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)”