American Cultural Insularity in the Center (ACIC) describes a tendency among American cultural consumers, especially those who hail from dominant and also mostly English-monolingual groups, to consume Anglo-American cultural products over “other” cultural products, sometimes to the apparent near exclusion of non-Anglo-American cultural products. This tendency is particularly apparent in terms of “language-heavy” objects such as popular music.
Broadly speaking, according to the ACIC model, American cultural consumers are more likely than consumers in any other national context to exhibit the greatest levels of cultural self-orientation, especially toward language intensive cultural products. ACIC focuses on the unique cultural situation of Americans, especially that of Americans who are essentially monolingual in English. It also seeks to theorize beyond the U.S. to consumers situated in national contexts farther from the center whose cultural consumption patterns often tend to orient more toward the center than toward products produced in, and coming from, less culturally and less linguistically central countries, for example, from China or Russia.
The primary impetus behind the ACIC, and, more generally, Cultural Insularity in the Center (CIC) models is the belief that not enough emphasis is being placed on the unique situation of American consumers vis-à-vis a global cultural and linguistic configuration of power often dominated by Anglo-American cultural products (Kuisel, 2003; Ritzer & Stilman, 2003) and Anglo-American English (Crystal, 2001; Phillipson, 2008). Indeed, as Cleveland et. al (2016) have noted, a clear inward pointing cultural consumption orientation among large numbers of Americans has remained mostly under-explored and under-interrogated among social scientific researchers.
Generally lost in the debate within international communication and global media and cultural studies surrounding whether cultural producers in countries such as the U.S. or cultural consumers in less central cultural hold more power are the ways in which consumers in the U.S. tend to be located very differently vis-à-vis “global culture” and global cultural flows. American consumers’ situation is a direct result of American cultural products’ comparative, and continuing, global domination (Crane, 2016; Moody, 2017; Nayan & Natividad, 2017; Wise, 2010) which is also frequently intricately bound up with global Anglo-American linguistic hegemony (Mirrlees, 2013; Phillipson, 2008). This creates for Anglo-American consumers a clear and pronounced cultural insularity in the center. Within the U.S., this insularity is likely to be most pronounced among Americans who embody dominant cultural and linguistic status, meaning, in particular, among white middle class English-language monolinguals.
In contrast to scholarly accounts, mainstream media in the U.S. have fairly regularly deployed a concept of cultural insularity in the center (e.g., Donovan, 2004; Timberg, 2004; Jackson, 2005) to describe Americans’ general tendency to be much less informed about, and much less connected to, non-American cultural products, ideas, information, etc. than many of their counter-parts in much of the rest of the world. A quote from Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka, interviewed by Boston Globe columnist Derrick Jackson in 2004, illustrates the mainstream media trope of American cultural insularity in the center: “[The United States] is one of the most insular societies I’ve ever encountered anywhere,” Soyinka tells Jackson. “And I’m not talking just about ghetto kids. Professors . . . parents . . . legislators. It’s across the board. That is something you do not find to that extent in the rest of the world.”
“[The United States] is one of the most insular societies I’ve ever encountered anywhere. And I’m not talking just about ghetto kids. Professors . . . parents . . . legislators. It’s across the board. That is something you do not find to that extent in the rest of the world.”
— Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka
Despite a number of popular media and popular culture references to American cultural insularity in the center in the U.S., along the scholarly literature plane there appear to be few consistent formal references to ACIC, though some scholars – Schiller (2000) among them – have indirectly invoked an idea of ACIC. Beyond global media and communication studies, a handful of scholars make direct references to the idea of cultural insularity in the center (e.g., Dyreson, 2005; McGroarty, 2013). However, none has deployed, or applied, the concept with any regularity. Nor has any attempted to develop ACIC or CIC into a theoretical model.
This lack of scholarly attention to CIC comprises a curious oversight given the ways in which dominant fundamental groups, both within international and national contexts, almost universally embody an often arrogant and, in many ways, ignorant self-orientation vis-à-vis their own ideology, politics, economics and culture (Mirrlees, 2013). That is, these groups frequently naturalize “their” culture, ideology, politics, etc. as the only “legitimate” ones (Bourdieu, 2013).
Straubhaar (1991), via the notion of “cultural proximity,” has constructed a useful typology from which I draw some inspiration for the ACIC model. Cultural proximity holds that consumers are more likely to orient toward cultural products coming from cultures comparatively “proximate”, or similar to their own. Taken to its logical extreme, cultural proximity implies that consumers would typically show greatest interest in their “own” dominant (national) cultural products. In terms of the question of cultural proximity and the global cultural system, American cultural consumers’ “own” dominant culture tends to dominate the international arena (Mirrlees, 2013; Verboord & Brandellero, 2018).
This means that “the international” sometimes can be, and often is, reduced to “the national” for contemporary average American consumers few of whom are likely to range much, or often, beyond their “own” (global) cultural products. Significantly, in contrast to a ACIC perspective, cultural proximity does not specifically address, or discuss, the important, and unique, positioning of Americans vis-à-vis the global cultural system. ACIC encourages us to directly highlight, and critically interrogate, Americans’ privileged, hegemonic, and even sometimes arrogant positioning vis-à-vis their “own” culture and language in the global context. ACIC is especially apparent with respect to language heavy cultural products such as film (Mirrlees, 2013) and pop music (Verboord & Brandellero, 2018). Indeed, the global hegemony of English aligns deeply with American/Anglo-American domination of (global) pop music. According to Crane (2016):
Global musical culture disseminated by media conglomerates generally concentrates upon artists from English-speaking countries and excludes artists from other countries, particularly those who do not speak English (Negus 1996: 184-85). The international repertoires of major record companies have increasingly focused on a small number of international stars and excluded local artists.
Verboord and Brandellero (2018) help us to understand the unique significance of living in what Schiller calls “the number one” country, via their concept of “cultural centrality.” This refers to the power of a national cultural actor to influence global cultural production and consumption. They note that,
“Cultural centrality . . . concerns the extent to which a country’s cultural production interests foreign producers, experts, and audiences. The more countries succeed in attaining a central position in cultural production, exemplified by the international circulation or consecration of their products, the more they themselves engage in domestic cultural consumption.” (p. 606; my emphasis)
The concept of “cultural centrality” is useful to, and relevant to, the argument I am making for a theory of CIC. However, Verboord and Brandellero (2018), focus on the notion of cultural centrality, not from a perspective which emphasizes the unique positioning of American cultural consumers vis-à-vis the global cultural system tilted toward their “own” cultural products, but instead zero in on the productive side of the global cultural system. They zoom in particular in on a production of the Anglo-American pop music star musician system that favors Anglo-American music.
In the U.S., in terms of my focus on cultural consumption as opposed to production, ACIC is illustrated by, and reproduced by, a long-running tendency for non-immigrant, dominant culture (white) Americans to ignore non-English languages. So, for example, McGroarty (2013) notes that just 25% of Americans possess the ability to conduct a conversation in a language other than English (with a disproportionate percentage of these Americans presumably first- or second-generation immigrants), only 18.5% of K-12 students in the U.S. study a foreign language and just 8.1% of contemporary U.S. college and university students are enrolled in a foreign language course, a percentage that, she notes, is significantly down from a figure of 16% in 1960.
A national group’s uniqueness vis-à-vis global cultural flow(s) is not just limited to the U.S., the U.K., Canada, Australia and other cultural contexts characterized by the domination of Anglo-American culture and language. I propose here that cultural insularity extends beyond the U.S. to a comparative and also complexly related insularity among other nationally located groups of consumers. According to this notion of comparative CIC, cultural consumer orientation vis-à-vis language heavy cultural products in many – not all — locations around the world will likely operate according to the following formula: Local national or regional cultural products plus Anglo-American cultural products.
Along the cultural plane of language, this insularity formula could be described as one that tends toward a locally/nationally dominant language plus English language cultural consumption equation. According to this model, many cultural consumers are likely to listen to popular music sung in a locally/nationally dominant language and/or in English. They are considerably less likely to listen to much pop music sung in any other languages.
A separate study (Demont-Heinrich, 2019) that analyzed the linguistic content of 14 national and 1 global weekly Top 50 national and international stream list(s) on Spotify found this type of locally/nationally dominant language plus English BUT no other languages formula to be quite common. That study also established that, for the U.S. and the U.K., a dominant national language plus English formula amounts to a “double English” outcome, or English plus English. In a comprehensive analysis of music consumption in various countries, including the U.S., Verboord and Brandellero (2018) have also found an insularity vis-à-vis popular music consumption in the U.S.
According to an ACIC and CIC model, language heavy cultural products such as pop music — which I examine empirically here and elsewhere (Demont-Heinrich, 2019) — along with, quite likely, other language intensive products such film, and TV/video and books tend to flow outward from the center. For example, music sung in English by an American pop music artist such as Taylor Swift is likely to be heavily listened to by consumers in the center and likely to flow easily out from the center into a large number of non-Anglo-American dominant/dominated contexts.
The model proposes consumers situated in linguistic and cultural layers further out from the center are, on the whole, more likely to be looking inward toward the center, than outward. It is in terms of the ways in which the global hegemony of English infuses and characterizes the ACIC model that it differs most from Straubhaar’s notion of cultural proximity. That is, according to the CIC model, German language pop music consumers are much more likely to orient toward German-language pop music plus English-language pop music than they are to orient toward Dutch- or Danish-language pop music. This despite the fact that Danish and Dutch are more culturally – and linguistically – proximate to German than English, and, in addition, are also geographically extremely proximate.
In sum, a theory of American Cultural Insularity in the Center (ACIC) holds that because “their” cultural and language dominate – again, this is a comparative domination, while American culture does not singularly dominate the world no other culture has, comparatively speaking, as much global presence and pull as American culture – Americans are more likely than people in other national cultural contexts to consume much more of their own cultural media products and much less from other countries compared to people in most other countries, many of whom are, at the very least, consuming American cultural media products on a regular and often widespread basis.
ACIC leans heavily on a theory of cultural hegemony which holds that dominant fundamental groups establish the “rules” of the social and cultural game and create social and cultural systems which favor their own “rules”, and products. While this is the case, it is also the case that these rules are malleable and that those who come from non-dominant (cultural) groups can, and do, push the rules in new, and different directions. However, these non-dominant groups still have to “spontaneously consent” to, as the Italian thinker and theorist Antonio Gramsci puts it, “the general direction imposed on social life by the dominant fundamental group” in order to gain access to the (cultural) system and have a chance to alter that system from within.
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