Large numbers of Americans rarely consume cultural media products produced outside of the United States and/or produced in languages other than English
American Cultural Insularity in the Center (ACIC) is the idea that, compared to most people in most other countries, Americans tend to consume much more of their own cultural products and much fewer cultural products produced in other countries than people in other countries do. Americans do so largely because, globally, American culture is still, comparatively speaking, the dominant culture. Globally speaking, it is also the most central culture. That is, people located in cultures outside of the United States are pointed toward the American “center” much more than the other way around.
Dal Jong Yin’s “Hierarchy in Globalization Trends.” The model is quite useful. However, I believe it needs to be adjusted to account for the unique situation/positionality of the United States.
I am currently reading, and reviewing, a well-done text book, Globalization and Media in the Digital Platform Age, written by Simon Fraser scholar Dal Yong Jin. Jin, unlike many global media and communication scholars, has not been fully seduced by the cultural globalization, hybridization and glocalization perspectives whose adherents have dominated global media and communication studies for more than two decades — is this the longest ever dialectical swing away from one pole (cultural imperialism) to the other (cultural globalization), I sometimes wonder? 😉
Jin develops a solid middle ground between cultural imperialism and cultural globalization in this textbook, published in 2019. That is, he is careful to acknowledge that the reality of hybridization, which sees cultures inevitably mixed in cultural products and objects, does not erase substantial differences in cultural and political economic power. Jin also smartly acknowledges the fact that everything is indeed a hybrid, to one extent or another, does not prevent hegemonic forces of globalization from co-opting and (ab)using hybridization and glocalization to suit their own globalizing (cultural) interests.
So, my work very much tilts toward the cultural imperialism side of a continuum of cultural imperialism vs. cultural globalization in the field of global media and communication studies. That is, I do not see individuals as having all that much power in terms of the age-old structure-agency debate.
I believe that we are primarily structured by forces outside of ourselves — long-running historical forces such as politics, ideology, culture, religion, socially-proscribed gender roles, etc. — primarily shape us and largely direct what sorts of “choices” we do (not) have.
I am especially very much opposed to the claim made by libertarian theorists that we do things own our “own.” We NEVER do anything completely on our own. NEVER!
What do I mean by this?
What I mean is that the entire history of the universe, the earth, and most importantly, the entire history of humanity — meaning the history of all human beings who have ever lived — precedes us. All of those human beings collectively, across time, through their also historically and socially situated being and actions created the social conditions and structures in which we today live as “individuals.” Continue reading “Deconstructing cultural globalization and its valorization of individual agency”
The Amazon Original movie One Night in Miami is available in German to U.S.-based consumers. It is part of a larger trend toward Amazon and Netflix offering their own original content in more different languages to more subscribers — regardless of their geographic location.
One of my greatest and most long-running frustrations with cultural content, especially with movies and television, has been the lack of language options offered for this content. In theory, with the advent of the DVD in 1990s, it became possible to easily encode countless language options for films for the consumer.
This did NOT happen, thanks mostly to a still-in-place and archaic and infuriatingly restrictive region encoding system that ensured that consumers in one place, for instance, in the United States, would NOT have access to filmic content dubbed into languages other than, for the most part, Spanish.
In my long-term quest to raise both of my daughters, now 14 and 16 respectively, as English-German bilinguals, I bought a region-free DVD player in 2004 — the year my oldest daughter was born — and immediately began ordering large numbers of DVDs from Amazon.de (Amazon Germany) to ensure that we had a good library of mostly, but not only, American-made films (Pixar, Disney, etc.) that we could consume in German. Our DVD library eventually hit several hundred DVDs, all of these sent to us “illegally” by Amazon.de — illegally because, technically, there is a warning at the very beginning when you play each of these DVDs that it is “illegal” to purchase them from a region in which you are not living and play them on a DVD player not located in that region 🙄!
Netflix appears to be “end-running” VPN users trying to access content walled off by arcane but also deeply entrenched nationally-based copyright laws by simply allowing VPN users into its various Netflix national iterations BUT then offering access ONLY to Netflix Originals, or Netflix produced content, and surreptitiously blocking access to non-Netflix produced content.
I’ve been using a VPN in order to mask my IP address and so that I can stream content from Germany-located content providers such as Videoload.de and Maxdome.de and Netflix Germany from here in Littleton, Colorado in the United States. I’ve been using a VPN for more than a decade for this purpose, though I have not always used ExpressVPN.
I’ve been doing this to circumvent the anachronistic and MADDENING cultural content borders that block access to content based on one’s geophysical location in the world, which, online, is marked by one’s IP address, or the string of numbers that identifies your computer, phone, tablet etc. so that information you are pulling off the internet can be directed to your device. And I’ve been trying to circumvent these content borders on the Internet so that I can use cultural content — primarily American-produced content that is dubbed into German — to help raise my two daughters bilingually in German and English.
It has not always worked. Cultural content distributors such as Netflix, Amazon, Google, Videoload.De and Maxdome.De are locked in a constant battle with VPN producers with each trying to outdo the other. Unfortunately for me, cultural content distributors mostly seem to win this battle: They write code that allows them to identify if someone is coming to their content from outside of the limited national boundaries in which they are permitted to distribute content to due to MADDENING copyright laws that require cultural distributors to pay more for the rights to distribute content if they want to distribute that content to more viewers in more places around the world.
These five newspapers are among the most influential in the U.S. “ and even in the world. Their coverage of the global hegemony of English both reflects, and reproduces, American Cultural Insularity in the Center (ACIC).
This abstract is for a paper published in the journal World Englishes that examines the ways in five major American newspapers — The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, the L.A. Times and the Miami Herald cover the global hegemony of English. The paper itself offers an overview of my Ph.D. doctoral thesis in which I conducted a critical discourse analysis of more than 200 articles published in five American prestige press newspapers across more than a decade’s worth of time, from 1991 to 2003. The analysis found, among other things, that, in general, the newspapers valorized and celebrated the rise of English as a global language. The global hegemony of English is central to American Cultural Insularity in the Center (ACIC) as it ensures that while billions of other people around the world learn English, the dominant language in the United States, precisely because billions of others are learning English, very few English-mother tongue speakers in the U.S. learn other languages to any meaningful degree of fluency. Continue reading “American prestige press newspapers valorize and celebrate the global hegemony of “America’s” language”
This abstract is for a paper published in the journal World Englishes that examines the ways in which more than 100 American college undergraduates reflect upon their own linguistic privilege vis-a-vis the global hegemony of English. The students reflect as well upon the ways in which being at the center of the global linguistic configuration of power also hurts them inasmuch as it reduces their incentive, and chances, to learn a non-English language. The global hegemony of English is central to American Cultural Insularity in the Center (ACIC) as it ensures that while billions of other people around the world learn English, the dominant language in the United States, precisely because billions of others are learning English, very few English-mother tongue speakers in the U.S. learn other languages to any meaningful degree of fluency. Continue reading “American university students and the global hegemony of English”
English is, far and away, the world’s most hegemonic language. This is true inasmuch as anyone who wants to rise to the top of global domains of power such as business, technology, science, higher education and law, pretty much has to learn English, typically to a very high degree of fluency.
Below is an abstract for a paper that examines the way in which the global hegemony of English privileges Anglo-Americans. The paper is based on a critical textual analysis of online discussion board exchanges about this topic among American, Australian and Slovenian university students. The global hegemony of English is central to American Cultural Insularity in the Center (ACIC) because it allows mother tongue speakers of English in the U.S. to get away without learning another language and therefore places a significant linguistic blinder on them. It also causes them to be more inward looking inasmuch as so few English-mother tongue speakers in the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom, etc. expand their linguistic horizons in any meaningful or deep way. A failure to expand these horizons means, of course — and this is redundant, I know — that their cultural and linguistic horizons are smaller and more inward pointing that members of other language groups all of who pretty much are required to learn English. Continue reading “American, Australian and Slovenian students debate the global hegemony of English”
A poster for Parasite. In 2020, the South Korean film became the first non-English language film to ever win the best picture award at the Academy Awards . [Credit: CJ Entertainment]For more than 100 years, the United States has been an exceedingly difficult market for non-English language films to penetrate. The historic win of the best picture award at the 92nd Academy Awards by the South Korean film Parasite cuts against that grain.
American Cultural Insularity in the Center (ACIC) does generate news media coverage, and has for awhile. In fact, the specific idea of ACIC seems to garner more attention in the news media than it does within academic research and scholarship where it is, within global media and international communication studies at least, largely overlooked as a phenomenon. Most of the attention by scholars is instead devoted to the impact of American culture outside of the United States rather than to some of the very clear, and also interesting, and, from a critical perspective, troubling dimensions of the comparative domination of American culture globally on its own domestic cultural production, consumption and distribution context.
Below is an obviously incomplete and somewhat eclectic but also interesting and revealing of list of news media coverage that touches upon, and often focuses upon, some dimension of or aspect of ACIC. For now, I have organized the list chronologically, according to date of publication, from most recent to oldest. I may change this organization as I search for, and come across, more news media coverage that either focuses on ACIC or touches on some significant aspect of it. Continue reading “A listing of news media coverage of American Cultural Insularity”
Where American vs. British English tends to be taught as the “ideal” standard for those studying English as a Foreign Language (EFL). [Credit: reddit user Speech500]The following paper  — The Globalization of English and the Question of a Global Written Standard — which examines the key question of the different ways in which a global written standard English privileges elite Americans and solidifies their global language and general cultural hegemony, puts forward what I believe to be a powerful and accurate – and extremely important – critique of the ways in which global power brokers (re)create a cultural and linguistic order that favors them and people like them.
I submitted it for consideration for publication in two academic journals: World Englishes and Language Problems & Language Planning. In total, three anonymous academic reviewers read my  submission. All three returned what I found to be hugely unfair and also demeaning and dehumanizing rejections. The often demeaning and hypocritical and poor treatment of other academics under the cloak of anonymity is one of the things I dislike most about the academic world. My experience has shown that far too often anonymous review results in people abusing their anonymity to blast writers of submissions in deeply personal and charged ways. In this case, the reviewers clearly did not like the fact that, in this paper, I was criticizing two things: Continue reading “American Cultural Insularity in the Center and the global hegemony of “standard” written Anglo-American English”
American Cultural Insularity in the Center (ACIC) is the idea that, compared to most people in most other countries, Americans tend to consume much more of their own cultural products and much fewer cultural products produced in other countries than people in other countries do. Americans do so largely because, globally, American culture is still, comparatively speaking, the dominant culture. Globally speaking, it is also the most central culture. That is, people located in cultures outside of the United States are pointed toward the American “center” much more than the other way around.
This abstract is for a paper published in the journal 
