drop Scene

Big Sur is an important novel in Kerouac&amp;rsquo;s late period. The origin, content and purpose of this novel are significantly different from his previous works. Through analyzing the symbolic images in the novel, we can understand Kerouac&amp;rsquo;s painful reflection on his resistance against the American mainstream culture, his deep understanding of the failure to convey his spiritual appeals and his inability to compromise with the society. The study of Big Sur not only shows Kerouac&amp;rsquo;s spiritual collapse, but also reveals the spiritual trajectory of the Beats from fanaticism to decay.&#x0D; &#x0D; Big Sur, on the coast of California, is a 99-mile-long rugged and beautiful waterfront. &amp;ldquo;Big Sur is fabulously romantic, &amp;hellip; with its rugged terrain, its treacherous sea, and its challenging climate&amp;rdquo; (Wallraff, 2002). Kerouac, the soul of the Beat Generation, finishes his novel Big Sur there. The agony and desperation shown in the novel helps to understand the ideological doom of the Beats. While On the Road, Kerouac&amp;rsquo;s best-known work, records the height of Beat Generation, Big Sur, which was published in 1962, written 7 years before Kerouac&amp;rsquo;s death, accurately summarizes the spiritual end of the Beat Generation. After Big Sur, Kerouac has never written works shown his spiritual pursuit and agony, which makes this novel the one that reveals his deep frustration and desperation over his spiritual struggle. In Big Sur, though the &amp;ldquo;spontaneous prose method&amp;rdquo; Kerouac has developed is applied, the symbols in Big Sur can still impress the readers by their concise and direct relation with Kerouac&amp;rsquo;s crushed feelings (Kostas, 2002). He never tries to escape from his true feelings for his definite failure, so the symbols pave the way for a thorough understanding of Kerouac&amp;rsquo;s spiritual journey and the ineluctable collapse of his dream. As Aram Saroyan said in the preface to Big Sur: &amp;ldquo;In Big Sur, we have the plaintive but magnificent aftermath&amp;rdquo; (Aram, 1992).

COMEDY OF IDEAS: STUDY OF OZICK’S BLOODSHED AND THREE NOVELLAS

Cynthia Ozick is an emphatic voice of new Jewish American novels who reveals various issues that a Jew has to face while living in a mainstream American culture. She advocates ethnicity and chooses the comic mode to reveal the truth. The present paper aims at the in-depth study of the second collection of short stories "Bloodshed and three Novellas'. In these stories Ozick which focuses on the betrayal of tradition by Jews. She brings out the hilarious situations and ideas by focusing on various flaws and blemishes in the personalities of her characters. She also mocks at their defective physical appearances. In fact the comic elements in her fiction have a much higher purpose than only evoking laughter. The present paper also attempts to study how Ozick's comedy is a mirror of human reality and focuses on humanity. The present paper is an endeavour to show how Ozick's comedy has a fair share of flippancy, folly and jest and how it manifests itself in forms like irony, satire, grotesque and farce.

“They Don't Know I Do It for the Culture, Goddamn”

Patriarchy, white supremacy, and fatphobia shape mainstream American culture into the twenty-first century. Fat Black women in popular culture are represented through controlling images that seek to define Black women through their perverse embodiment. Two dominant stereotypes, the Hottentot Venus and the mammy, synthesize anti-Blackness, anti-fatness, and misogyny to confine large Black women within a continuum between hypersexualized deviance and asexualized subservience. This historical context informs the social dynamics surrounding Lizzo, a fat Black performer whose rise has electrified discussion of race, gender, and body size across American society. The discourse surrounding Lizzo is marked by pernicious, oppressive ideologies and the controlling images of the mammy and the Hottentot Venus. The song “Rumors” directly confronts these attacks on Lizzo’s identity and works against this oppressive framework to proclaim joint Black, fat, female liberation.

Erik R. Seeman. Speaking with the Dead in Early America.

Ghosts, spirits, haunted cemeteries—those realms where life blurs with death never fail to capture our imagination. Historians who seek to illuminate those spaces have typically cast their gaze on the nineteenth century. Spiritualism, séances, and the rapping Fox sisters offer tantalizing glimpses into worlds where humans claim to encounter the supernatural. But Erik Seeman, arguably the foremost scholar of cultures of death in early North America, maintains that Protestant communication with the dead dates back much further than the Victorian era. In this lively and compelling volume, Speaking with the Dead in Early America, Seeman shows that Americans did not suddenly begin speaking with the dead during ­­nineteenth-century séances but rather such efforts had been embedded in Protestant practice since the ­­Reformation. And although we might assume belief in the spirit world lay on the fringes of mainstream American religious culture, such beliefs were in fact fundamental to understandings...

Social Oppression and American Cultural Imperialism: The Crisis of the Muslim Minority Groups’ Identity in Terrorist by John Updike

Terrorist (2006) by John Updike has been classified within the post-9/11 novel genre where many American authors depict their counter-narratives to the horrific event of 9/11. The novel revolves around the life of a young teenager named Ahmad and his religious mentor, Shaikh Rashid, who are accused as terrorists. This study problematises the issue of the identity of Muslim characters in facing oppression using the concept of cultural imperialism by Iris Marion Young (1990), focussing on the social treatment of Muslim minority characters in America perceived as inferior to the entire American cultural mainstream. The objective of this study then is to examine the author’s depictions of the American society as the cultural imperialism persecuting Muslim characters. The findings highlight the Muslim characters’ inability to emulate the prevailing American cultural imperialism which oppresses them. As such, the study’s originality lies in the interpretation of the aversive affinity between Muslim minority groups and American cultural imperialism from a social perspective. Thus, the social aspects of social oppression and the American cultural imperialism will be the core of the study’s novelty regarding the view of Muslims in America in the years ensuing the events of 9/11.

The Legal Oxymoron of Whiteness in “The Laws” Chapter of China Men by Maxine Hong Kingston

The article centers on the legal construction of whiteness captured by Maxine Hong Kingston in “The Laws” chapter of China Men (1980), exposing the oxymoron of whiteness, which consists in its simultaneous gesturing towards universality and particularity. On the one hand, the laws passed by white Americans enabled them to cast whiteness as the self-proclaimed standard-bearer, the self-declared legal norm. On the other hand, this self-proclaimed norm rests on the principle of exclusivity and exclusion. Wielding a weapon of exclusion, white people have constructed a legally manufactured white identity that bars non-whites, in this case Chinese and other Asian immigrants from citizenship, economic resources, space, the “mainstream” American society and mainstream American culture. Kingston not only exposes anti-Chinese and anti-Asian legislation, but also shows Chinese immigrants’ responses to this legislation, their failed and successful attempts at countervailing various forms of exclusion and “exclusive” treatment they received.

Breaking the Silence: an Analysis of The Joy Luck Club from the Perspective of Postcolonialism

Postcolonialism is a cross-cultural critical theory that has emerged since the 1970s. It is a criticism with distinctive anti-colonial and anti-racist ideas, focusing on the search for decolonial paths while criticizing cultural hegemony. This paper attempts to analyze the novel The Joy Luck Club of the Chinese American female writer Amy Tan from the perspective of postcolonial criticism. As women from the third world country, Chinese American women are subjected to triple oppression in American society from the race, gender, and women of the first world countries, moreover, they become the Other marginalized by the American mainstream culture. As one of the Chinese American women, Amy Tan tries to break the silence of them and speaks for them by writing, in order to seek for a path of decolonization.

From Eastern European Rooted Immigrant Circle to the Mainstream of American Culture – an Alfred Kazin’s Transition

Tracing the process of immigrants’ transition, it appears that in the twentieth century children of Eastern European, mainly Jewish immigrants were trying to get rid of the European past of their parents as quickly as possible in order to take the full advantage of American culture. This attitude brought serious changes in family values, social ties, and religious traditions among immigrants’ children, which was vividly presented in Kazin’s works. Moving straight toward their American future often meant leaving the Old World heritage and language behind. Many of the immigrant children regarded this type of attitude as another logical step in their development. But although this incorporation into the mainstream of the American culture was fruitful, some of them experienced a deep sense of irreversible loss over their past.

Rural Revolt: Power Line Protests and the Alternative Technology Movement in the United States, 1970s.

In the 1970s, powerline protests erupted across rural communities in the United States. Just as a global movement of environmentalists, farmers, and activists fought expansive energy infrastructures, many rural Americans living in the transportation corridors of the electric-grid system directly confronted the political, social, and environmental costs of cheap electricity. This article revisits three well-known powerline protests in the United States-in western Minnesota, Appalachian Ohio, and upstate New York. It argues that rural protestors, by resisting capital-intensive technological growth in the countryside, proved highly receptive to the era's alternative technology movement. The protests show how the alternative technology movement and its democratic vision spread and transmuted within mainstream American culture. Rural communities, leery of large-scale corporate and government control, helped advance renewable energy politics and challenged the "utility consensus" of the American electric power industry. Grassroots revolts blended populist politics with global critiques to make environmental ethics agreeable to rural constituencies.

Table Lands: Food in Children’s Literature by Kara K. Keeling and Scott T. Pollard

Reviewed by: Table Lands: Food in Children’s Literature by Kara K. Keeling and Scott T. Pollard Sarah Minslow (bio) Table Lands: Food in Children’s Literature. By Kara K. Keeling and Scott T. Pollard. University of Mississippi Press, 2020. This is a delightful compilation that extends arguments around food in children’s literature with which Kara Keeling and Scott Pollard have become associated since their 2008 anthology Critical Approaches to Food in Children’s Literature (Routledge). This book focuses on “how food signifies in a sociohistorical context” (5) and engages in numerous interdisciplinary discourses about history, identity, and social hierarchies associated with food: its production, preparation, presentation, and consumption. The intention of the book is to show “how comprehending the sociocultural contexts of food reveals fundamental understandings of the [End Page 210] child and children’s agency,” thus the arguments presented enrich our interpretation of texts as “classic” as Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of the Pie and the Patty-Pan to more contemporary works like Inside Out and Back Again by Thanhha Lai. They focus on the classist significance of food in Potter’s works and argue that “food and the complex beliefs, behaviors, and customs that surround it remain fraught and function to illustrate the irresolvable and irreconcilable motives that Potter uses to create her characters and build her plots” (46). Throughout this book, the authors link their interpretations of the food, foodways, and meals in children’s books to arguments of scholars like Paula Connolly, who argues that Pooh is highly motivated by his search for honey. In one of the most interesting chapters, the authors highlight and extend Michelle Pagni Stewart’s analysis of how Louise Erdrich employs the concept of “counting coup” in the Birchbark series. Keeling and Pollard argue that Laura Ingalls Wilder and Erdrich use detailed descriptions of “pioneer and Ojibwe food and food-ways” to “portray these opposing journeys of settlement and displacement” (65). They also explain that Erdrich’s series highlights Native foodways and how they were adapted by pioneers in Wilder’s books even while the pioneers displaced indigenous people from the land on which they lived and depended for survival. The first chapter is dedicated to exploring the history of cookbooks written for American kids and how they reflect “a changing set of adults’ expectations of skills based on shifting ideologies of child capability” (7). They trace the Victorian stereotype of Coventry Patmore’s “the angel in the house” in 1920s cookbooks aimed at young girls’ initiation into domesticity through to later cookbooks that provided a more subversive space where “ordinary women could record their subjectivity and network it with other women” during a time when women’s writings (and voices) were marginalized (17). This chapter also shows how American culinary traditions were passed down through generations and became “repositories of generational memory and knowledge” until they changed significantly after World War II, when “the availability of industrialized foods fed a growing appetite for convenience” (19). They also showcase more contemporary cookbooks by Molly Katzen and Alice Waters that emphasize and value child agency and promote healthy, sustainable foods. The link between food and cultural identity and history is sustained throughout Table Lands. Their analysis of Maurice Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen focuses on how it “uses the city of food to portray ethnic Jewish experiences set within the mainstream American culture” and represents “the tensions between assimilation and integration, forgetting and remembering, inclusion and alienation that shaped Jewish cultural identity for generations” (92). Further in the chapter on Rita Williams-Garcia’s books, Keeling and Pollard highlight how “each place is marked by distinctive foods and foodways that reflect the particular historical moments of African American culture of that time and place: the Black Power movement [End Page 211] in Oakland in 1968, the Great Migration in Brooklyn as it adapts to post-World War II convenience culture, and the Jim Crow American South” (144). In the chapter on Pixar’s film Ratatouille, the authors argue that viewers are invited “to value the subjectivity of characters that could be defined as Other,” in this case, a rat in the kitchen (124). Digging into the sociohistorical contexts...

A person-centered examination of acculturation and psychological functioning among Chinese and Korean immigrant mothers in the United States.

Objectives: The present research used a person-centered approach to examine the acculturation styles of Chinese and Korean immigrant mothers in the United States and demographic characteristics and psychological functioning associated with each acculturation style. Method: The sample comprised 240 first-generation Chinese immigrant mothers (CIMs; M = 37.80 years, SD = 4.55) and 222 first-generation Korean immigrant mothers (KIMs; M = 36.00 years, SD = 3.69) of preschool children. Latent profile analysis was used to identify latent acculturation styles among CIMs and KIMs. We further examined whether mothers' acculturation styles were associated with their sociodemographic characteristics and psychological functioning within each cultural group. Results: Four acculturation styles were revealed among CIMs: (a) behaviorally undifferentiated/psychologically assimilated, (b) behaviorally marginalized/psychologically separated, (c) behaviorally psychologically assimilated, and (d) behaviorally integrated/psychologically undifferentiated. Three acculturation styles were uncovered among KIMs: behaviorally psychologically separated, behaviorally psychologically assimilated, and behaviorally psychologically integrated. Chinese behaviorally integrated/psychologically undifferentiated mothers and Korean behaviorally psychologically separated perceived the highest levels of coethnic concentration in their communities. Chinese behaviorally marginalized/psychologically separated mothers reported poorer psychological functioning than other Chinese mothers. Korean behaviorally psychologically separated mothers had poorer psychological functioning than other Korean mothers. Conclusions: Findings revealed the significant role of participation in the American mainstream culture for Asian immigrant mothers' psychological adjustment. The heterogeneity in the acculturation experiences of Asian immigrants in the United States was highlighted. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Together, We Can Make This Place Our Home: Civic Engagement Among Asian Immigrants

Civic engagement is an important dimension of age-friendly communities but has been understudied among Asian immigrant groups. While research has attributed greater civic engagement among immigrants to acculturation factors, the influence of acculturation may be conditioned upon Asian immigrants’ social network and place attachment to their city. We used data from the Asian American Quality of Life survey to analyze civic engagement activity (e.g., City council meeting, voting in a City election) among a diverse sample of middle-aged and older Asian immigrants in Austin, Texas (N = 994). 34.5% of the sample had participated in at least one civic engagement activity in the past 12 months. We examined how such civic engagement is associated with acculturation factors, and further examined whether one’s friend network and perception of their city moderated the association. We found that number of years lived in the U.S., familiarity with mainstream American culture, and number of friends in one’s social network were positively related to civic engagement activity. Furthermore, we found that the association between years lived in the U.S. and civic engagement was more pronounced for immigrants with larger friend networks; the association between familiarity with American culture and civic engagement was more pronounced for immigrants with more positive perceptions of the city. These findings highlight that acculturation may not operate alone in civic engagement among Asian immigrants. Rather, it may also be important to create opportunities for Asian immigrants to feel connected to their community and build meaningful friend networks to encourage civic engagement.

The Ideology of a Nation of Immigrants and the Issue of Employment in Aviva Chomsky’s “They Take our Jobs”! And 20 Other Myths about Immigration.

This study explores the postulate studied in Aviva Chomsky’s “They Take our Jobs"! And 20 Other Myths about Immigration. It examines the assumptions and arguments that fuel the public discourse about U.S. immigration. As noted by Chomsky, those arguments are based on myths that should be deconstrued to better understand the rationale behind the anti-immigrant rhetoric which is reflected by stereotypes such as immigrants take American jobs, drain down wages, or represent a threat to the social order and national security. On the basis of these arguments and information drawn from diverse sources, we have shown how from a nation of immigrants, America has become a country where immigrants take American jobs. Thus, the idea of the nation of immigrants refers specifically to immigrants of European ancestry, in particular those from northwestern Europe. The latter, also known as the WASP, represent the American mainstream culture and their hegemony is widespread to the point of influencing other sectors where decision-making processes echo the legacy, the values and expectations of the white community. Starting from these arguments, it can be stated that Anglo-Saxonism is fundamentally based on the domination of other communities and the institutions and ideologies of the United States reflect this reality.