Search

“Here, There and Everywhere”

The Foreign Politics of American Popular Culture

Edited by Reinhold Wagnleitner and Elaine Tyler May

American popular culture is everywhere. All over the world, kids wear Levis, radios blare rap songs, television stations broadcast American programs, and Hollywood movies draw huge audiences. Does this massive “Americanization” of the globe represent some sinister form of cultural imperialism? Alternatively, do audiences and consumers in the importing countries accept American movies, music, and television programs because they match local trends and desires? Do receiving communities transform these products to fit their own needs, to the point where they are no longer “American” but in fact have become indigenous? And who is in charge of all of this, anyway? Is it Wall Street, Madison Avenue, the Pentagon, the CIA, or Hollywood? Is it, at least partly, local economic and political elites in the receiving countries? Or is it simply “the people,” nationalities be damned? These are the questions at the heart of the essays collected in “Here, There and Everywhere.” Essays by 23 authors from 14 countries cover topics from Japan to Spain, Nigeria to Russia, and from West Germany to East Germany (a distance that seemed to be further than travelling to the moon, yet was covered by rock ‘n’ roll most easily, despite the wall). In five sections, they examine the historical background, the impact of Hollywood, the power of American popular music from jazz to rock ‘n’ roll and rap, and the popularity of as well as resistance to American popular culture in particular countries.

Cover Image of “Here
Paper: $35
ISBN-13: 9781584650355
Pages: 368 | Size: 6 in. x 9 in.
Date Published: March 1, 2000
Screenshot-2023-10-11-at-16.51.58

Reviews

  • A fitting vehicle for the editors' efforts to put the very idea of Americanization to rest.

    Lingua Franca

About the Author

REINHOLD WAGNLEITNER, Associate Professor of Modern History at the University of Salzburg and past President of the Austrian Association for American Studies, also played and sang in Austrian pop, rock, and jazz bands. The English translation of his Coca-Colonization and the Cold War (1994) won the Stuart L. Bernath Prize of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. ELAINE TYLER MAY, Professor of American Studies and History at the University of Minnesota, was a recent President of the American Studies Association and a Fulbright Distinguished Professor of American History at University College Dublin, Ireland. Her books include Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (revised edition, 2000), and Barren in the Promised Land: Childless Americans and the Pursuit of Happiness (1995).

Other Recent Titles

Jewish Dimensions in Modern Visual Culture

Edited by Rose-Carol Washton Long, Matthew Baigell, and Milly Heyd

Photographing the Jewish Nation

Edited by Eugene M. Avrutin

All-Out for Victory!

John Bush Jones

Jewish Roots in Southern Soil

Edited by Marcie Ferris and Mark I. Greenberg

Arctic Adaptations

Igor Krupnik; Marcia Levenson, trans.; Marcia Levenson, ed.