CULTURAL IMPERIALISM

Sociologyindex, Sociology Books 2011, Imperialism, Cultural Imperialism, Neocolonialism, Cultural Colonialism

Cultural imperialism is the practice of systematically spreading the influence of one culture over others by means of physical and economic domination.

Cultural imperialism usually involves an assumption of cultural superiority (ethnocentrism). 'Cultural imperialism' can refer to either the forced acculturation of a subject population, or to the voluntary embracing of a foreign culture by individuals who do so of their own free will. The term cultural imperialism is understood differently in particular discourses as in "media imperialism"

Cultural imperialism is the practice of artificially injecting the culture or language of one culture into another. It is usually the case that the former belongs to a large, economically or militarily powerful nation and the latter belongs to a smaller, less important one. Cultural imperialism can take the form of an active, formal policy or a general attitude. The term 'cultural imperialism' is usually used in a pejorative sense, usually in conjunction with a call to reject foreign influence.

Cultural imperialism and resistance in media theory and literary theory
Colleen Roach
Media, Culture & Society, Vol. 19, No. 1, 47-66 (1997)
DOI: 10.1177/016344397019001004
This article places particular emphasis on the criticism of cultural imperialism that began in the mid-1980s and that is now subsumed under the rubric of `cultural studies' and its key concepts: the active audience, audience `resistance' to media messages, and polysemy. It contrasts the political economy school with cultural studies. The positions of Herbert Schiller and Armand Mattelart on the `resistance debate' are outlined, with the author concluding that while Schiller still asserts the validity of cultural imperialism thinking, Mattelart has moved in a slightly different direction. Nonetheless, while the latter has welcomed the departure from monolithic research models, he by no means endorses cultural studies positions, particularly their political implications. The article also contrasts the way `resistance' has been used by postmodernists in the field of communications with its meaning as articulated by two prominent writers in the field of comparative literature: Edward Said and Ngugi Wa Thiong'o. Both writers still validate the notion of cultural imperialism and use the term `resistance' to refer to the struggles against colonialism and imperialism in the countries of the South.

Twenty Years of Cultural Imperialism Research: Some Conceptual and Methodological Problems.
Burrowes, Carl Patrick
While the notion of "cultural imperialism" has received significant attention in communication studies since the early 1970s, researchers have ignored analyses of message systems and audience cultivation in favor of institutional analysis. Likewise, researchers have concentrated on the technologies, media products and processes of Western exporting countries with little concomitant concern for importing countries. These biases stem from a mechanistic model of social processes along with a non-symbolic, materialist conception of culture, viewed as synonymous with technologies, ideologies, or commodities. Previous critics have also failed to question the radicalism of scholars who would preserve the Third World cultures from Western encroachment. Furthermore, the cultural imperialism paradigm presents some serious problems in terms of data measurement and research design models. In brief, the cultural imperialism model, while yielding extensive and often useful analyses, so far has explicated little on the specifically cultural dimensions of relations between nations or between media and their audiences. An examination of popular music in one Third World country, Jamaica, shows how human creativity, exercised even by politically powerless people, can wreak havoc with facile assumptions held by proponents and opponents of imperialism. The current debate revolves largely around moral questions, and unless significant methodological shifts occur, this debate is unlikely to be settled on an empirical basis. (Sixty references are attached.)

Beyond Cultural Imperialism: Cultural Theory, Christian Missions, and Global Modernity
Author: Dunch, Ryan
Source: History and Theory, Volume 41, Number 3, October 2002 , pp. 301-325(25)
Abstract:
“Cultural imperialism” has been an influential concept in the representation of the modern Christian missionary movement. This essay calls its usefulness into question and draws on recent work on the cultural dynamics of globalization to propose alternative ways of looking at the role of missions in modern history. The first section of the essay surveys the ways in which the term “cultural imperialism” has been employed in different disciplines, and some of the criticisms made of the term within those disciplines. The second section discusses the application of the cultural imperialism framework to the missionary enterprise, and the related term “colonization of consciousness” used by Jean and John Comaroff in their influential work on British missionaries and the Tswana of southern Africa. The third section looks at the historiography of missions in modern China, showing how deeply the teleological narratives of nationalism and development have marked that historiography. The concluding section argues that the missionary movement must be seen as one element in a globalizing modernity that has altered Western societies as well as non-Western ones in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and that a comparative global approach to the missionary movement can help to illuminate the process of modern cultural globalization.

Cultural Imperialism on the Internet
by Seongcheol Kim
Abstract
The purpose of this article is to review the cultural imperialism argument in terms of the developments of the Internet through some case studies. In trying to explain problems of global unequal flow of media including the Internet, the cultural imperialism argument seems to be uniquely helpful. However, because of the structural differences between the Internet and traditional forms of mass media, it may not be appropriate to apply the argument to the Internet. Furthermore, it can be said that the cultural imperialism argument has some limitations in the research of not only the Internet but the other new interactive electronic media.

The Orientalist Perspective: Cultural Imperialism in Gaming?
By Elmer Tucker
Abstract:
Japanese video game titles represent a significant portion of the U.S. video game market. With such widespread representation of Japanese made games in the video game market, this presentation asks ‘What kinds of ideas are formulated by Western consumers of Japanese games?’ More specifically, what does the consumption and digestion of this media reveal and conceal about Japan to Western consumers? These questions directly address Edward Said's conceptualization of Orientalism both in the Western consumption of Japanese games and in Japanese games' depictions of Japanese-ness in the games.
Even when not actively perpetuated, Orientalism persists as the default framework through which gaming depicts Eastern cultures. This presentation will cover three dominant forms of Orientalism found in gaming today. The first form is the exoticization of the East by the West, as from a fixed Orientalist perspective that can be found in Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, which tells a tale of the exoticized Middle Eastern Other through the Westernized Prince. The second form of Orientalism frequently found in games is the East's internalization of the Orientalist's fetish and its own production of Orientalism. Essentially, Orientalism acts as a two-way relationship in which the West consumes a fetishized version of the East and in which the East internalizes that fetishization and markets it to the West. Because the Oriental subject is founded on the exploitation of Otherness, the Oriental subject in turn allows an auto-exoticizing Japan to use cultural tropes and stereotyped icons to market themselves to a Western audience and to enforce a culturally imperialistic policy for Asia. Japan's continuance of the commodification of Japanese icons, specifically seen with the Samurai and Ninja figures, reveals the use of Orientalist perspective in selling games such as Onimusha and Tenchu that rely on distinctly Japanese archetypes. The third form of Orientalism found in gaming relies on both prior forms. This form is the imperialist and Orientalist stance that Japan takes in regard to other Asian nations. This form can be seen in the Japanese view of Chinese pseudo-history as represented in the Dynasty Warriors series. The series serves to illustrate the dominant position Japan establishes for itself within the Orientalist hierarchy.
After establishing a working framework for the types of Orientalism frequently found in gaming, this presentation will illustrate the role of Orientalist perspectives in the playing, marketing, and creation of current games on the international market. Working from an examination of the recursive Orientalism of fetishized Japanese stereotypes in games made in Japan, I also explore Orientalism as a force for subjugation and the implicit meaning this gives in regard to Imperialism, which highlights the privileged position Japan occupies vis-à-vis other Asian nations. As gaming continues to develop, the cultures which create, market, and consume games become increasingly important and this presentation will serve as one entry point into that discussion.

Cultural imperialism: A critical theory of interorganizational change
Joseph W. Grubbs
Journal: Journal of Organizational Change Management
Abstract: Current theories of organization tend to discuss the management of change across networks in a grammar of instrumental reason, thereby offering legitimacy to the imperialism that emerges when groups come together in a shared-change experience. However, by adopting principles of critical theory, the social research project initiated by a group of scholars known as the “Frankfurt School”, we may challenge this degradation of knowledge and its companion, human domination. A critical theory of interorganizational change reveals three forms of organizational imperialism: cultural domination, cultural imposition, and cultural fragmentation. From this perspective, we may understand the deleterious human, social and cultural consequences of organizational expansionism, and thereby initiate a dialogue for cultural emancipation, a more meaningful, culturally sensitive approach to change.

U.S. Cultural Imperialism: Today Only a Chimera
Elteren, Mel van.
SAIS Review - Volume 23, Number 2, Summer-Fall 2003, pp. 169-188 The Johns Hopkins University Press
U.S. Cultural Imperialism: Today Only a Chimera - SAIS Review 23:2 SAIS Review 23.2 (2003) 169-188 U.S. Cultural Imperialism Today: Only a Chimera? Mel van Elteren Abstract: After revisiting the notion of "cultural imperialism" and reclaiming its valuable components, the article focuses on the most significant aspects of U.S. cultural imperialism in the current era of globalization. It goes beyond media imperialism to examine other domains of U.S. cultural influence at the heart of capitalist globalization, including business culture, management and labor practices, and cultural and political "development policies." Recognizing two levels of meaning associated with the ideas and practices distributed from the United States to the rest to the world, the author posits the sustained dominance of the first level, that is, the culture of consumerism. U.S. cultural imperialism as understood here -- ultimately seen as a predominantly negative phenomenon from the perspective of self-determination by local people -- is neither essential for, nor inherent to, globalization, but a contingent form of the global diffusion of consumerist beliefs and practices. The concept of "cultural imperialism" has generally been discredited. Today, it is primarily European intellectuals and politicians warning against the purported threat of the "Americanization" of some part of European culture who employ the term. The French have been leading critics in this...

The Death of Cultural Imperialism — and Power Too?
A Critical Analysis of American Prestige Press Representations of the Hegemony of English
Christof Demont-Heinrich
Mass Communications and Journalism Studies Department, University of Denver, 2490 S. Gaylord St., Denver, CO 80208, USA, cdemonth@du.edu
A condensed chapter from a recently completed dissertation, this article critically examines selected texts taken from a pool of 275 accounts of the global rise of English published from 1991 to 2003 in five American-owned prestige press publications — the Los Angeles Times, the International Herald Tribune, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post. In particular, it interrogates representations that declare the death of cultural imperialism. The article deconstructs and problematizes these representations along a number of theoretical and analytical lines. The author notes, and challenges, a powerful propensity toward conceiving globalization through the lens of cultural consumption, contending that to focus on cultural consumption and creative appropriation, and to loosely use the catchphrase `cultural flow', is to lose sight of the specific, and considerable, cultural production and distribution inequities that characterize the contemporary global social order. The author also challenges a valorization of individual agency in the texts, as well as a bottom-up view of globalization that implies the disintegration of global power differentials.

In Praise of Cultural Imperialism? Foreign Policy, Number 107, Summer 1997 - mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/protected/rothkopf.html
David Rothkopf
DAVID ROTHKOPF is managing director of Kissinger Associates and an adjunct professor of international affairs at Columbia University. He served as a senior official in the U.S. Department of Commerce during the first term of the Clinton administration.
The gates of the world are groaning shut From marble balconies and over the airwaves demagogues decry new risks to ancient cultures and traditional values. Satellites, the Internet, and jumbo jets carry the contagion. To many people, "foreign" has become a synonym for "danger."
Of course, now is not the first time in history that chants and anthems of nationalism have been heard. But the tide of nationalism sweeping the world today is unique. For it comes in reaction to a countervailing global alternative that-for the first time in history-is clearly something more than the crackpot dream of visionaries. It is also the first time in history that virtually every individual at every level of society can sense the impact of international changes. They can see and hear it in their media, taste it in their food, and sense it in the products that they buy. Even more visceral and threatening to those who fear these changes is the growth of a global labor pool that during the next decade will absorb nearly 2 billion workers from emerging markets, a pool that currently includes close to 1 billion unemployed and underemployed workers in those markets alone. These people will be working for a fraction of what their counterparts in developed nations earn and will be only marginally less productive. You are either someone who is threatened by this change or someone who will profit from it, but it is almost impossible to conceive of a significant group that will remain untouched by it.
Globalization has economic roots and political consequences, but it also has brought into focus the power of culture in this global environment-the power to bind and to divide in a time when the tensions between integration and separation tug at every issue that is relevant to international relations.
The impact of globalization on culture and the impact of culture on globalization merit discussion. The homogenizing influences of globalization that are most often condemned by the new nationalists and by cultural romanticists are actually positive; globalization promotes integration and the removal not only of cultural barriers but of many of the negative dimensions of culture. Globalization is a vital step toward both a more stable world and better lives for the people in it.
Furthermore, these issues have serious implications for American foreign policy. For the United States, a central objective of an Information Age foreign policy must be to win the battle of the world's information flows, dominating the airwaves as Great Britain once ruled the seas.
 

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