Tag: Dominant Cultural Group

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American and Anglo-American films originally in English have dominated globally — and in the United States

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.

Avengers: Endgame poster
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:

  1. All of the Top 20 grossing films, globally, are Anglo-American produced films originally produced in English.
  2. All of the Top 50 grossing films, globally, are Anglo-American produced films originally produced in English.
  3. All of the Top 100 grossing films, globally, are Anglo-American produced films originally produced in English.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. 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.

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Building a theory of language and its role in human social reality — and in American Cultural Insularity in the Center (ACIC)

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).

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