Reinhold Wagnleitner

In their introduction, Reinhold Wagnleitner and Elaine Tyler May write, “It could easily be argued that the products, icons, and myths of American popular culture represent the single most unifying and centripetal cultural force for the global triumph of the American Century. On the other hand, in many areas of the world, American cultural products are potentially among the most disruptive and centrifugal forces of the twentieth century” (pg. 1). They continue, “Arts, music, and movies were among the most important exports that linked American capitalism to freedom of expression, consumerism, and the good life. But the hegemony of American popular culture remained contested throughout the years of the Cold War because critics in countries around the world saw it as a propaganda used to promote American cultural imperialism, political interests, and the expansion of corporate capitalism” (pg. 6). Finally, they conclude, “It remains to be seen whether the enduring resistance to American popular culture will eventually evaporate, or whether it will take on new life as other cultural forms vie for hegemony in the new global marketplace” (pg. 6). John G. Blair writes of the interplay of meaning, “The Americanness of the original imports was largely lost as time and adaptation went on, a process that, based on the nineteenth-century evidence, should be expected everywhere in cases of cultural exports. It still takes two to tango, even in an era of intensive media development like our own” (pg. 26). Theodore A. Wilson writes, “The [wartime] conviction that people in other countries held erroneous and/or unfortunate ideas about the United States and American society and that those attitudes derived chiefly from the stream of motion pictures churned out by Hollywood and blithely exported to Europe, Latin America, and other regions was as pervasive as the presumed American inferiority complex” (pg. 86). He concludes, “The question to be posed is not whether a Hollywood film triggered certain responses from its viewers or whether individually and collectively the movies were manifestations of a conspiratorial drive for ideological hegemony; rather, one must ask, what meanings did this myriad of wonderful and atrocious films, considered as symbolic associations and representations of a vanished era, convey to audiences in Peoria, Illinois, Paris, France, and Portsmouth, England, about that America constructed by our past selves?” (pg. 95). Michael May writes, “At times the Soviet state embraced jazz as the revolutionary song of its black comrades overseas. Later, during the Cold War, jazz attracted an aura of undeniably Western decadence and was outlawed by decree. The American government also had an ambiguous relationship with its hottest cultural export. There was a bitter irony in bending jazz to the goals of Cold War foreign policy when its progenitors suffered under Jim Crow. As both bureaucracies of the Cold War attempted to use jazz to reinforce nationalism, jazz musicians were, more often than not, simply caught in the fray” (pg. 179). He concludes in the post-Cold War era, “The grand irony is that jazz, once labeled ‘decadent,’ is now and oasis of Russian virtues – intensity, dedication, and soul – in a country drowning in American commercialism… Conspicuous consumption seems to be the only kind of consumption in today’s Moscow. You are either paying $50 to get into a nightclub or eating watered-down borscht in the old Soviet cafeterias” (pg. 191). Thomas Fuchs writes, “Officials in charge of the development of popular culture in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) were extremely concerned about the ‘destructive and decadent’ potential of American trash culture, such as chaotic and shrill music, comics, and other forms of trivial literature, gangster movies, pornography, and violent westerns” (pg. 192). Further, “By the early fifties it became clear that neither West nor East would succeed in pulling the other part of Germany into its sphere of influence. Consequently, the competition between the ideologies shifted in the direction of culture” (pg. 192). Masako Notoji writes, “American popular culture products, from music to fast food to theme parks, appear to standardize tastes and lifestyles around the world. But, in actually, the values and meanings attached to such exports are often reconstructed and redefined within the contexts of the importing societies” (pg. 219). Addressing concerns of U.S. culture colonizing other societies, Notoji writes, “This line of argument, however, assumes the dominating and unilateral influence of the ‘sending culture’ over the ‘receiving culture,’ and lacks an understanding of the dynamic process in which the meaning and function of the original culture is reconstructed in the new context of the receiver. If culture is understood as a system of symbols and meanings, what a particular symbol means has to be learned. Symbols are also polysemic; there is no one-to-one relationship between symbolic signifiers and their objects” (pg. 222). Myles Dungan and David Gray write, “The English and the Irish have both appropriated facets of America’s frontier mythology, and thereby contributed in different ways to America’s cultural mythmaking” (pg. 228). They conclude, “As the Irish and the English have both had such significant inputs into American culture and its national character, and our two cultures seem increasingly resonant with American culture as a result, it is hardly surprising that we each see a little of ourselves in it, and find so many of its cultural products so appealing, even with our tongues firmly in our cheeks” (pg. 241). Rob Kroes writes, “The symbolic connection that advertisers sought to establish hinged on the concept of ‘freedom.’ This linking of evocative images of American freedom and space tended to work best with leisure-time articles, such as cigarettes, beer, automobiles, or even blue jeans. Consumerism, leisure time, and ‘freedom’ thus became inextricably interwove. Even today, ‘America’ triggers an association with freedom. The iconography of America has become international” (pg. 276).… (mer)