"Americanization" and the Function of Critical Vocabulary

I got into a fairly heated debate with my brother earlier about the term "Americanization" when we were talking about national cuisines. During the conversation, I had casually mentioned that I hated the term (a passion which is, I suppose, never really that casual), and I was inexplicably unable to defend my reasons for this. Part of the reason, it turns out, is that I often have my own difficulties justifying the need for a more complicated critical discourse than the ones which are already popularly in place: in other words, the difficulty was defending the role of a cultural critic (particularly an academic one), something which I was apparently unprepared to do in regular conversation.

After thinking about it more, I can say that the term "Americanization" does (at least) three things that are potentially damaging to the ways in which individuals identify themselves in relation to other cultures and their own: it tries to stabilize two particular identities while suggesting a monolithic appropriation of one of them.

An example to bring this into significantly less abstract terms: I study Shakespeare and the uses of his works in contemporary American youth culture. It would only be too easy for me to suggest a model in which "Americanization" would be a key term (to say, for instance, that Baz Luhrman's William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet is an Americanized version of the play). But to suggest that youth culture is Americanizing Shakespeare would be misleading in three ways:

1) It suggests that there is a universal "American" identity which simply doesn't exist,
2) It suggests that there is a stable idea of what "Shakespeare" is that can be Americanized, and most insidiously,
3) It suggests that this stable American identity entirely co-opts or appropriates this stable Shakespearean identity fully, that there is no Shakespeare left in American youth culture that is not Americanized.

All three propositions are incorrect. All three can have dangerous consequences. When I stare blankly and stupidly at my brother's suggestion that the average person doesn't need a more complicated understanding of this process, I'm really staring at my own inability to bridge that seemingly unbridgable chasm that exists between the academy and what he calls the "average Joe" in the popular sensibility.

"The critical categories that we have work," he says. "They describe a cultural process in a way that is important and which does reveal something about the way that other cultures are economically exploited by the U.S." Brief pause. "And try talking about how this process is more complicated to jihadists who have a genuine reason to hate America as a whole because of this process of Americanization!"

But such an example merely demonstrates how deadly such a binary logic can be: it is precisely a response this slippage between "Americanization" as a critical discourse and the perception of "Americanization" as a social process that results in such a reductive, violent attack on a national culture. My brother is correct in asserting that the distribution of a critical vocabulary doesn't materially affect our social relations: but we can certainly feel the material, often-violent reverberations when that critical vocabulary is misapplied in pragmatic situations, reducing enormously complicated histories into either/or propositions.

We constantly see how American pundits' discussions can turn just as ugly when they discuss their perceptions of how other cultures are appropriating American culture: such reductive assumptions about how cultures relate to one another are at the heart of our worst public debates about issues such as immigration laws and the "need" to officially set English as the national language. It's all reactionary bullshit that trades on the worst assumptions that any cultural hybridity poisons the "authenticity" of our culture. (Not incidentally, "authenticity" is another term that needs to be discarded from public discussion altogether.)

Innumerable academic cultural critics have posed alternative ways of understanding how cultures interact that pushes us beyond the paradigm of cultural imperialism or Americanization (Stuart Hall, Lawrence Grossberg, Arjun Appadurai, Hardt and Negri, and Iwabuchi all come immediately to mind, not to mention the many others I can't think of off the top of my head), but I think that the Shakespearean scholar Bryan Reynolds offers an interesting, immediately recognizable model for how these interactions can occur. Reynolds suggests that these "transversal encounters" (his jargony term to denote hybridity) are similar in structure to how empathy works on an interpersonal level. If I empathize with someone, I obviously do not fully become or appropriate the other person's emotions or identity as I do so. But I am also not fully myself, either. I am something different, and, if the affect is strong enough, I am forever changed. So it happens in empathy, so it goes in inter-cultural relations: nothing is ever fully appropriated so much as it becomes a hyrbrid that somehow manages to change both cultures. Sometimes these changes happen for the worse (the kinds of economic exploitation traditionally associated with Americanization, for instance), but they often transform the public sphere in valuable ways that allow individuals to negotiate how they relate with others (with Google's unforgivable deal with China, we see the genuine fear that international means of information distribution can cause as it relates to the political public sphere). More consciousness of these complexities--complexities that the "average Joe" already understands so intuitively in inner emotional life--within our public critical discourses is necessary for developing a more peaceful interaction between cultures in an increasingly complicated globalized setting. I'm not necessarily suggesting that a higher public profile for cultural critics is the answer, but it's certainly one avenue of routing our cultural pedagogy.