Cultural Theory and Popular Culture

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Chapter 9 Postmodernism
Photo 9.1 The Coca-Colonization of China.
globalization and culture, is to see it as the reduction of the world to an American
‘global village’: a global village in which everyone speaks English with an American
accent, wears Levi jeans and Wrangler shirts, drinks Coca-Cola, eats at McDonald’s,
surfs the net on a computer overflowing with Microsoft software, listens to rock or
country music, watches a mixture of MTV and CNN, Hollywood movies and reruns
of Dallas, and then discusses the prophetically named World Series, while drinking a
bottle of Budweiser and smoking a Marlboro cigarette. According to this scenario, globalization
is the supposed successful imposition of American culture around the globe,
in which the economic success of American capitalism is underpinned by the cultural
work that its commodities supposedly do in effectively destroying indigenous cultures
and imposing an American way of life on ‘local’ populations. Photo 9.1 presents a very
succinct version of this argument. It is a photograph of a sculpture depicting people
entering a Coca-Cola house as Chinese citizens and leaving as little Coca-Cola people.
There are at least three problems with this view of globalization.
The first problem with globalization as cultural Americanization is that it operates
with a very reductive concept of culture: it assumes that ‘economic’ success is the same
as ‘cultural’ imposition. In other words, the recognition of the obvious success of
American companies in placing products in most of the markets of the world is understood
as self-evidently and unproblematically ‘cultural’ success. For example, American
sociologist Herbert Schiller (1979) claims that the ability of American companies to
successfully unload commodities around the globe is producing an American global