Between America’s Culture and Politics

A symposium titled “Globalization and American Pop Culture” was held in the beautiful Austrian city of Salzburg, organized by the world-renowned Salzburg Foundation through their American Studies Center.

Academics who specialize in American studies attended the symposium from 20 countries. They belonged to different branches: science, history, literature, politics, media and arts. The discussion was about the American cultural influence around the world, whether we are talking about movies, McDonald’s, jeans or rap music.

You can walk on the streets of Cairo or Manila and find McDonald’s restaurants; turn on the T.V. in Moscow or Budapest and find American movies; travel to Tokyo or Beijing and listen to the Japanese or Chinese words sung by local bands to American rap rhythms. The central question in all this is how we understand this phenomenon, its significance and impact on local cultures.

There were wide debates in the symposium on the analysis of the phenomenon, mostly focusing on the theses of the two schools of thought. The first school is “cultural imperialism” and the second school is “global hybrid culture.” The first school considers the American cultural influence to be a form of cultural hegemony or “imperialism” on the cultural level. It believes that the American culture has become a “product” promoted and sold around the world by giant U.S. companies who can provide it for prices that make it difficult for the local cultural “product” to compete with or survive in competition.

This is true for the American movie industry, as it is also for fast food restaurants. This has lead to a wide standardization of the world’s taste and the decline of local cultures, which are losing some of their components over time.

The second school of thought, “global hybrid culture”, rejects the idea of American cultural hegemony and gives greater attention to the role of the recipient. The proponents of this school think that the recipient in Abu Dhabi or Rio de Janeiro is not a passive victim, but a major player who lends some of himself to what he receives. Rap music, for example, is received differently in different local contexts and its meaning is reproduced to suit different cultural and social realities. The birth of an entirely new culture results from this process – the global “hybrid” culture is born from the “received” and local culture.

The truth is that none of these schools were fully convincing, as each raised more questions than provided answers. Perhaps the initial imbalance suffered by the two schools is that they do not distinguish between the various components of the American culture. For example, McDonald’s and jeans are treated like jazz, which has a composite of historical and political dimensions, and the movie industry and its cultural influence are treated like Coca-Cola products and are considered to have the same impact.

Although the school of cultural imperialism is the most coherent in its ideas, it may also focus entirely too much on the role of capitalism in the manufacture of cultural domination and overlook other important aspects. It’s true there are giant companies standing behind the American movie industry, McDonald’s and even rap music, but how can this role interpret, for example, the emergence of local bands around the world playing and producing rap songs with words from their local languages? There must be something about rap music that makes it attractive.

Perhaps the source of attraction might be that rap music has a high degree of simplicity that would allow production in different local contexts, without the need for complicated techniques, and outside of equipped studios.

Focusing on the role of big companies is not allowing the cultural imperialism school to see that important dimension. In other words, the nature of rap music that is freeing young people from giant companies is exactly the opposite of this school’s focus. Rap music itself has also led to the globalization of simplification, so to speak! This confirms again that every component of American culture cannot be treated on equal footing.

The truth is the global hybrid culture school raises more theoretical problems than the cultural imperialism school. I expressed in one of the seminar meetings my reservations about the substance of the school’s thought and did not hear convincing answers from its supporters. I said it is not permissible to talk with such confidence about the global hybrid culture if the United States is an exception. America, which produces a culture that is consumed by the world, is self-focused and isolated from other cultures. How many Americans listen to Arabic or Turkish music, watch Hindi movies or read Russian literature?

Throughout the symposium, the only aspect unanimously agreed on by the participants was the predominant influence of American culture. They all differed on the analysis of the phenomenon.