Yankee Go Home & Take Me With u: Americanization and Popular Culture

Description

From Yeah to Yo! our language bears traces of American influence. We can do little to escape the experience of America through many media: Tv, pop music, youth culture, Hollywood, fast food. How do these traces and images affect us? Do we internalize them, want to be American? Do we (can we?) resist them, see America as still at cultural Cold War? Is our desire for them a symptom of European pop culture's crisis? From blackface minstrelsy, rap music and fiction to McDonald's, rock festivals and Star Trek, the cultural conception of America is critically unpacked by contributors from Europe, Israel and the Usa. George McKay rounds off the picture by offering a comprehensive introduction that explains theoretical approaches to Americanization from the thesis of Yankee cultural imperialism to America as site of liberation or fantasy. Cover Half-title Title Copyright Contents Acknowledgments Notes on Contributors Introduction: Americanization and Popular Culture Make it New Cultural Imperialism Ten Little Englanders The Positive Discourse of Americanization Cross-cultural Complexities: The Import/Export Trade Blackface Minstrels as Cultural Export: England, Australia, South Africa 1. American Beginnings: The Original Jim Crow' Song-and-Dance Routine 2. English Adaptations 3. Australian Action 4. South African Assimilations Americanization? The War of Words: Literature for German POWs in the United States 1943-1944 Star Trek Old and New: From the Alien Embodied to the Alien Imagined The Bohemian Transformed: America, the Malcontent and the Alterations of the 1960s First Moves: Definition Historical Context, National Identity Populist Bohemianism Updating Bohemianism All Chosen Outcasts Taming the Malcontent: Americanization Back to the 1960s Revolutionary Bohemianism Woodstock, Isle of Wight, Altamont The Mob's Vengeance? Cyberspace and Crowd Power Popular Culture and Political Discourse in American Narratives about Vietnam I Am the King: Cultural Appropriation in Australia's Gothic Graceland Postscript American Life by Proxy: Dutch Youth and Sense of Place Diverse Interplays of Cultural Localization and Globalization in Popular Music Conclusions The Origins and Evolution of French Rap Music and Hip Hop Culture in the 1980s and 1990s Afterword: Downsizing America Notes Bibliography Index