Large numbers of Americans rarely consume cultural media products produced outside of the United States and/or produced in languages other than English
But only a little.
Yes, Parasite did break important new ground by becoming the first non-English-language film in the 92-year history of the Academy Awards to win the coveted best picture award. But — and this is an important but — it is the ONLY non-English language film, so far, to ever win this award. Continue reading “A South Korean film, Parasite, may have become the first non-English language best picture winner, but Americans still have little interest in foreign film”
Cultural insularity in the center — which I will refer to from here on as CIC — 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, I suggest, is particularly apparent in terms of “language-heavy” objects such as popular music. In this paper, I examine and critically engage CIC via a textual analysis of the written discourse of 86 American undergraduates. These undergraduates were required to — via a formal written and verbal group assignment – directly reflect upon their own English-language heavy online pop music consumption habits when using the global music distribution platform Spotify. Continue reading “Theorizing and documenting cultural insularity in the center: A critical analysis of U.S. college students’ English-language Spotify consumption orientations”
In 2018, I researched the presence of English-language songs in 14 different national Top Weekly Streamed songs lists on Spotify, which was then, and still is, the world’s leading online streaming service. I also analyzed Spotify’s Global Weekly Top Streamed songs list for the presence of English-language songs.
What I found — and I looked across an 18-month period — confirmed, for the most part, that, among other things, on Spotify, there was almost zero presence of non-English language songs on the U.S. and U.K. top weekly streamed songs lists, there was significant presence of English-language songs on the top weekly streamed lists in European countries such as Sweden, Germany and Poland, that there was somewhat less of a presence of English-language songs on several Asian countries’ Spotify lists and, finally, very little presence of English-language pop songs in the Spotify lists from countries in which Spanish is a dominant language such as Spain and Argentina.
The significant presence of English-language pop songs on Spotify charts in diverse countries ranging from Sweden to Poland to Germany to Japan and the near total lack of non-English language songs on the U.S. and UK Spotify charts show cultural and linguistic imperialism are not outmoded nor invalid. Indeed, a cultural and linguistic imperialism perspective reveals much about the cultural and linguistic hierarchies and inequities that characterize contemporary global cultural and linguistic configurations of power