Page 129 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

10 | Cultural Imper al sm and Hybr d ty

see also Audience Power to Resist; Cultural Imperialism and Hybridity; Inno-
vation and Imitation in Commercial Media; Online Digital Film and Television;
Tourism and the Selling of Cultures; User-Created Content and Audience
Participation; World Cinema; Youth and Media Use.

Further reading: Fiske, John. Understanding Popular Culture. Boston: Unwin Hyman,
1989; Garcia Canclini, Nestor. Hybrid Cultures. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1995; Giddens, Anthony. Modernity and Self Identity. Cambridge: Polity, 1991;
Hannerz, Ulf. Cultural Complexity. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992; Heb-
dige, Dick. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Methuen, 1979; Lull, James.
Culture-on-Demand. Oxford: Blackwell, 2007; Lull, James. Media, Communication,
Culture: New York: Columbia University Press, 2000; Willis, Paul. Common Culture.
Boulder, CO: Westview, 1990; Willis, Paul. The Ethnographic Imagination. Cambridge:
Polity, 2000.
James Lull

Cultural iMPerialisM and hyBridity

Hollywood movies, television shows, and music CDs are just some of the U.S.
media exports that can be found in almost every corner of the globe, however
remote. As soon as U.S. programs were sold overseas, the export of American
media stirred controversy. In the twenty-first century, critics continue to charge
that the massive exporting of U.S. media and consumer goods harms indigenous
cultures by influencing attitudes and edging out local producers in a process that
leads to the domination of U.S. products and values. Other scholars see evidence
of cultural mixing and a process of sharing that results in hybrid genres and cul-
tural fusion in an age of globalization.
The charge that the United States was practicing cultural imperialism was
heard frequently from the 1960s through the end of the twentieth century.
Scholars, political activists, and policy makers asserted that Western films, TV
shows, and commodities were promoting a social model of consumer-based
capitalism. They lodged the central claim of cultural imperialism: that through
the media, U.S. business and political leaders were trying to influence audiences
in receiving countries and create overseas environments favorable to Western
political and economic interests. In the process, the argument goes, the auton-
omy of receiving countries, as well as their cultures, values, and identities would
be weakened or destroyed.

hisTory oF a ConCEPT

The idea that an imperial power exports its culture as part of a process of
domination is not limited to the modern setting. It has been applied to past
practices of European countries such as Britain, France, and Spain, and also to
the Japanese and Ottoman Empires, as well as other imperial regimes through-
out history. The cultural imperialism thesis states that with politico-military
imperialism on the wane, powerful countries use cultural means rather than