Cultural Theory and Popular Culture

Figure 9.3 ‘Imagine there’s no countries’.
The global postmodern 207
therefore both help confirm and help undo local cultures; it can keep one in place and
it can make one suddenly feel out of place. For example, in 1946, addressing a conference
of Spanish clerics, the Archbishop of Toledo wondered ‘[h]ow to tackle’ what
he called ‘woman’s growing demoralization – caused largely by American customs
introduced by the cinematograph, making the young woman independent, breaking
up the family, disabling and discrediting the future consort and mother with exotic
practices that make her less womanly and destabilize the home’ (quoted in Tomlinson,
1997: 123). Spanish women may have taken a different view.
A third problem with the model of globalization as cultural Americanization is that
it assumes that American culture is monolithic. Even in the more guarded accounts of
globalization it is assumed that we can identify something singular called American
culture. George Ritzer (1999), for example, makes the claim that ‘while we will continue
to see global diversity, many, most, perhaps eventually all of those cultures will
be affected by American exports: America will become virtually everyone’s “second
culture”’ (89).
Globalization as cultural Americanization assumes that cultures can be lined up as
distinct monolithic entities, hermetically sealed from one another until the fatal
moment of the globalizing injection. Against such a view, Jan Nederveen Pieterse
(1995) argues that globalization, as cultural Americanization,
overlooks the countercurrents – the impact non-Western cultures have been making
on the West. It downplays the ambivalence of the globalising momentum and
ignores the role of local reception of Western culture – for example the indigenization
of Western elements. It fails to see the influence non-Western cultures
have been exercising on one another. It has no room for crossover culture – as in
the development of ‘third cultures’ such as world music. It overrates the homogeneity
of Western culture and overlooks the fact that many of the standards