Large numbers of Americans rarely consume cultural media products produced outside of the United States and/or produced in languages other than English
The cover of a recent issue of the Journal of Communication Inquiry. [Credit: Sage Journals]In a forthcoming paper, which will be published in the Journal of Communication Inquiry, I seek to define and illustrate the explanatory power of a proposed theory of cultural insularity in the center. I do so via an instructive case study that critically interrogates the self-reflection of American college undergraduates vis-à-vis their largely Anglo-American and English-language centric pop music orientations – with Anglo-American here defined as including the United States, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
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
Avengers: Endgame, an American Hollywood film, is the top-grossing film of all-time, globally, according to Box Office Mojo.
Hollywood films dominate Top 200 all-time biggest grossing films globally
If you want to get an idea of just how predominant American Hollywood films are globally, take a look at the Box Office Mojo all-time top grossing films page. The page, or, really, pages list(s) the top global grossing films according to box office receipts and includes 1,000 films. American Hollywood films – and films originally produced in English – dominate this “global” list.
On Sept. 28, 2020, all of the Top 20 grossing films of all time, globally, were Anglo-American produced films.
Here are some of the highlights from the list, which underscore the continued predominance of American Hollywood films globally, at least when dominance is measured by way of money produced:
All of the Top 20 grossing films, globally, are Anglo-American produced films originally produced in English.
All of the Top 50 grossing films, globally, are Anglo-American produced films originally produced in English.
All of the Top 100 grossing films, globally, are Anglo-American produced films originally produced in English.
The very first non-Anglo-American film to break into the Box Office Mojo all-time top 1,000 grossing films, globally, is a Chinese film, Ne Zha, released in 2019. As of Sept. 28, 2020, it was ranked at No. 115. Globally, at that time, Ne Zha had garnered $726 million in box office receipts. Meanwhile, in the United States – and this a perfect example of American Cultural Insularity in the Center (ACIC) – Ne Zha had made only $1 million in box office receipts.
Detective Chinatown 2, another Chinese film, ranks at No. 187 on the Box Office Mojo all-time list as of Sept. 28, 2020, with $544 million in box office revenue. Meanwhile, the film earned less than $2 million in the United States.
Just two of the Top 200 all-time grossing films globally are produced in a non-Anglo-American country, both in China. Both of those films did extremely poorly at the box office in the United States, offering further evidence of American Cultural Insularity in the Center and of un-even cultural flows and hierarchies. Cultural flows have historically skewed heavily in an outward direction from the United States with barely even a trickle of foreign films flowing in the other direction into the United States, at least when flow is measured by way of box office receipts, which is a powerful indicator of both political economic and cultural might.
People who speak languages of bigger more dominant and powerful groups are nearly always at a power advantage in terms of the global linguistic configuration of power. [Image Credit: Louise Mézel, Babbel.Com]Few things are as central to human social being, identity and interaction as language (Fairclough, 2001; Lupyan, 2015). Language shapes the ways that we perceive of and understand “reality” (Morand, 2000; Sapir, 1981). Indeed, “reality” is itself a human concept that we encode via the so-called signifier “reality” in order to describe something “out there” and assign it meaning so that we can begin to make sense of that thing.
Without language of some kind – with language here broadly defined to include all forms of signed and spoken language, including facial expressions, etc., we humans would have no way to communicate with each other about this thing we call “reality.”
Most human beings – probably nearly all – spend vast amounts of their day thinking, and, for the most part, they are thinking in language – talking to themselves and to others endlessly, and internally, in a near endless loop of internal talk and speech (Vygotsky, 1984).
Not only can we not collectively and socially refer to, and communicate about, something called “reality” without some sort of language, we can’t really make sense of the world in which we live, both the natural and social world, without language. We are constantly in the act of naming and categorizing things. We use these names and categories to create meaning and we share our meaning(s) via the stories that we tell to ourselves and others about ourselves and about others as well as about the “objective” natural world (Geertz, 1973).
Spotify Charts — U.S. Top 10 Weekly Streams, 9-17-2020.
This page tracked the Spotify Charts Weekly Top 10 Streamed songs or albums for the World and for the United States on a once-a-month basis from September 2020 through September 2021. I used this once-a-month sample of these weekly lists to survey them for the (lack of) presence of albums and/or songs sung in languages other than English.
I sample one Global and US weekly Top 10 list from each month. I started this with the Global and US Weekly Top 10 list for the week of 9-17-2020 and ended the 12-month once-a-month snapshot of most popular weekly songs and albums for the week of 8-19-2021.
Spotify changed its charting system in June 2021 and moved from charting the popularity of single songs to charting the popularity of entire albums. That means the data on this page are somewhat disparate, with some of the tables below focused on most popular songs in a given week — from Sept. 2020 through May 2021 — and others focused on most popular albums — from June 2021 onward.
The primary aim is to chronicle the following ==>
The (lack of ) presence of non-Anglo-American pop artists appearing in the Spotify Global Weekly Top 10 and Spotify U.S. Weekly Top 10.
The comparative presence of English-language vs. non-English language songs in the Spotify Global Weekly Top 10 and Spotify U.S. Weekly Top 10.
Dominant Group Studies (DGS) and Dominant Cultural Group Theory propose that we focus critical and empirical attention on the ways in which Dominant Cultural Groups (DCGs), most notably, culturally and linguistically and educationally and racially privileged Americans, are both especially insular and also comparatively arrogant vis-a-vis their own dominant culture and relatively ignorant vis-a-vis the culture of so-called “others.” [Image Credit: theinclusionsolution.me]American Cultural Insularity in the Center (ACIC) also draws upon a new theory I am developing called Dominant Cultural Group Theory (DCGT). I situate this theory within the broader domain of what I call Dominant Group Studies (DGS).
I am not the first to have put forward a proposal for Dominant Group Theory, though, to the best of my knowledge, I am the first to call for a field of study called Dominant Group Studies. Within the fields of media and communication studies and theory, Razzante & Orbe (2018) have recently begun to develop a Dominant Group Theory (DGT). Razzante and Orbe (2018) focus on how “dominant group members communicate with co-cultural group members within oppressive structures,” and therefore zero in primarily on communication with not much focus on culture and language. In contrast, I am much more interested in, and DCGT is much more focused on, the dynamics of power vis-à-vis the production and consumption of popular culture and the specific role that language, e.g. English as a nationally and globally dominant language for particular dominant groups inside the United States, play in terms of the (lack of) empowerment and ability of non-dominant groups to alter dominant groups’ comparative stranglehold on (global) cultural production and consumption.
Razzante’s and Orbe’s (2018) “five premises” of DGT are useful in terms of articulating a critical version of Dominant Cultural Group Theory (DCGT), which at heart, is a normative critical theory. These five premises are:
In each society, a hierarchy exists that privileges certain groups of people: in the United States these groups include cisgender men, European Americans, Christians, heterosexuals, the able-bodied, native English speakers (emphasis = my own), and those from the middle and upper classes;
Others—trans persons, women, people of color, Muslims, LGBT persons, people with disabilities, non-native English speakers, and those from a lower class—are marginalized as co-cultural group members;
Although representing a widely diverse array of lived experiences, dominant group members will share a similar societal position that provides them with societal advantages compared to their co-cultural group counterparts;
While dominant group members share an advantaged position in society, their lived experiences—like their co-cultural counterparts—reflect a diversity of perspectives that resist essentialist understanding; and
On the basis of varying levels of privilege, dominant group members occupy positions of power that are used in their negotiation of traditionally dominant communication systems.
A snapshot of the Top 10 Weekly Streamed Songs on Spotify for the week of Sept. 10, 2020 shows that all 10 songs in the United States are in English. In Germany, three of the top 10 songs are sung in English. This comparative snapshot repeats itself repeatedly, with American Spotify charts rarely seeing songs sung in languages other than English break into the Top 10, except for, occasionally, songs sung in Spanish or hybrid English-Spanish songs. German-language, or Japanese-language, or French-language songs, etc. never make their way into the American Spotify Top 10, in large part due to American Cultural Insularity (ACIC) in the center.
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. Continue reading “Building a Theory of American Cultural Insularity in the Center (ACIC)”
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 “counter flows” 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.) continue to take up Schiller’s 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”
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.
Hollywood films dominate Top 200 all-time biggest grossing films globally
