American Pop Culture: A Commodity or an Ideology?

Review by Marwan M. Kraidy

Annenberg School for Communication

University of Pennsylvania

Globalization and American Popular Culture, by Lane Crothers. Boston: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007.

 It is a widely spread notion in both scholarly and popular discourse that the globalization of popular culture essentially means its Americanization, meaning its adoption of styles, forms, norms and values developed by the culture industries in the United States. In Globalization and American Popular Culture, Lane Crothers, a professor of politics and government at Illinois State University, explores the connection between American popular culture and globalization with the help of many case studies dispersed throughout the book. The author’s clear language and use of elaborately explicated examples are positive points, but passages of thoughtful description and analysis are undercut by an unfortunate recurrence of sweeping statements about U.S. popular culture.

The first two chapters lay the book’s foundations. Chapter 1, “American Popular Culture and Globalization,” defines terms and establishes the basic links between the two themes in the book’s title. Chapter 2 revisits the history of the film, music and television industries in the United States with a focus on their global scope. It focuses on dynamics of production and distribution that give American influence vast worldwide influence. The chapter provides brief summaries of the history of media industries. The following chapter (3), “‘American’ Popular Culture,” complements chapter 2 with nine case studies, three for each category (film, music and television), ranging from Titanic to West Wing to Britney Spears. The chapter includes discussions of the connections between popular culture and civic culture, of ethnic and racial stereotypes in American popular culture, and the dominant use of the English language, large non-English (especially Spanish-speaking) audiences notwithstanding. Chapter 3 concludes with a description of what the author defines as “formulas in American popular culture.”

The last two chapters integrate the previous explanatory and descriptive chapters in an analytical framework seeking to push the conceptual boundaries of cultural globalization and American popular culture. In Chapter 4, “Globalization, Fragmegration, and American Popular Culture,” the author borrows the international relations theorist James Rosenau’s notion of “fragmegration,” a neologism combining “fragmentation” and “integration,” and applies it to four national case-studies. The dynamics between American popular culture and national contexts are explored in Iran, France, Venezuela and Hong Kong, focusing on “the legal context of international trade in popular culture” (p. 109). The countries analyzed present a range of diverse modes of governance and ways of dealing with global popular culture, from Iran’s theocratic rejection of Americanization to France’s “cultural” opposition to U.S. media products. The author’s analysis of these countries, albeit a bit superficial because of the brevity of each case, is overall lucid and engaging. Crothers concludes Chapter 4 as follows: “Whether in individual cases or as a matter of international law … American popular culture has been and remains one of the most divisive, most limiting forces in the process of globalization” (p. 135).

Chapter 5, “American Popular Culture and the Future of Globalization,” carries the conceptual discussion into the territory of hybridity and glocalization, that other neologism blending “globalization” and “localization,” and concludes with the author’s thoughts on “the future of American popular culture and globalization.” End matter includes a helpful list of recommended readings.

In crisp and accessible language, the author distills central arguments in the study of global media and popular culture in their overlapping national and global political-economic context and legal-regulatory environments, often with a historical perspective.

Early chapters describe this context: “Global relationships of trade, immigration, ideas, security, and even entertainment were profoundly shaped by the Cold War” (p. 2). “American popular culture,” the author continues, “is an agent of cultural globalization … Popular culture is a business run by megacorporations and marketed across the globe … it has an impact on the economic dimension of globalization” (p. 16). “At the core of these disputes,” writes Crothers (p. 110) “lies a deceptively simple question: is popular culture a commodity like rice or computers or automobiles, or is it an agent of socialization that shapes culture?” He then proceeds to explicate the U.S. role in promoting free trade in media and popular culture, understood as market commodities, and the French role in crystallizing and advancing an alternative view of media and culture as resources that ought not be subjected to the vagaries of global markets.

A penchant for hyperbole is visible throughout the narrative of the book. The author’s claim that “[A]s a consequence of the business, technological, and social factors noted throughout this chapter, the production of mass popular culture has always been centered in the United States” (p. 63) ignores other media centers in Asian, Latin America and the Middle East, not to mention Europe. The author’s rather uncritical adoption of the idea that U.S. films and television programs are “transparent” leads him to the rather grandiose claim that “American movies, music and television programming are, in effect, seen to have a greater power to transform other societies than virtually any other form of trade or relations ever developed in human history” (p. 137). Many people around the world would undoubtedly be surprised to learn that U.S. popular culture has been more transformative of their societies than colonialism, migration, war and global economics!

In addition, claims of narrative transparency and social transformation is not fully compatible with the role of the U.S. government in promoting media and popular culture exports (which the author discusses elsewhere in the book), in addition to U.S. intervention in the politics and economies of other countries. These seem oddly to contradict previous sections of the book that offer more thoughtful analysis, and even subsequent sections of the concluding chapter that carry more nuanced statements. A more complete treatment of the relationship between American popular culture and globalization would have incorporated discussions of U.S. trade promotion and foreign policy more systematically.