Large numbers of Americans rarely consume cultural media products produced outside of the United States and/or produced in languages other than English
Category: Cultural imperialism, cultural globalization & cultural hegemony
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? đ
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”
While American popular culture is not the only culture to have global sway, no other culture has, comparatively speaking, as wide, broad, or deep a reach as American culture. Different cultural consumers in different countries respond to, and “read” American culture differently, and it is one of a range of cultural choices for consumers globally. However, it is still the most predominant “dish” on the global smorgasbord, as cultural theorist Richard Kuisel has noted.
I place a theory of American Cultural Insularity in the Center (ACIC) in relation to larger theoretical models/debates with international communication and global media studies. Two general models describing the global cultural system — cultural imperialism and cultural globalization — have dominated scholarship within global media and international communication studies, with a third model, to which I ascribe, cultural hegemony, also significant.
Generally, debates between scholars who lean more toward a cultural imperialism perspective (e.g., Golding, 1977; Mattelart, 1979; Schiller 1976) and those who tilt more towards a cultural globalization perspective (e.g., Alim 2010; Cheshire & Moser 1994; Katz & Liebes 1987; Kirmse 2010; Thussu 1998, 2006) tend to imply that either the global cultural system is largely characterized by a top-down and/or center-out relationship or that it is primarily marked by localization, hybridization, cultural resistance and âcounter flowsâ back to the top/center.
Cultural imperialismrefers to a global situation in which powerful culture industries and actors located almost exclusively in the West and, in particular, in the United States, dominate other local, national and regional cultures and actors. This domination is understood as being largely the outcome of fundamental historical inequalities that have resulted in the bulk of political and economic power being concentrated in the West and, especially, in the United States. A number of different scholars have been associated with the development of the notion of cultural imperialism, among them Schiller (1976, 1991), Mattelart (1979), and Golding (1977), with Schiller widely viewed as the most influential of these. Many contemporary scholars (Boyd-Barrett, 2016; Sparks, 2007, etc.) Â continue to take up Schillerâs perspective, and despite what some academics have claimed, I strongly believe that it is clear that cultural imperialism still has relevance within the fields of media, cultural and global communication studies.
In contrast to cultural imperialism, which encourages scholars to concentrate on cultural domination and cultural producers as well as on the power of the latter to impose their ideology on others, cultural globalizationencourages researchers to focus on cultural resistance and cultural consumers as well as on the power of people, both on individual and collective levels, to read, appropriate, and use cultural products in creative fashion. In the tensions between cultural imperialist-inflected and cultural globalization-inflected scholarship, we see disagreement about what level of analysis to focus on, with scholarship rooted in a cultural imperialism approach generally concerned primarily with macro-level (global/national) cultural production and distribution questions and issues and scholarship grounded in a cultural globalization approach tending to focus more on micro-level (local) questions surrounding cultural consumption. Continue reading “Cultural imperialism, cultural globalization and cultural hegemony”
So, my work very much tilts toward the cultural imperialism side of a continuum of 