Yankee Go Home & Take Me With u: Americanization and Popular Culture 9781474287852, 9781474287845

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Yankee Go Home (& Take Me With U)

Cultural Studies: Bloomsbury Academic Collections

These seven titles are facsimile editions from our imprints Cassell, Continuum and Sheffield Academic Press. They cover a broad range of cultural studies, addressing pop culture and music, the social and cultural changes brought on by the Internet and the Americanization of the Western world throughout the twentieth century. Further, it also looks at cultural changes in the perception of gender in fashion as well as politics and literature. The collection is available both in e-book and print versions. Other titles available in Cultural Studies include: Arrested Development: Pop Culture and the Erosion of Adulthood, Andrew Calcutt Culture First!: Promoting Standards In The New Media Age, edited by Kenneth Dyson and Walter Homolka Good Girl Messages: How Young Women Were Misled By Their Favourite Books, Deborah O'Keefe Men in the Mirror: Men's Fashion, Masculinity, and Consumer Society, Tim Edwards Sound Alliances: Indigenous Peoples, Cultural Politics, and Popular Music in the Pacific, edited by Philip Hayward Women, Europe And The New Languages Of Politics, Hilary Footitt

Yankee Go Home (& Take Me With U) Americanization and Popular Culture Edited by George McKay Cultural Studies BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC COLLECTIONS

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www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in 1997 by Sheffield Academic Press This edition published by Bloomsbury Academic 2016 © Bloomsbury Academic 2016 George McKay has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editor of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders of material reproduced in this volume. If any copyright holder has not been properly acknowledged, please contact the publisher who will be happy to rectify the omission in future editions. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-1-4742-8783-8 ePDF: 978-1-4742-8784-5 Set: 978-1-4742-8855-2 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress Series: Bloomsbury Academic Collections, ISSN 2051-0012 Printed and bound in Great Britain

Yankee Go Home [a Take Me With U)

YANKEE 2 Americanization and Popular Culture

George McKay

H

Sheffield Academic

Press

Copyright © 1997 Sheffield Academic Press Published by Sheffield Academic Press Ltd Mansion House 19 Kingfield Road Sheffield Si 1 9AS England

Typeset by Carnegie Publishing Ltd and Printed on acid-free paper in Great Britain by Cromwell Press Melksham, Wiltshire

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 1-85075-811-5

Contents

Acknowledgments Notes on Contributors Introduction: Americanization and Popular Culture George McKay

7 8 11

Blackface Minstrels as Cultural Export: England, Australia, South Africa ]ohn G. Blair

53

The War of Words: Literature for German POWs in the United States 1943-1944 Ron Robin

67

Star Trek Old and New: From the Alien Embodied to the Alien Imagined Karin Blair

78

The Bohemian Transformed: America, the Malcontent and the Alterations of the 1960s )ohn Dean

89

Popular Culture and Political Discourse in American Narratives about Vietnam Yonka Krasteva

104

1 Am the King: Cultural Appropriation in Australia's Gothic Graceland Richard Walker

117

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Yankee Go Home (& Take Me With U)

American Life by Proxy: Dutch Youth and Sense of Place

131

Mel van Elteren

The Origins and Evolution of French Rap Music and Hip Hop Culture in the 1980s and 1990s

146

Andre J.M. Prevos

Afterword: Downsizing America

161

George McKay

Notes Bibliography Index

166 174 188

Acknowledgments This book has its origins in a workshop 1 organized on popular culture at the 1994 European Association for American Studies Conference in Luxembourg. Thanks to Annick Capelle and Brian Scobie for contributions and thoughts from then. 1 am particularly indebted to EAAS itself for awarding a subvention to facilitate the publication of some of the material from that workshop. At the University of Central Lancashire I owe thanks to the Department of Cultural Studies and to library staff. 1 would like to thank Alan Rice for his very useful comments on drafts, Will Kaufman, Kay Boardman, Heidi Macpherson, and Daniel Lamont for support and an invaluable extended period of study leave. A special thanks to students on my modules American Popular Culture and American Popular Music for their enthusiasm and knowledge. At Sheffield Academic Press I owe thanks in particular to Eric Christianson, Ailsa Parkin and Jeremy Boucher. 1 owe other thanks to Maran McKay and Stello Tomasello, Emma McKay, Ross Dawson and to those who commented on papers I gave at the 1994 British Association for American Studies conference at Sheffield University, as a visiting lecturer at the University of Southern Maine in 1994, and at the 1995 Utopian Studies Society conference at the University of Central Lancashire. Finally, I wish to acknowledge that the illustration on page 59 is reproduced by kind permission of the Harvard Theatre Collection, The Houghton Library.

Notes on Contributors

John G. Blair has been Professor of American Literature and Civilization at the University of Geneva, Switzerland, since 1970. He is the author of three books: The Poetic Art of W. H. Auden (1965), The Confidence Man in Modern Fiction (1979) and Modular America: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Emergence of an American Way (1988), winner of the Ralph Henry Gabriel Prize for interdisciplinary American Studies. His current research emphasizes comparative culture studies.

Karin Blair, PhD, has lived in France, China, the USA, where she was born and Switzerland, where she teaches at the Ecole Superieure de Commerce de Malagnou. She has written articles taking a multicultural perspective on leisure, popular culture, women's studies and language teaching. She had edited and contributed to the volume, Art of Leisure: A Multi-Cultural Perspective. She is author of Meaning in Star Trek, Cubal Analysis: A Post-Sexist Model of the Psyche and Multicultural Awareness in t Language Classroom. She is co-author with Zhou Yi of two video tapes and two books on the Chinese discipline qigong and is currently pursuing a three-dimensional research project, supported by the UNESCO Silk Route Project, taking China, India and the West as key points of comparison.

John Dean is Maitres de Conferences at Universite Strasbourg II, France, where he is Professor of American Civilization and Mass Media Studies. American himself, he has nevertheless lived in Europe half his life, mainly in London, Munich and Paris. Why? He believes in Emerson's dictum, 'We go to Europe to be Americanized'; and, like Rick Blaine, 'I came to Casablanca for the waters.' Dean's most recent books have been Education in the United States (1990) American Popular Culture (1992) and European Readings of American Popular Culture (1996), and he is currently wrapping up The Diffusion of American Culture in Western Europe since W War Two. Yonka Krasteva is Professor in American Studies at the University of

Notes on Contributors

9

Veliko Turnovo, Bulgaria. In recent years she has published articles about the nature of postmodern warfare and the specifics of its representations in literary journals in the United States, Spain and Bulgaria, and has taken part in many international conferences with papers on the subject, and as a workshop organizer. She has been awarded two Fulbright Research Grants, a grant from the J.F. Kennedy Institute and a Research Grant from the ACLS. Her book, The West and the American Dream has been published recently by University of Veliko Turnovo Press. George McKay is Senior Lecturer in American Studies and English and Subject Leader in American Studies at the University of Central Lancashire, Preston, U.K. He is the author of Senseless Acts of Beauty: Cultures of Resistance since the Sixties (Verso, 1996), and editor of a forthcoming collection on the radical youth and protest of DiY Culture in Britain, also for Verso. He is Associate Editor of the British Association for American Studies Paperbacks series published by Keele University Press. Andre J. M. Prevos holds a PhD in American Studies from the University of Iowa and a doctorate in the study of North American civilization from the University of Paris, France. He is Associate Professor of French and Spanish on the Worthington Scranton Campus of The Pennsylvania State University, in Dunmore, Pennsylvania, USA. He has published articles on Franco-American relations, French popular music, Franco-American cultural relations and is a regular contributor to European blues magazines (Soul Bag in Paris and Solo Blues in Madrid). He is the translator, along with the author, of Robert Springer's Authentic Blues (Edwin Mellen Press, 1995). Ron Robin teaches American history and communication studies at the University of Haifa, Israel. He is a graduate of the Hebrew University, Jerusalem (BA), and the University of California, Berkeley (MA, PhD). His most recent books are: Enclaves of America: The Rhetoric of American Political Architecture Abroad (Princeton, 1992), and, The Barbed Wire College: Reeducating German POWs in the United States During World War II (Princeton,

1995). Mel van Elteren is Associate Professor of Cultural Sociology at Tilburg University, the Netherlands. He has a degree both in sociology and psychology. He has taught and published widely on the history and theory of the behavioural and social sciences, social history, American

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studies and cultural studies. Currently his main interests are the reception of American culture in Europe, and sociocultural comparisons between the USA and Western European societies. Dr van Elteren is board member of the Netherlands American Studies Association (NASA) and associate editor of The Social Change Report (editor Theodore Caplow), published by the Center for Middletown Studies, Ball State University, Muncie, Indiana, USA. Richard Walker was born in Manchester, England. He is a lecturer in the Department of Cultural Studies at the University of Central Lancashire where he teaches nineteeth-century literature and cultural theory. He is joint editor of a forthcoming collection called Inhuman Reflections: Thinking the Limits of the Human (Manchester University Press).

Introduction: Americanization and Popular Culture George McKay

I never felt so fervently thankful, so soothed, so tranquil, so filled with peace as I did yesterday when I learned that Michelangelo was dead. — Mark Twain, writing on a package tour of Europe in the 1860s (quoted in Hebdige 1988: 119) Interviewer: How did you find America? Ringo: We went to Greenland and made a left turn. — Ringo Starr, the Beatles, on a concert tour of America in the 1960s (quoted in Kelly 1994: 118)

There's a dual gaze going on here, stretching across an ocean and a century. Twain and Ringo, American and English: each treats the other with humour, deflates the other's country's importance, while making the effort to witness and experience it in the first place. Each takes the other's cultural form—Twain adopting the European form of the novel, Ringo the American form of rock and roll—and offers it back, differently, with an effort at relocating its narratives, at transforming them into some sort of an indigenous vernacular. Each localizes the other, around the Mississippi, around the Mersey Beat. The period stretching from Twain's 1860s to Ringo's 1960s contains a significant shift too, though. Twain looks to Europe, to its overwhelming high cultural tradition, Ringo is directed toward America and its overwhelmingly energetic popular culture production and consumption. Between Twain's and Ringo's

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remarks the relative sites of power between the two countries and continents have perhaps reversed: the 1860s shows America displaying a degree of cultural deference, possibly inferiority (even if couched in Twain's ironic stance), while a century later, Europe, via Ringo, acknowledges America's prominence as cultural and economic market. This is a book largely about America and Europe, America as represented in and constructed through its own popular culture, and as experienced and consumed by Europeans. It also makes some effort to consider the wider global context, with particular reference to Australia. Its opening premise is that the consumption of popular culture is our primary experience of the USA. Students make early contact with America via television, pop music, film, video, but these interests and influences tend to be overlooked or sidelined when they begin their American Studies degrees. If they are lucky they can return to them for the odd final-year module, when the popular culture text is treated as just another form of (literary or historical) narrative; if they are unlucky students may find that engagement with pop culture is entirely outside their American Studies programme, not even the b-side to the official single. I am assuming in this book that popular culture is worth studying, not least because of its near unavoidable presence and the subtle or obvious ideological positionings of its consumers, but also because of its energy, ingenuity, fun. Yankee Go Home (& Take Me With U) is located in that intriguing lacuna in which not only is American popular culture found but also its modes of influence and domination explored. It focuses on a range of moments and processes of 'Americanization' in popular culture, still an underdeveloped area for American Studies. (1 will consider below that one reason for this critical absence is precisely the discipline of American Studies' complicity in the process of Americanization: American Studies in Europe has its roots in a Cold War project as a deliberate governmental strategy of the United States. As with all ideological functioning, the gaps in the narrative signify, even conceal.1) There is a vibrant tradition of European travellers, writers, thinkers commenting on America, from which both America and Europe have taken their positive and negative images of each other and of themselves. In psychoanalytic terms, this is testament to the fascination with the Other of America which the Self of Europe has long held. European commentaries on America illustrate ways in which both Europe and

McKay, Americanization and Popular Culture

13

America have defined themselves in relation to the other, through duplication, assimilation or opposition. One of the most recent European critics to document his experiences and ideas of America is French postmodern theorist jean Baudrillard. He offers a dual gaze, explores the (anus perspective, the mirrored envy and reference, via his theoryby-cliche strategy. In his book America, Baudrillard describes that country, that 'world': It is a world completely rotten with wealth, power, senility, indifference, Puritanism and mental hygiene, poverty and waste, technological futility and aimless violence, and yet I cannot help but feel it has about it something of the dawning of the universe. Perhaps because the entire world continues to dream of New York, even as New York dominates and exploits it (1986:

23; emphasis added). There is a fairly standard millenarian angst here—Old/New World, 'the dawning of the universe'—but what interests me more is that the outsider's construction of America is actually an extraordinarily partial (if powerful) one: for Baudrillard here America is urban East Coast America, and that's all it is. This synecdoche is the case for Europeans in general too: in much the same way I use the term 'America' to refer only to the United States areas of the north part of the Americas. It would even seem to a large extent that Europeans ignore clear signifiers of regionalism in their consumption of popular culture: few entering a Kentucky Fried Chicken or Tex-Mex fast food outlet in Europe do so with awareness of the regional signification of their action. They are vaguely aware of America, not of the South or the South West rather than Baudrillard's New York, say. The point is that America exported does not equal America at

home: the discourses are predicated on misrepresentations and partialities. Looking at popular culture, Mel van Elteren also sees a very partial version of American practice being adopted or admired overseas: 'A significant part of the export hits of American culture drew its appeal from popular traditions which were, and are still marginalised or even considered "non-culture" by the cultural elites of the United States.' (van Elteren 1994: 7). The pleasure and popularity of blues music in America in the 1960s, for example, was given a real boost by the music being embraced (okay, and updated, deracinated) in Britain and by its popularity being exported back to America in the form of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. 2 More tellingly, the African-American blues-rock musician Jimi Hendrix, like earlier African-American jazz musicians, had

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Yankee Go Home (& Take Me Witft U)

to leave America in order for his 'low art' music, his 'non-culture' to be eventually accepted back home by van Elteren's cultural elites. Europeans understand and consume America as a grand narrative—of freedom, of Dream, of violence, even of obesity—yet they construct that grand narrative from fragments, mis-moments. Of course such a grand narrative of homogenization may not only be a result of European ignorance or lack of interest in the subtleties of American society and regions, but may also or instead be a result of mass culture. John Clarke explains that the arrival of a national mass culture embodied in the creation of mass media of entertainment (film and radio) and in the growth of systems of mass production, distribution and consumption ... undermined the collective practices and identities of class-ethnic cultures and created the overarching social identity of the American consumer (1991: 74). Clarke seems to be using the term 'Americanization' here to refer to the ways in which people of different class and ethnic backgrounds—immigrants, generally—become American in the USA. The defining feature of that (new) American identity is consumerism. One point I want to pursue below is the extent to which we can extend this argument out to suggest either that, in some ways, we are all American immigrants (we just haven't all got there yet), or that America's borders are so wide now they include us within them (the idea of the global as the American popular). As Rob Kroes notes, on one aspect of the European condition, '[w|e have acquired a set of cultural codes that allow us to understand American cultural products, to appreciate them, to consume them, as if we were Americans' (Kroes 1993: 312; emphasis added). Van Elteren goes further: 'To be or feel "American" no longer means either moving to the USA or sharing its consumer tastes' (1994: 212).3 Unpacking the dual gaze, Richard Pells offers two sets of binary oppositions to compare old world with new, as seen from each continent's perspective. Americans see the divide as this: 'American innocence, hope, optimism, freedom, opportunity, and modernity versus European decadence, decay, pessimism, social and ideological conflict, war'. Europeans reverse the polarity, so that 'America is seen as irredeemably avaricious, materialistic, frantic, violent, culturally sterile, standardised, vulgar, without spirit or soul—in vivid contrast to a refined, mature, sophisticated, socially conscious and responsible

McKay, Americanization and Popular Culture

15

European civilisation' (Pells 1993: 69). Dick Hebdige further dramatizes relations between America and Europe as constituting a 'taste war', between the Old and the New Worlds, between an America which, as Leslie Fiedler puts it, 'has had to be invented as well as discovered' and a Europe with its long literary and aesthetic traditions, its complex codings of class and status - between that is, two continents and a history, between two symbolic blocs: 'Europe' and 'America' (Hebdige 1988: 120). There is another, less narcissistic way of reading what 1 have been calling the dual gaze of Europe and America, one which seeks to widen the view out from the Western imperial consensus of these continents. Rob Kroes offers a succinct definition of Americanization as 1 have been touching on it so far. It is a word that 'normally serves in a discourse of rejection to point to the variety of processes through which America exerts its dismal influence on European cultures' (Kroes 1993: 303). Kroes here deliberately sketches a crude model of Americanization, which 'reduces the complex processes of cultural influence ... to the stark binary form': 'any degree of Americanisation implies an equal degree of de-Europeanisation' (Kroes 1993: 303). Yet Kroes is more concerned to construct a model of Americanization that moves beyond the simply dual or binary of Europe and America, old and new, self and other. He goes on to offer a more complex version of what he terms, rather than Americanization, 'cultural globalisation'. The perspective moves from a self-regarding and -maintaining binary model, in which America and Europe both fear and protect each other's past or present imperial and cultural authority, to a larger one which seeks to locate discourses of Americanization and related ones of imperial cultural power in a global context, outside the potentially restrictive binary framework. The remainder of this introduction involves exploring the issues and problems of Americanization, that generally negative discourse through which America threatens and invades our local cultures. If there is an emphasis on British-American cultural relations in it, this is partly a result of my own expertise and nationality, and partly in order to map out in more depth the sheer range and complexity of responses to American culture, and the ideological traces and nuances of taste of those responses. European and wider global concerns are taken up in the subsequent chapters.

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Yankee Go Home (& Take Me With U) Make it New

The Twentieth Century has become the American Century. — Gertrude Stein (1935: 490) This isn't quite the clarion call to modernity it may once have been,4 but nonetheless the American modernist writer Stein's famous maxim testifies to the conviction that America encompasses, embodies even, the modern, the new. 'Americanization and modernisation are frequently conflated, especially by Europeans', argues a European Americanist group in Holland (NIAS 1993: 322). Modernity and technology do interweave in America, or, more pertinently, in our images of America: in the early twentieth century, immigrants not only travel to America on steamboats and liners, but the appeal of America is advertised by shipping companies through poster images of huge ultra-modern ships. (Modernity is the destination, modernity the means of travel.) Later in the century, the design styles of streamlining on cars, trains and planes—and vacuum cleaners, cigarette lighters—will signify modernity and America; come the space age, rocket parts seem almost bolted on to cars to literally update, modernize them again. In science fiction, America is almost as important a location as outer space itself, with the result that it does not only represent or contain the modern and the new, but the future itself. (A slogan from the 1939 New York World's Fain Tomorrow—Now!') This science fiction future is most often dystopian: 'America as a warning (America's present will be Britain's [Europe's] future) becomes a standard trope in the rhetoric of Americanisation' (Webster 1988: 180). Technology and the cultural imagery of technology have largely come to dominate our iconography of (American) modernity. According to Richard Pells, 'the European lament' about the irresistible rise of America masked a generational conflict, the parental fear of losing control over children and adolescents. It reflected as well a general discomfort with the technological advance, urban sophistication, and physical mobility, trends that in the postwar years appeared less the consequence of American policies or American popular culture than a result of the overall modernisation of daily life in the West (1993: 69). There are two points of interest here. First, the new is connected to youth, to each 'new generation with a new explanation', as Scott

McKay, Americanization and Popular Culture

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McKenzie sang in 1967's 'San Francisco'. Since Marlon Brando and James Dean in the 1950s, America has been associated with, or represented through, youth, right up to Nirvana's 'teen spirit' in the 1990s. For some critics America not only is young but more intriguingly it connotes youth. This is expanded on by Michael Sturma, writing of the effects of rock and roll in Australia in the 1950s: Teenage bodies also offered a metaphor for Americanisation ... Images of teenagers driven toward disorder by American music, in part symbolised broader fears about Americanisation (Sturma 1992: 129). Second, Pells suggests that recent social and cultural change is less a result of Americanization than of a more general 'modernisation of daily life in the West'. 1 explore this point in more depth below, in relation to the development of mass culture. Either way, there is a sense that European modernity is somehow a secondhand or inferior one, an idea captured by Baudrillard when he writes that 'America is the original version of modernity. We are the dubbed or subtitled version' (Baudrillard 1986: 76). The postmodern problematizing of the real, the original, is looked at below with reference to the cultural politics of Disney and to critical interpretations of Disney. The poet Ezra Pound's call from The Cantos for the continuing revival of literature, 'MAKE IT NEW', can be read as a seductive grand narrative of the American cultural project too (Pound 1975: 157). We can view America as the new, as source of the new. D.H. Lawrence wrote in 1924 that '|ajll this Americanising and mechanising has been for the purpose of overthrowing the past' (1924: 21). A rhetoric of newness can be identified that threads through America's images and reinventions of itself, from de Crevecouer's 'American, this new man' of the eighteenth century right up to the New Age of Aquarius in the 1960s and 1990s. If we read America as locus of the new, the modern, does it follow that Americanization is fundamentally simply another word for change, a process taking place globally? Already it seems as though it is not so much cultural change or transformation that is at issue with Americanization and popular culture, but something more subtle or complex, cultural appropriation and reinscription perhaps. It is possible critically to construct a model of mass culture, if not of popular culture in general, via its newness. As greater study has been made of the operations of popular culture through the twentieth century,

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Yankee Go Home (& Take Me With U)

so new and alternative theoretical models have been developed. I want to consider two approaches, those under the rival terms mass culture and popular culture.5 Before doing so, it is important to recall that the focus of this collection is the workings of America in relation to the consumption of, and the production of meaning from, popular cultural texts, the bombardment of Europe by American popular culture. (Bombardment? Other metaphors are, in descending order of paranoia: invasion, collision, creolization, influence, borrowing, appropriation .. .6) It does not directly deal with, say, important political or economic interventions by the USA into the lives of Europe—such as GIs during military intervention in World War Two, the economic aid of the Marshall Plan, or even the rhetoric of the Cold War. Such interventions appear largely as background, as contextualization, for the cultural texts themselves. Focusing on aspects of popular culture permits analysis of ways in which it functions at a local, even autonomous level where negotiation and resistance are operating. However, use of the term mass culture invites more of an overview, locating discussion more specifically in the culture industries themselves. Such a macro-perspective takes into account issues of capital, of industrial development and organization (even where the industry is, say, Hollywood, or pop music). In general, mass culture has been the term preferred by American critics and Americanists, because of historic America's mass status: its geographical expansion, its multicultural roots, the related developments of mass communications (telegraph), and transport technologies (railroad), and of mass cultural institutions. During the last third, of the 19th century a series of interlocking cultural institutions, including wild west shows, world's fairs, dime novels, sentimental fiction, circuses and amusement parks, produced a relatively homogeneous mass culture that valued entertainment, leisure, and unpretentiousness that many Europeans found congenial' (NIAS 1993: 324; emphasis original). These mass elements formed a solid foundation for greater developments in the twentieth century, when mass culture is increasingly a product of mass industrialization and of technological developments and the rationalization or routinization of the workplace and the domestic sphere. Jim Collins addresses limitations in the mass culture approach, in particular that there is a marked degree of pessimism inscribed within

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it. It is a model that constructs popular culture negatively: 'popular culture itself is so contaminated by mechanisation and commodification that it cannot be seen as a genuine expression of anything other than the corporations that standardize it for their own ends' (Collins 1989: 7). Citing the 1940s work of Europeans Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer on 'the culture industry', that is, on the production of formulaic popular culture in America and its operations to standardise, limit, erase any individual pleasure or response, Collins writes that 'the most extreme ramification of this position is their absolute denial of style in such a culture, particularly in relation to Hollywood films, jazz music, etc' (Collins 1989: 9). Note that here are European critics able to flee Nazi persecution and relocate to the United States, offering approaches to American pop culture in America that echo the concerns of other critics of Americanization in Europe. The danger of the mass culture model, whether an explicitly Adorno-influenced one or not, is then that it has an implicit conservative ideology. Even the word 'mass' may suggest something we need protection from, and it may follow that, as Collins explains, 'the role of the cultural critics is essentially an evaluative one in which the criteria for authentic art must be defined and defended against the onslaught of mass culture' (1989: 8). Further, the approach is patronizing to its audience, which is understood as 'merely a mass, identical as the texts it consumes' (Collins 1989: 8). While the model for the dystopian blueprint of Adorno and Horkheimer's mass culture is Nazi Germany, the rhetoric and fear behind it not only relates to America itself but also can be transferred to the negative discourse of Americanization. John Storey explains that for some cultural critics 'mass culture is not just an imposed and impoverished culture, it is in a clear identifiable sense an imported American culture'. He goes on to explain that mass culture can be read in two main political ways: 'there are political left and political right versions of the argument. What is under threat is either the traditional values of high culture, or the traditional way of life of a "tempted" working class (Storey 1993: 10-11)'. The model of popular culture, on the other hand, can be less restrictive and pessimistic in its consideration of the liberatory or expressive potential of the form. The model of popular culture is as concerned with the possibility of resistance as with the certainty of standardization. Following the work of Italian Marxist cultural theorist Antonio Gramsci, lohn Storey explains that popular culture

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can be viewed as 'a site of struggle between the forces of resistance of subordinate groups in society, and the forces of incorporation of dominant groups in society' (Storey 1993: 13). This is a line also taken by John Fiske, who argues that 'Popular culture always is part of power relations; it always bears traces of the constant struggle between domination and subordination, between power and various forms of resistance to it or evasions of it (Fiske 1989: 19)'. Mass culture is constructed as a form of socialization, even, in the most extreme and pessimistic versions, as a tool of ideological conditioning. In Adorno's analysis of 1930s popular music, for instance, listeners consume 32-bar structures, or four beats to the bar rhythms, or melodies which stay within a clearly limited harmonic range, and the on-going effect of this is that we as listeners are produced by the music as similarly standardized. In Fiske's reading, however, popular culture also and always is a site of negotiation of roles and power. Thus, in music terms, we might look at ways in which subcultures offer youth the possibility of a resistant identity, one at odds with the expectations of majority culture, or at the connections between sexuality, pleasure and transgression in recent dance music. These are politically very different ways of reading the largely twentieth-century phenomenon of the pop music industry. In turn of course they may require modification, since in postmodern times 'all culture is commercial culture' (Storey 1993: 15), making distinction between high and low, dominant and resistant, altogether more awkward. The newer positions of postmodern culture stress its availability and multiplicity, as Dick Hebdige observes: 'In the West popular culture no longer is marginal, still less subterranean. Most of the time and for most of the people it simply is culture' (quoted in Storey 1993: 18; emphasis original). Theories and definitions of popular culture, and the ideological assumptions inscribed within those theories, need then to be considered within the context of Americanization, since the worldwide presence and acceptance of American popular culture, via global developments in capital and technology, is a dominant and relatively new phenomenon. A reductive mass cultural analysis might suggest cultural imperialism at work, whereas a popular cultural analysis would be as concerned with ways in which the consumption of American popular culture might function as a positive, maybe liberatory discourse. Those two poles—Americanization as imperialism or liberation—are

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effectively the concern of most of the rest of this introduction, with a little postmodern blurring of the edges. Cultural Imperialism The most extreme negative stance to the influence and experience of American popular culture overseas is that under the term cultural imperialism. Imperialism is a capitalist operation normally referring to the acquisition and control of extrinsic territories by a nation-state through economic and if necessary military means—African lands by European countries in the nineteenth century, east European states by the Soviet Union in the twentieth, for instance. The term has been more widely used since to include economic dependency rather than overt control, and domination by cultural influence.7 In the imperialist rhetoric the role of culture can be to transmit positive images of America in order to ideologically position audiences to be sympathetic to the United States. More analytically, American popular culture has inscribed within it either overtly or covertly ideological assumptions that foreign consumers internalize consciously or unconsciously. More conspiratorially still, culture is explicitly co-opted for political or social purposes overseas. These different approaches, gradations of active involvement, indicate that implicit in the term is a degree of awareness of the aims of the cultural project by the imperialist nation. John Tomlinson's book Cultural Imperialism recaps some of the complexities of the apparently fairly straightforward situation we have considered so far. |T|ake the obvious example of the arch-imperialist, the United States. Granted, the States are not as united in cultural terms as they advertise themselves: the famous 'melting pot' has not formed a homogeneous nation out of the world's huddled masses. This does not prevent us from identifying 'the American way' as a hegemonic culture (or at least one aspiring to hegemony) within the contested terrain of United States culture. It is clear that, for example, black, Hispanic or American Indian cultures are in real senses dominated by a mainstream white American culture. It is reasonable to think of this 'hegemonic' culture, this dominant 'version' of America, as that exported by corporate capitalism, such that this will appear to other nationalities as American culture pure and simple. The slogan, 'Yankees go home' recognises no subtleties of cultural variation in the Yankees. What it recognises are the bearers of cultural practices which are dominant at home and abroad: dollar power

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and its manifestation in cultural goods; Madonna and McDonald's (Tomlinson 1991: 75). In spite of what I earlier identified as the misrepresentation, the partial version of America being experienced by overseas consumers of popular culture, Tomlinson has a point when he argues that we can reasonably speak of a hegemonic American national culture as experienced from the outside. This experience may relate to certain symbolic materials: denim, celluloid (at one time, chromium), and symbolic forms and dimensions: high-rise buildings, multi-lane highways, shopping malls (at one time, 'streamlining') (1991: 75). There is a need to distinguish between a real and a mythical (in Roland Barthes's sense of the word) America: 'such aspects of perceived American culture may be distinguished from a more complex "reality" in which the symbolic images exist in a contested or contradictory form, or at least alongside other "versions" of American culture' (Tomlinson 1991: 75; emphasis original). Their mythic status should not exclude their power. Indeed, for Barthes myth is precisely a strategy for concealing power, for masking ideology at work in popular culture. While Barthes's groundbreaking analyses of popular cultural texts laid bare the 'mystification which transforms petit-bourgeois culture into a universal nature' (1957: 9; emphasis added), the relevant critic here would analyse it to lay bare the mystification that transforms American popular culture into a universal or imperialist narrative. Just such a transformation is what is claimed, indeed lauded, by the headline of a 1996 newspaper advertisement for trainee managers by McDonald's fast food chain in Britain. In large letters the advert informs the reader that 'The price of a Big Mac is used by The Economist as an index for comparing the relative value of world currencies.' McDonald's is appealing to business graduates in a language they will understand, that of finance, and by association with a magazine like The Economist; it is claiming a universal importance that supersedes that of any local context, even to the extent of proudly erasing national financial systems; as a triumph of capital in popular culture it presents itself as a replacement currency - where once there were conch shells for trading now it seems there are Big Macs. Even if we've seen Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction and are aware of the differences in names and accompanying relishes between burgers in America and Europe, this advert presents

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the globalization of America as a success story to be celebrated, to aspire to be a part of. The rise of fast food outlets in America in the years following World War Two is evidenced by the McDonald's, Burger King, Pizza Hut chains, as a response to suburbanization and the car economy. In the 1960s, '|prompted—or, in some cases, forced—by political and economic developments or general disillusionment, Americans of all sorts, even entire organisations, hit the road ... All of this movement was what fast food chains were made for' (Helmer 1992: 89). According to George Ritzer a social process called McDonaldization, 'the process by which the principles of the fast-food restaurant are coming to dominate more and more sectors of American society as well as of the rest of the world', is taking place (Ritzer 1996: 1). McDonaldization is a very specific cultural form of rationalization, and Ritzer identifies four key constituents: efficiency, calculability, predictability and control. The rational ordering of workplace and of pleasure zone, creating the 'fast-food factory' (Ritzer 1996: 30), are themselves developments of scientific management from F.W. Taylor and assembly line production from Henry Ford. McDonald's main management-training, facility in America is Hamburger University, near Chicago, where managers internalize the ideology and modes of production to such an extent that the compliment to good managers is that they have 'ketchup in their veins' (Leidner 1993: 54). To what extent is McDonaldization a form of Americanization? Ritzer's dehumanizing global 'iron cage of McDonaldisation' is criticized by van Elteren as tending 'to overemphasise cultural unification and rational control in the modern world' (1994: 2), and yet in the mid-1990s in Britain an extremely lengthy court case was fought out between McDonald's lawyers and two London Greenpeace environmental campaigners. The McLibel case can be seen as local resistance to American cultural imperialism or at least dominance, or, less extreme, as a symptom of the resentment produced by McDonald's continuing effort to present itself globally.8 An advertising campaign in the early 1990s, for instance, sought baldly to undercut the cultural richness and diversity of London: in the Underground stations of London there hang huge posters depicting a dozen of the city's most famous sights and giving the distance of each from the nearest McDonald's ... 'So what's the big attraction?' the headline asks, while the tag assures us that 'From Trafalgar Square to Chinatown, you're only minutes away from McDonald's' (Helmer 1992: 96).

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Cultural imperialism must deal with the reception of cultural texts in those countries subject to 'coca-colonisation', as Tomlinson notes. 9 A text may bear traces of imperialist ideology, even unconsciously so, but cultural imperialism can only be said to be occurring when that text is being consumed in the colonised space itself. 'Any advance in this approach to cultural imperialism is dependent on an analysis of the relationship between text and audience', he writes (Tomlinson

1991: 44; emphasis original). This is the point of Tomlinson's criticism of Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart's key text in the popular culture field, How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic.

This deeply politicized study was written in Chile in 1971, under the short-lived democratically elected revolutionary government of Salvadore Allende. Besides a predictable hostility towards Marxists (even democratically elected ones), the USA was outraged by President Allende's extension of the nationalization of copper mines partly owned by subsidiaries of US companies, without compensation. The coup of 1973 saw Allende's assassination and heralded the long-lasting military dictatorship of General Pinochet; the destabilization of Chile was, of course, one of the 'covert actions' of the American Central Intelligence Agency. This was predicated in part on the mentality of the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 on American foreign policy, which, among other things, sought to justify US intervention as and when necessary throughout North and South America. In the Chilean context of this maelstrom of revolution, democracy, imperialist intrusion and military dictatorship, Dorfman and Mattelart's project is more clearly locatable. Tomlinson explains the simple argument of their study: rather than childlike narratives and images of anthropomorphized animals that innocently appeal to youth and adult readerships, Disney comics 'are about the capitalist-imperialist world-view implicit in the narrative' (1991:43). Dorfman and Mattelart reveal a catalogue of ideological themes in the comics: an obsession with money and a 'compulsive consumerism'; the constant reference to the 'exotic' (that is, Third World) lands as the source of wealth 'there for the taking' by adventurers from the West; the depiction of Third World nations in terms of racial and cultural stereotypes (and in particular the 'infantilisation' of the people of these countries); the presentation of capitalist class relations as natural, unchangeable and morally justified; direct anti-communist and anti-

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revolutionary propaganda; the representation of women in stereotypically subordinate terms, and so on (Tomlinson 1991: 42). In Dorfman and Mattelart's own words, '[t)he imaginative world of the child has become the political Utopia of a social class' (1971: 59). A more recent, less obviously politicized analysis of American export rhetoric—the construction of the ideal worlds of Waltopia in America and around the globe—is offered by Stephen F. Mills. He looks at a contemporary manifestation of what Dorfman and Mattelart might consider as Disneyfication-as-American-cultural-imperialism: the EuroDisney theme park in France. Mills identifies the Europeanization of fantasy America at Euro-Disney, which is either a display of some of the inner contradictions of American cultural imperialism or further evidence of its sophisticated masking of ideological operation. The logo of Euro-Disney is the chateau, while Discoveryland presents a future as envisaged by Leonardo da Vinci, Jules Verne and H. G. Wells (Italian, French and British respectively). And never forget Euro-Disney is just 'like getting back to one's roots', for didn't the founder's family originally come from Normandy (D'Isngny became Disney)? (Mills 1993: 99-100) Of course, the very name Euro-Disney, with its hyphen that both divides and connects, signals its ambivalent status. Maybe the inclusion of European referents in an all-American product indicates both crosscultural complexity and negotiation and the way in which power can function through apparent negotiation. The socio-economic context in 1990s France is radically less extreme than that in Chile in the early 1970s, the critical responses correspondingly less strident—even while, interestingly, the degree of cultural imposition may be all the greater at Euro-Disney. After all, here is French land, territory within the national borders of the country, claimed and reinscribed as American, a cultural version of a USAF airbase in Europe (military), or of an American embassy (political). Looking slightly further back to the postwar period of superpower tensions and rivalries known as the Cold War (around 1946-1989) opens up for consideration a critical era of political and cultural activity, one which largely revolved around the protection and extension of spheres of influence by capitalist and communist empires. The Cold War was described by one CIA official as a war 'fought with ideas instead of

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bombs'—hence cultural operations like the Congress for Cultural Freedom and the British-based intellectual journal Encounter, covertly funded by the CIA (quoted in Tallack 1991: 198). Duncan Webster observes that 'the discourses of "Americanization" and of criticism of US foreign policy are deeply entwined' (1988: 240). The Marshall Plan of postwar financial aid for reconstruction in Europe was passed in 1948, and amounted to $12.5 billion worth of aid. Its roots were in President Truman's request for aid for Greece and Turkey in order to help those countries resist Communist pressures. So, even though Marshall aid was offered to the Soviet Union (which refused it), it still became and was in part intended as a response to postwar antagonisms with Russia, and fed into the Cold War. Of course the immediate postwar period was a time of intense official intervention in the cultural realm at home too, notably by Senator Joe McCarthy. Beginning with the Hollywood Ten—the number of scriptwriters and other film workers persecuted and imprisoned for defiance of the House Un-American Activities Committee's investigation of alleged communist infiltration of the film industry—the late 1940s and 1950s is a high point of state paranoia. What became known as McCarthyism is as a powerful signal of the sheer importance of popular culture in America, more specifically its importance in international relations and global ideological struggles. Other culture also came under attack at home during the Cold War. Douglas Tallack notes that, in the universities, the American Committee on Academic Freedom was busy rooting out communists. And not just the academics, but the books they taught, too. 'Disturbed by the image of America to be found in William Faulkner or Sinclair Lewis, (one member] recommended that writers should stress the positive and not the negative side of American life so as to combat Soviet propaganda' (Tallack 1991: 195). Americanization through culture can be seen as part of the Cold War project, just as the space race was a spectacle of national propaganda between the USA and the USSR. It can also be seen as a residual narrative of the Cold War (consider anything from the high culture of Abstract Expressionism, that radical form of art the touring exhibitions of which were secretly subsidised by the CIA,10 to satellite MTV beaming free of charge to Eastern European countries in the 1990s). Hugh Wilford identifies a 'Cultural Cold War', observing that one of its significant strategies was that 'American "high" culture was emphasised at the

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expense of American popular culture' (Wilford 1994: 315). Culture in America is a field of ideological struggle; it is not unreasonable to assume that the cultures of Americanization need ideological unpacking too. Yet Wilford notes of the Cultural Cold War that it is ironic that whereas many European intellectuals in this period perceived American popular culture as an invading, colonising force within their countries, it was in fact an American high culture that was being deployed in a deliberate political intervention. If the US was guilty of any sort of cultural imperialism in postwar Europe, it was high cultural* imperialism (Wilford 1994: 319; emphasis original). Effectively, in American-funded propagandist cultural publications like Encounter and Perspectives there was a 'ban on discussion of popular culture' (Wilford 1994: 320)—editorial apologists for America going so far here as to reinforce European prejudices against American popular culture. There appear to be two competing strands of Americanization at work here, one of which comfortably taps into local anxieties around the other: popular culture as Americanization is viewed as distastefully by Cultural Cold Warriors as it is by European elite audiences, even as those same Warriors seek to Americanize those same European audiences via the attractions of American high culture. Earlier official government efforts were themselves responses to European success in overseas influence, which again challenges any monolithic version of domination, let alone imperialism. At the end of the 1930s, writes Richard Pells, 'inspired by the fear of German and Italian

influence in Latin America, Washington launched a series of cultural programmes designed to cement Franklin Roosevelt's "good neighbour policy'" (1993: 71; emphasis added). Pells details the hegemonic efforts to further the American project in Europe in the postwar period, including the emergence of the Fulbright programme and the United States Information Agency, the significance of the Congress for Cultural Freedom and annual international conferences like the Salzburg Seminar, the creation of American Studies departments in European universities, the impact of Amerika houses in Austria and Germany, and the effects all of these had on American and European scholars and intellectuals. These initiatives helped create sympathetic constituencies in postwar Europe, particularly among elite audiences in government, the media, and the academic world (Pells 1993: 68).

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While trying to remain conscious of the dangers of what David Forgacs describes as 'an overfunctionalist view of the relation between culture and political interests' (1993: 161), there are two cultural products of the Cold War I want briefly to consider in greater detail in order to interrogate the functions of that relation. These are the architecture of American embassies and the academic discipline of American Studies itself. In an effort to connect culture and politics in a more functionalist way, Ron Robin has written of the architecture and construction of American embassies as 'icons of imperialism': 'the intensive construction of US embassies in the aftermath of the Second World War should be approached as an architecture of imperialism. Rather than merely announcing the coming of age of a new power, this array of American symbols abroad was intrusive, and mostly anti-nationalist' (Robin 1993: 23). The early postwar building style America chose to represent itself with was avowedly modern, in the International Style, drawing attention to an energetic American culture 'unshackled by the past', redolent of 'the citadels of big business' (1993: 25). There followed a change of direction, where a new monumental style had somehow to be fitted more into the local context, paying attention (or lip service) to indigenous styles—so Grosvenor Square in London sought to combine neo-Georgian touches with a display of American design ingenuity—but the result was that the building was 'a monument to the power of progress and the eclipse of tradition' (1993: 29). The authority and exceptionalism (their degree of difference to their surroundings or local styles) of embassy buildings were significant not least because an 'encounter with the fagade of these American institutions ... was bound to be practically the only time that most people would ever confront any representation of the United States' (1993: 24; emphasis added). It would appear that 'icons of imperialism' here signify both America and the outsider's (that is, most citizens of the countries the buildings are sited in) exclusion from America. Robin offers as further evidence of the recognition of the imperial intent of these buildings the fact that, in the 1960s, majestic style and condescending symbolism served as catalysts for the many violent attacks on diplomatic edifices throughout the world. During a five-month period, from October 1964 to March 1965, twenty-five American embassies and consulates were attacked; the overwhelming majority of these diplomatic outposts had been constructed in the late 1950s and

McKay, Americanization and Popular Culture

early quite tures 1993:

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1960s ... [Within a few years) the State Department had shifted dramatically to a new inconspicuous architecture of simple strucand compounds tucked away behind impenetrable walls. (Robin 32)

With a book such as Yankee Go Home (& Take Me Witft U), which aims to explore issues and contradictions within American popular culture abroad, it is at least unwise and at most impossible to avoid discussing the role of one of the academic disciplines we find ourselves in. Any discussion of Americanization, whether in popular culture or in the teaching of popular culture, must engage with the fact that American Studies as a university discipline is itself complicit in the project. The striking thing for me has been the frequency with which discussions of Americanization by Americanists have bypassed the role of their own and their students' discipline, job, career and study area. This is not to say that we need in these postmodern times always to indicate a degree of self-reflexivity in analysis (though we may need to do this) but simply that American Studies bears its own ideological assumptions and historical origins that we need to uncover. American Studies as a discipline in the USA is itself only fifty years old, launched on a wave of optimism and pride at the end of World War Two; its European roots are in postwar context leading up to the early Cold War. Richard Pells describes the Fulbright programme of academic exchanges, set up in 1946, as 'a sort of cultural Marshall Plan for the intellectual reconstruction of the West' (1993: 74). The United States Information Service today encourages a similar approach in the former communist states of Eastern Europe. Patrick Brantlinger's book Crusoe's Footprints, the subtitle of which illustrates its combination of concerns, Cultural Studies in Britain and America, offers a comparative analysis of the development of Cultural Studies as an academic discipline in Britain and the USA. For Brantlinger, Cultural Studies in the USA has largely meant the interdisciplinary subject of American Studies, recently updated to embrace issues of gender and race, and class to some extent. Here the influence of British Cultural Studies is seen, with its concerns around a clearly left-wing critical agenda. Cultural Studies reads class, pleasure, power and subjectivity in ideological terms, and seeks to locate these in a wide range of cultural and social texts (anything from the beach to the car, the poem to the punk) (see Brantlinger 1990; Storey 1993 on culturalism). This is what Raymond Williams called 'cultural materi-

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alism': 'the analysis of all forms of signification ... within the actual means and conditions of their production' (quoted in Brantlinger 1990: 17). Brantlinger's construction of a Cultural Studies-tinged American Studies discipline (and vice versa) more recently on offer in US universities may or may not be valid. However, my point here is that the ideological basis for American Studies as a discipline outside the USA is altogether more problematic. Brantlinger does go on to explore, quoting Henry Giroux, 'American Studies as a cautionary example' of interdisciplinary studies which tries to be 'counterdisciplinary', that is, politically radical. He takes issue with 'the American rhetoric of unifying the plural and harmonising differences' (1990: 27) which American Studies in the USA has uncritically repeated in the past. This produced, at least in its early days, a discipline 'less oppositional or critical than nationalist and celebratory—an academic cultural chauvinism' (1990: 27). He does not ask, let alone answer, the vital question here: what happens when a discipline that has uncritically encapsulated 'cultural chauvinism' is exported? And then the questions begin to roll. Is its chauvinistic authority doubled by virtue of being an export rhetoric? With whom does the responsibility lie for unpacking it—American academics themselves, or those teaching the subject in overseas countries; European Americanists, for instance? How far has the 'cultural chauvinism' of American Studies actually been unpacked outside the USA? Is it the case that American Studies in Europe simply repeats this 'cultural chauvinism' via implicit assumptions of American exceptionalism? Finally, did (does?) American Studies in Europe exist solely or primarily in order to maintain American cultural, economic—even, let's go for it, imperial—hegemony? Pells writes of the consensus of the discipline of American Studies in the 1950s: European academics tended to reproduce rather than question notions about America's 'exceptionalism' and uniqueness, and to duplicate the search for a distinctive American identity ... the American Studies movement in Europe was a crucial vehicle for the cultural diplomacy of the United States throughout the postwar era (1993: 76-77). I think the assumption here is clear: American Studies since the 1950s has become a muchvmore sophisticated, self-reflexive and critical academic discipline. Really? If 1 can anticipate my discussion of reasons for the popularity of American popular culture a little, it is worth here mentioning that its energy and attraction is captured by Dick Hebdige,

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who is also keen to emphasize the sheer diversity of local appropriations of it: American popular culture—Hollywood films, advertising images, packaging, clothes and music—offers a rich iconography, a set of symbols, objects and artefacts which can be assembled and re-assembled by different groups in a literally limitless number of combinations. And the meaning of each selection is transformed as individual objects—jeans, rock records, Tony Curtis hairstyles, bobby socks etc.—are taken out of their original historical and cultural contexts and juxtaposed against other signs from other sources (Hebdige 1988: 74). Yet does Hebdige betray a reluctance to uncover the traces of American power in all these cultural assemblies and appropriations he is celebrating? Or is there even a reluctance to suggest that there may indeed be relations of power between cultural practice (even where cultural forms might be apparently subverted by the liberatory strategy of bricolage offered by Hebdige here) and a military/social/political hegemony? It is this aporia that concerns me, this moment of blindness in the light. A British academic working in American academe in part on the strength of his seminal work on British punk subculture, has Hebdige been seduced by American cultural affluence? Where is the basic awareness of the traces of capital, of ideology, of domination, of commodification, in this analysis? Is it the case that, with American Studies as a discipline in general, the closer British academics get to America the less critical their edge becomes? At least Hebdige is open about this, as he explains-. 'Like so many arts and social science graduates educated in the late 1960s and 1970s, I have tried to escape the English tradition, to find my own "elsewhere", to stage-manage my own symbolic defection' (1988: 11). Must the embracing of 'elsewhere' be accompanied by a jettisoning, or at least refocusing, of the political in criticism? Dutch academic Mel van Elteren's work on Americanization also betrays a degree of (potentially) uncritical idealization of America: 'America shows in perfect forms all those tendencies which could never fully develop in Europe' (van Elteren 1994: 18; emphasis added). In his contribution to this book, American Americanist John Dean writes of Americans as the 'wealthy winners ... at the helm of western civilisation'. The danger of course is that Americanist criticism becomes hagiology, or that, forty years on, in spite of what Pells implies above, American Studies can still repeat narratives of exceptionalism.

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The development of a global perspective is linked with popular culture by Simon During when he writes that 'Disneyland, Teenage Ninja Turtles, Michael Jackson, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and even Bart Simpson, like Coke, McDonald's, and Sony Walkmans, belong to the global popular' (During 1993: 22). John Tomlinson would prefer to keep these processes apart: for him, there are two ways of reading cultural imperialism. First is the familiar 'discourse conducted around the binary opposition of "us and them" ... the discourse of Americanization and so on'. Second is the idea of 'the broader discourse of cultural imperialism as the spread of the culture of modernity itself. This is a discourse of historical change, of "development", of a global movement towards, among other things, an everyday life governed by the habitual routing of commodity capitalism' (1991: 90; emphasis original).11 What During allows us to do is to remind ourselves of the rather obvious point that there may well be some large degree of imbrication between the American and the global, which Tomlinson seems to overlook. The British cultural critic Stuart Hall has succinctly defined the condition of postmodernity as 'the way the world has dreamed itself American' (quoted in Brooker 1992: 24). There is a fundamental problem with a call to culture such as that offered by Richard Pells in his analysis of Americanization, in which his aim is to lay 'the foundations for a genuinely international culture in the future' (1993: 68). Doesn't 'international' really mean American? Not necessarily, argues Pells—and possibly only to Europeans anyway. 'It is the collision between an emerging international culture often ascribed by Europeans to the impact of "Americanization", and the continuing efforts of national cultures within Europe to resist the pressures of assimilation and homogeneity, that I most want to explore' (Pells 1993: 68). Ten Little Englanders Yet in debates about cultural imperialism, whose empire are we really talking about? There is a reverse angle to the reading given above, of the discourse of Americanization as strands of American cultural imperialism, which suggests that Americanization is much more concerned with European authority and cultural hegemony. More specifically, it is concerned with the absence or at least attenuation of European cultural authority. From this perspective Americanization is less an expression of American cultural empire than a sign of, say, Britain's

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sense of loss of empire in the same period. Duncan Webster notes that 'the discourse of Americanization is shadowed and generated by an unquestioned ideology of Englishness' (1988: 195). This statement requires qualification: accusations of Americanization may not only betray one's own 'unquestioned' sense of natural superiority-—something, as a Scot, 1 have always thought the English were rather good at—but may also conceal the fact that, as David Forgacs suggests, 'Americanization is, in part at least, a symptom of anxieties about one's own national identity' (Forgacs 1993: 158; emphasis added). From this perspective Americanization is generated by a questioning, a crisis, in the ideology of Englishness. It is perhaps more a signifier of one's own culture's place in the world rather than of American culture's. In effect, we project our own fears and weaknesses, and our cultural nostalgia, on to America, and by doing so we construct it as the root of our problem. We preserve our (invented) past by lamenting its passing, and by blaming America for the change. In this reading, the idea of America as icon of modernity, of the new, which I discussed earlier, emphasizes not the energy, confidence and vitality of American popular culture but the retrogressive, even terminal, state of decline of the European. If America has a culture industry, Europe has only a heritage industry. Webster identifies this characteristic as one of long standing: 'Americaas-threat goes back to the mid-nineteenth century and the reason that Americanization is 'absorbed' into the Culture and Society tradition [of Victorian and later cultural criticism] is because that is where the term came from' (Webster 1988: 183). The negative discourse of Americanization is recast as anti-Americanism: 'the unspoken "little Englander" assumptions that anti-Americanism is intimately bound up with' (Webster 1988: 213) clearly voice critical concerns from within the supposedly colonized culture itself. For instance, Hebdige uncovers a common set of 'ideologically charged connotational codes' that is understood and agreed on by an extraordinary range of groups and individuals from the 1930s to the 1950s. This gives some sense of the loaded nature of class and cultural antagonism towards American popular culture in Britain at the time: Groups and individuals as apparently unrelated as the British Modern Design establishment, BBC staff members, Picture Post and music paper journalists, critical sociologists, 'independent' cultural critics like (George) Orwell and (Richard) Hoggart, a Frankfurt-trained marxist like (Herbert)

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Marcuse, even an obsessive isolationist like Evelyn Waugh, all had access to these codes (Hebdige 1988: 71). Not only had they access, but all those named by Hebdige here sought to maintain the ideological charge of 'America-as-threat\ a charge whose purpose was—from left and right critics, from high and low culture institutions alike—to preserve Anglo-European cultural authority. Webster swiftly cuts through the concealment of a British cultural establishment seeking to resist domination by Americanization; for him, the invention of coca-colonisation has its own political agenda: Where people do feel 'colonised' in Britain is by the British state in Northern Ireland, Scotland, or Wales, and where they feel humiliatingly dependent seems more likely to be in Housing Benefit Offices, in DHSS queues, on hospital waiting lists, on Youth Training Schemes, in the cracks of a declining and undemocratic Welfare State rather than in a queue at McDonald's or Kentucky Fried Chicken. 'Americanisation' is systematically blind to these crises within the British state, for that is precisely its effect, to displace analysis from British decline on to threats to sovereignty and culture (1988: 215). Anti-Americanism in British culture is not the preserve of the establishment though. One feature of the punk rock scene in Britain in the late 1970s was an antagonistic attitude towards contemporary American youth culture. One of the most virulent anti-American punk tracts is Julie Burchill and Tony Parsons's The Boy Looked at ]ohnny from 1978: No American new wave band likes another—but they all have clean butts and a nasty taste in their mouths. For a relatively young nation, the USA is remarkably slow when it comes to tapping talent—even though sucking the cents out of every available European culture is the national pastime. Why, even France caught on to punk rock quicker! [Readers of American Punk magazine are| sycophantically fanning over the grossest old repented hippy masquerading as a wrinkled punk (Burchill and Parsons 1978: 59). The national debate in youth culture is again played out in terms of youth, but here it is America that is cast by Burchill and Parsons as the old, the 'wrinkled'. The use of American terms like 'butts' and 'cents' does little to hide the Little Englanderism of 'even France'. Elsewhere Duncan Webster is altogether more explicit on the correspondence

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between a discourse of anti-Americanism and one of a reactionary local politics: the French National Front MP, Claude Autant-Lara, known for his antisemitism, opens the European Parliament with a plea for 'decent Europeans' to 'stop drinking Coca-Cola and drink good French wine'. Already, it might be possible to see the links between anti-Americanism and a focus on national identity that excludes not only Dallas but North Africans, Turks, Asians, Afro-Caribbeans, Europe's other Other, as it were (Webster 1989: 74). The prejudice of ten Little Englanders resonates and repeats across the Channel. Steven J. Jackson identifies a similar situation where anti-Americanism, that extreme response to Americanization, has been employed as a diversionary tactic within national politics. In Canada, which perhaps has as strong a claim as any for considering itself the limit case of American cultural imperialism, 'Americanization may also be strategically employed in order to forge a crisis of national identity and thus serve particular political interests' (Jackson 1993: 142). He concludes that 'the issue of Americanization is often interpreted with respect to its cultural imperialist effects. However, the hegemonic use of Americanization symbolically to construct crises and other politically based discourses should not be ignored' (Jackson 1993: 153). To recap here, when we talk of cultural imperialism, of empires of culture, we also need to be asking: 'Whose empire?' The Positive Discourse of Americanization |T)he double stake in popular culture, the double movement of containment and resistance, which is always inevitably inside it. The study of popular culture has tended to oscillate wildly between the two alternative poles of that dialectic—containment/resistance (Hall 1981: 456). We've considered containment, ways in which popular culture presents a conservative ideology, one which constructs and preserves dominant social positions. While Duncan Webster can argue that 'American culture represents not capitalist seduction but an expression of the desire for some form of social and cultural hegemony' (1988: 230), 1 am suggesting that it can be both, and so, having looked at capitalist seduction, 1 turn to look at hegemonic desire. It is time now to consider the other part

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of the dialectic offered by Stuart Hall, to look at American popular culture and its consumption under the term 'Americanization' as a site of resistance. The argument is a political one: the export rhetoric of Americanization can be viewed much more positively, as constituting a discourse of liberation rather than of imperial domination. We see this evidenced more specifically in terms of the attraction of American popular culture. Here, many consumers of American popular culture understand it as a culture of democracy, challenging the long-standing Eurocentric tradition of cultural and social hierarchy. Its very crudeness (or perceived crudeness) is seen to contribute to its challenge to hierarchy—'the charm and power of American (un)culture', as Jean Baudrillard nicely puts it (1986: 79). There are other more overtly political modes of culture that can also be examined as establishing a positive discourse of Americanization. This will involve reading America as a significant twentieth-century source of innovation (or at least development) in social movement, a subject 1 look at following discussion of the attractions of American popular culture themselves. As seen with McCarthyism in relation to the Cold War, it is clear that popular culture has been viewed and treated as a site for the negotiation and contestation of dominant and subordinate social positions in America itself. The energy and cheek of popular culture, its sense of being not mass but anti-authoritarian, is evidenced from within the country throughout the century. Indeed, the surprising thing may well be the extent to which popular culture in America has been such a target for official intervention, even legislation: the film industry (Hays Act, McCarthy), comics (witness the 1954 voluntary Code of the Comics Magazine Association of America), television (programmes like Murphy Brown and The Simpsons attacked by government for undermining family values), pop music (rap and metal lyrics, though not rave music, interestingly: only Britain is that repressed)—all have been the subject of various moral outcries, government comment, self-censorship on the part of the industries concerned, legal battle, attempted and achieved repression. However, in terms of reasons for the attraction of American popular culture I want to suggest three ways in which America presents itself to or is constructed by foreign consumers: America as zone of liberation or democracy, as locus of pleasure and as Utopia. These may overlap: in the spirit of postmodern consumerist eclecticism we can view America as a vast shopping mall where we go pick 'n' mix. The consumption

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and interpretations of American iconography are captured by Mel van Elteren: For the young people looking for signs and symbols of a lifestyle which expresses their generation-specific meanings, the American popular culture has presented itself as one big 'self service store' ... a reservoir of cultural elements from which one may borrow as much and in as many ways as one wishes. However, all elements thus borrowed also have the aura of Americanicity or Americanness in common: elementary connotations of freedom, casualness, liberality, vitality, modernity and youthfulness (van Elteren 1994: 6-7). First, then, 1 will look at America as zone of liberation or democracy. American cultural experimentation, the seemingly happy juxtaposition of 'King Lear and King Kong, Rimbaud and Rambo, Plato and Puzo' has been explained variously as a form of cultural creolization or as the cultural logic of replaceable parts (Kroes 1993: 307-308). Its attractiveness to certain audiences is located in its cultural politics, in its apparent democratizing impulse. Rob Kroes suggests that 'the authenticity of American culture consists in its picaresque tradition of creolisation, its freedom from genteel control, its freedom to borrow, to cut up and hybridise' (1993: 310). This 'casual sense of cultural bricolage'—producing Baudrillard's (un)culture—is a product of the American liberty and confidence 'to take the European cultural heritage apart and re-arrange it as they see fit' (NIAS 1993: 323). This is effectively a positive gloss on the fear of America discussed earlier in relation to cultural imperialism, a fear partly founded on its culture's capacity to disregard or to threaten a cosy high cultural consensus in Europe. One of the signal achievements of American culture was the discovery of its own vernacular form, notably in the poetry of Walt Whitman, which celebrated ordinary men and women, embracing their speech and manners ... American culture was self-consciously seeking a democratic alternative to [European] elitist forms. Not literature for the few but Whitman's 'the word democratic, the word en masse'. Not classical music, but jazz. Not private palaces but palatial railway stations and movie theatres (NIAS 1993: 324). That signal achievement has been massively attractive to European popular culture audiences, even more so at critical historical moments such as during and following World War 11. In Italy from 1943 on, for

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instance, it was not only the case that American popular culture was embraced with enthusiasm, but so were Americans themselves. As the south of the country was liberated, there was an American lira, and I'm told there was even a separatist movement in Sicily whose main political platform was that Sicily should become a state of America. In Italy at this time Americans were not only transmitters of a discourse of liberation, but were literally liberators. Duncan Webster describes research which looks at the pleasure of the American popular cultural text for British consumers. American detective fiction opened up for British readers a different world from the one they perceived as constrained by the class-bound concerns of classic English detective fiction characters like Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes or public school-educated criminals and cricketers like E.W. Hornung's Raffles. British readers in the 1930s and 1940s were attracted to the hard-boiled American detective fiction of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler because of 'the absence of snobbery, gentlemen, or middle-class adulteries, the very features whose absence Orwell mourned in Americanised crime fiction' (Webster 1988: 190). American popular culture was seen to offer a fresh, democratic alternative, an experience echoed by film director Wim Wenders as he explains the pull of American pop culture for West Germans in the postwar period: In the early Fifties or even the Sixties, it was American culture. In other words, the need to forget twenty years created a hole, and people tried to cover this ... by assimilating American culture ... But the fact that US imperialism was so effective over here was highly favoured by the Germans' own difficulties with their past. One way of forgetting it, and one way of regression, was to accept the American imperialism (quoted in Webster 1989: 67). For the young Wenders, German cultural tradition—even Beethoven— was tainted by the Nazi past; American film and popular music on the other hand were free, even innocent. Of course there is a paradox here, as Wenders points out: for postwar Germans, embracing America through its pop culture was both a way of 'forgetting (Nazi) history' and itself a 'way of regression', of moving backwards. Yet central to the sense of liberation Wenders experienced through popular music was the simple fact that it had 'nothing to do with fascism' (quoted in Webster 1989: 68).

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Second, it is possible via popular culture to view America as a locus of pleasure. For Simon Frith, images and presentations of America have come to signify pleasure: 'America, as experienced in films and music, has itself become the object of consumption, a symbol of pleasure' (Frith, quoted in Webster 1988: 200). The issue here is partly one of the presentation of American self-image. While Baudrillard can view America as New York, all speed, glamour, urban sophistication and decay, others tap into alternative fictions of America. One of these of course is the historic one of the West. In advertising, for instance, America presents itself through an appeal to its own Western history and popular myths (Lee as the jeans that built America), through the iconography of its Western landscapes (Marlboro Country cigarette advertising campaign), even through a blurring of the two: a jean-clad cowboy smoking a cigarette as archetypal American. Advertising and sales executives have constructed a global version of America through the Marlboro Country campaigns: 'Both ... saw in the West and in the cowboy (set in contemporary times with modern equipment, including jeeps and aeroplanes) a "perfect symbol" to sell just about anything' (Farber 1994: 327). Through visual advertising 'we are invited to consume not just an American product but "America" itself (Webster 1988: 228). This is a point pursued by Dutch academic Ien Ang in her study of the consuming pleasures of American melodrama and soap opera, Watching Dallas. The hegemony of American television (and film) has habituated the world public to American production values and American rnises-en-scene, such as the vast prairies or the big cities, the huge houses with expensive interiors, luxurious and fast cars and, last but not least, the healthy- and good-looking men and women, white, not too young, not too old. Such images have become signs which no longer merely indicate something like 'Americanness' but visual pleasure as such (Ang, quoted in Webster 1988: 200). Ang concludes here with the argument that the American popular is now the global popular, that these signs of American pleasure are so dominant today that they effectively function as signs of universal visual pleasure. (As we have seen of course it is problematic to read a process of universalization as Americanization by another name.) Van Elteren observes, however, that the appeal of America is predicated on local national conditions, so that for Holland he suggests a very specific set of appealing characteristics:

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in a well-regulated and overorganised country as the Netherlands the limitless, expressive individualism embedded in [American] cultural forms is irresistible to particular audiences ... Here we find an Americanophilia (love of America] which is the expression of a yearning for open spaces, novelty and freedom of action which is to be found among those young and youthful people who want to transcend the boundaries of 'little Holland' (van Elteren 1994: 219). Third, I want to consider the attraction of American popular culture in terms of the construction of America as Utopian space, or fantasy zone.12 We project America in our own (local) images—it becomes what we are not, what we want it to be, what we want to be. It does not matter whether this bears any similarity to the real thing. On the idea of America as Utopian space, for fulfilling our desires, any of them, van Elteren notes that the America of popular culture 'nearly always concerns an imaginary reality: "America" as represented and experienced in people's fantasies. An America that hardly corresponds with the "real" America, whatever that may be' (van Elteren 1994: 218). This is not quite the same point as the one 1 made at the beginning of the introduction, where I suggested that America exported does not equal America. The misrepresentations and partial versions of America on offer then were 'real' (if you like): New York as synecdoche for the entire country, jazz as one preferred form of popular culture in Europe. Now the argument is that the America constructed by producers and consumers of its culture— popular and otherwise—is a myth, a fantasy. In images of vast space or super speed we dissolve ourselves into our desires. That is the significance of the quotation from Simon Frith above: the America we speak of is 'America, as experienced in films and music' (emphasis added), a mediated nation. But it is also a space that Europeans, that non-Americans design in the image of our own subjective desires. This is the significance of David Forgacs's line that 'it is more useful to see Americanization as involving imaginings, myths, subjective perceptions and ascriptions' (1993: 162). The notion of an imagined America in Americanization is emphasised by Sergei Ostrovsky's study of Americanization in Russian culture. Because of the Iron Curtain, 'because of the lack of information, Russian culture had to satisfy its curiosity with an imagined America' (Ostrovsky 1993: 71). Ostrovsky implies that the imagining of America is a result of the lack of accurate information and authentic experience of it. I am suggesting rather that even in western Europe, where infor-

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mation has been more open and experience more widespread, America is imagined or invented. It is that Utopia, the fictive good-place that is no-place as Thomas More punned in his neologism. Rob Kroes reminds us that America, or rather the meaning of America produced by European consumers of its popular culture, has always been a realm of desire constructed by us: To the extent that America holds up a phantasma, a dream world, to the extent that it conjures up a world of freedom, without inhibitions and constraints, we are reading a leaf from our own book. The European imagination had already invented a mythical West before America was discovered ... [America| provides a repertoire for identification with epic worlds that derive their attraction from the fact that 'America' is non-Europe, that it provides a counterpoint to our culture, a Utopian realm for our dreams of escape (Kroes 1993: 313). The counterculture of the 1960s is one of the most obvious clusters of cultural moments and movements to spring to mind when thinking of Americanization as constituting a discourse of liberation. However, 1 want to raise some aspects of the period of and following World War II, including the sixties, in more detail to consider ways in which European youth has looked to America for inspiration in terms of a liberatory politics. Tracing appropriations of American popular music and its functions as a focus of enthusiasm and identity for anti-Nazi youth groups in Germany during World War II, Earl Beck describes a significant and perhaps surprising subcultural activity. The Hottjungen ('Swing Youth') groups were so named in clear contrast to the official Nazi Hitlerjungen ('Hitler Youth') movement dominant at the time. The most common motif of the movement was a love for 'swing' or 'hott' ... music of English or American origin. Phonograph records were traded and sometimes stolen. The style of dancing, 'with the long hair flying wildly in their faces' and the dancers following English and American examples until they 'hotted' it 'in the most evil fashion' horrified German police observers ... Long, 'hangman's' hair styles reaching to the coat collars and extravagant dress were affected by male clique members. The girls plucked their eyebrows, used rouge, and painted their lips. Often there were common clothing styles and group insignias ... Death's head emblems, Edelweiss insignia, golden anchor pins, or other devices marked the members of particular bands ... Free sexual relationships, overnight stays of couples in guest houses or farmers' haystacks,

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and even group sex was a common motif of the rebel cliques (Beck 1985: 47). Names of groups and members and the use of Western frontier imagery also indicated an American influence, and implied a degree of resistance both to the war effort and to the dominant Nazi ideology of racial purity: the Harlem Club, the Cotton Club, lonny, Texas Jack, the Al Capone Gang, the Navajos.13 The Hottjungen positioned themselves as outsiders to majority culture. Interestingly, Beck's subcultural narrative problematizes the more straightforward version that 1960s European youth were inspired by 1960s America. It may be, in some ways, that 1960s students in Germany were inspired (or at least anticipated) rather by 1940s American culture, mediated via groups like the Hottjungen, as Beck suggests: In a highly organised, authoritarian state, these youth groups violated both the laws and the accepted standards of society. In dress, songs, amusements, and life styles, they represented a gesture of defiance against the existing regime and anticipated significant aspects of the much larger youth rebellion of the 1960s (Beck 1985: 46). However, looking at the postwar period leading up to the sixties and the counterculture, the overseas influence and inspiration of American youth and new social movements is undeniable, and couched in a rhetoric of liberation. With hindsight, an extraordinary range of social and cultural ideas and actions can legitimately be identified as rooted in or popularized by the alternative values and world views of the counterculture. These include Civil Rights and racial equality, second-wave feminism, revolutionary student activism, environmental concern and action, anti-Vietnam War movement, gay rights. As Patrick Brantlinger explains, with a heady optimism perhaps tinged with nostalgia, Although these events |of the sixties)—and the decade as a whole—did not produce major political revolutions in western Europe or in the US, there was a worldwide trend toward liberation—the dismantling of the last remnants of the old colonial empires (of which the Vietnam War was only one highly spectacular instance), the civil rights movement, feminism, the various youth 'countercultures'. Even without political revolutions in the West, the political gains were major ones, and so were the cultural gains. As during similar revolutionary eras in the past ~ the aftermath of the American and French revolutions, for instance - creative

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energies were released in the sixties that are still active (Brantlinger 1990: 5). Mel van Elteren unpacks some of the contradictory issues by contrasting what he sees as pre- and post-World War II European experiences of America and its cultures: Concepts of an 'other' or 'alternative' America, unknown to the generation of the first postwar years, received much attention during the following decades ... An intriguing example is the European student movement of the sixties, insofar as this was a counterpart of the American New Left. Confusingly enough, the rebellious students of the sixties, influenced by the alternative America, often considered themselves 'anti-American'— strictly speaking, an inappropriate term which obscures the fact that many Europeans protesting against the war in Vietnam were inspired by the ideals and artistic expressions of the American New Left and youth culture (van Elteren 1994: 5). Exploring this confusion in the context of the British underground's rock festival culture of the 1960s and 1970s, Elizabeth Nelson writes that festivals reflected a new kind of consumerism. Indeed, it could be argued that many of those 'in' the counter-culture were there chiefly as consumers, spectators more than participants ... And ironically for the British counter-culture, which was trying to reject what it saw as straight society's acceptance of the American way of life'—including American consumerism—it became imbued itself to a large extent with what might be termed the American way of the alternative future' (Nelson 1989: 99). Whether such ironies constitute counter-revolutionary trends within the grander narrative of liberation is open to debate, yet Brantlinger's 'worldwide trend toward liberation' only partly originates in America and as a radical project is only partly extended in America. In the sixties European youth embrace American causes (the Battle of Grosvenor Square outside the American embassy in London during anti-Vietnam protest in 1969, for instance) and extend the countercultural project via, for instance, student radicalism, particularly in France in 1968. The paradox of the appeal of the American rhetoric and practice of liberation is seen in greater complexity in the 1980s peace movement in Europe, since here liberatory American ideas and strategies are employed against America, or more specifically against the military

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and nuclear presence of the United States on European territories. The anti-nuclear activist and writer Petra Kelly was someone who, of German and Irish-American parentage, literally embodied Euro-American tensions and alliances. Writing of her work, Heinrich Boll suggests that 'we should look to America with hope as well as apprehension' (Boll 1984: 7). This is indeed what Kelly did, drawing inspiration for 1980s protest against the presence in Europe of American nuclear weaponry from earlier American Civil Rights rhetoric and practice: 'Martin Luther King found an answer which we must listen to if our green movement is to succeed' (Kelly 1984: xi). The rise in popularity of non-violent direct action by 1990s eco-warriors can itself in part be traced to American developments, as seen in the imitation and then extension of activist groups like Earth First! from the States in Britain—in north America Earth Firsters used direct action tactics to protect the environment of the wilderness and trees from exploitation, while later Earth First! groups in Britain have been at the forefront of the extraordinary anti-roads direct action protest phenomenon since 1992.14 Cross-cultural Complexities: The Import/Export Trade In order to glean some further sense of the complexities of cross-cultural relations, 1 want briefly to consider the postwar cultural relationship between the United States and Britain as a case study. Dick Hebdige suggests a surprising alliance on the 'negative consensus' among cultural critics of the direct relationship between Americanization and the 'levelling down process'. Looking at attitudes towards American forces in Europe during World War 11, he writes of the way the American Gl began (surreptitiously at first) to be presented in the press as a 'folk devil', as the enemy at home—a subversive and unsettling influence. It was not only German propaganda dropped behind British lines which played upon the fears and resentments of British soldiers separated from their girlfriends and wives. British journals and newspapers often resorted to similar tactics (Hebdige

1988: 53; emphasis added). A rhetoric of anti-Americanism is expressed by German and British sides alike, playing on sexual jealousies of course, but also constructing the American GI as a figure of desire, site of attraction, energy and difference, locus of pleasure, of abundance (no rationing for them)—synecdoche of the constructed, idealized America itself, as we have seen. Hebdige's

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work on the appropriation of Pop Art in Britain in the 1960s also lays bare the ideological workings of taste, of style, in relation to a venerable cultural institution and arbiter. Even the use of strip cartoon iconography, popularized by Pop artists like the American Roy Lichtenstein, can be seen to tap into an earlier anxiety about the excessive influence of American pop culture. In Britain in the 1950s there was a moral panic about the extent to which violent American horror and detective comics were contributing to the fairly newly identified problem of juvenile delinquency.15 Within the space of a few years such demonized artwork has escaped the confines of youth comic books to appear on—horror, horror—the walls of art galleries. In Britain, Pop [Art] challenged the legitimacy of validated distinctions between the arts and the lingering authority of pre-War taste formations. The 'lessons' inscribed in pop's chosen objects -Americana, 'slick graphics', pop music, etc. - matched BBC didacticism point for point and turned it upside down. Where the BBC counselled discrimination and sobriety, pop recommended excess and aspiration (Hebdige 1988: 122). American music contributed to what in some quarters increasingly became perceived as an anti-American protest movement. The anti-nuclear campaigns in Britain originated in the 1950s because of America's leading role in atomic weaponry and were revived in the 1980s as a result of the later prevalence of American nuclear weapons on western European territories. Clearly the movement opposed the technology that had resulted in the American nuclear bombings of japan in 1945, but also it gained momentum from America's pursuit of the hydrogen bomb during the Cold War (as well as from Britain's formation of its own atomic bomb). Folk singer and Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament activist Ian Campbell recalls that It is significant that 1958, the year that saw the climactic boom in jazz popularity, also produced the first Aldermaston march. The jazz revival and the rise of CND were more than coincidental; they were almost two sides of the same

coin. Similar social attitudes and positive humanist values informed them both. At any jazz event, a liberal sprinkling of CND badges, and perhaps even leaflets and posters, would be in evidence; conversely, at every CND demonstration live jazz music set the tempo for the march (Campbell 1983: 115; emphasis added). It is significant that Campbell connects the political with the cultural,

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social protest with popular music. However, the implicitly conservative ethos of a traditional jazz revival in Britain—looking back to a music from the early decades of the century, at a time when in America the innovations of bebop were themselves being extended in the beginnings of free jazz—may indicate traces of the Little Englander attitude identified by Duncan Webster in his criticism of anti-American sentiment. It may suggest that some of the original impetus behind CND was nostalgic, even hankering after a consensual British Empire rather than a New World American one: at least when there was a British Empire it was possible only to destroy some of the world, while in the 1950s the writer and campaigner J.B. Priestley could write that American-led '[n)uclear war is war against the human race. It is not war as it used to be' (quoted in Richards 1981: 7). In Revolt into Style, his study of 1960s pop culture, George Melly writes that the British pop music scene acts as 'a potting-shed for America' (Melly 1970: 123). By this Melly is referring to the ways in which groups like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones 'spend most of their time in the States, where, after all, the money is' (123). It might equally refer to 1990s groups like Oasis, where the curiously-constructed Britpop phenomenon (itself maybe an example of retrogressive Little Englander pop culture) judges its success by the extent to which it can break the American market. Writing of the music of the sixties, Rob Kroes again challenges any monolithic reading of Americanization: If in England and the Netherlands groups of young people began to make music in idioms that drew on American blues and Rock music, they did not simply change into agents of an American cultural imperialism. They wrote their own lyrics, they made their own music, they gave vent to sentiments that were their own. They, as well as their fans, recognised themselves in the music. They created a cultural space of their own, which they gave sense and meaning (Kroes 1993: 317). A cultural space of their own: this is the aim that many cultural practitioners outside America seek. The paradox of course is that they seek it in the arena of dominant American cultural product. One way to do this is to adopt the strategy identified by Australian critic Meaghan Morris as 'positive unoriginality'. According to Duncan Webster, |t)his combines 'cultural assertiveness' and 'economic pragmatism', achieving 'survival and specificity ... by the revision of American

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codes by Australian texts', allowing for different readings by different audiences or, indeed, individual spectators. The example given [by Morris) is the Mad Max cycle's appropriation of road movies (Webster 1989: 66). Examples of 'positive unoriginality' in popular music are the appropriation of blues by white British musicians in the 1960s, mentioned by Kroes above, or the appropriation of African-American rap by French African youths in France today, as discussed in this volume by Andre Prevos. These examples do suggest that the import/export trade of culture is interwoven with complex negotiations and reinscriptions. The following essays are intended to convey and analyse particular local or cultural examples of these negotiations and reinscriptions of the consumption of American popular culture and its relation to Americanization. The essays employ a range of critical or theoretical positions, display the specialist interests of their writers, whether historical, cultural, political or interdisciplinary, are focused on European and wider perspectives and experiences, and some trace suggestive connections or tensions with other cultural practices or moments. The purpose of the essays in the context of the introduction is that they should complicate things;16 that is, after this largely explanatory introduction the close individual studies that follow indicate ways in which issues of the export, reception and consumption of American popular culture may be even more complex than the basic binary structure of (negative) cultural imperialism and (positive) discourse of liberation 1 have set up here as an initial framework. John G. Blair's historical analysis of blackface minstrelsy as a cultural export is significant for a number of reasons. First, Blair focuses on a cultural moment prior to the twentieth century, thus challenging a clear notion of Americanization as a more recent phenomenon and showing the cultural attraction of America at work in advance of mass technological and communications developments. Second, he takes issue with a monologic reading of 'Americanization' by discussing the different modes of reception English, Australian and South African audiences adopt for the original American performances. The local/global debate more readily associated with, say, postmodernism, is identifiable in consideration of much older cultural practice. Third, Blair suggests connections between the stereotypical representations

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of African-Americans in blackface minstrelsy and the dominant white ideologies of empire. World War II is generally read as an early peak in the process of Americanization in Europe, in countries like Britain and Italy because of the presence of American troops as allies or liberators, in countries like Germany because of postwar involvement in economic and social reconstruction. However, Ron Robin's essay focuses on wartime Americanization within America itself. Further, the process of Americanization Robin uncovers is a deliberate and overt cultural strategy on the part of the American state. Robin looks at ways in which popular fiction is consciously employed as a device of Americanization, as German prisoners-of-war who have been brought to the United States are supplied with both German and ail-American literature as part of their propaganda induction. This may be particularly significant since a state of war is a time of crisis during which the official control of culture is often a central propagandist strategy. From Robin's essay we can both see how aware the organizers of the re-education process are of the significant power of American popular culture, and we can gain some idea of the kinds of popular literature approved of by the military education authorities. Looking at the popular television and film texts of Star Trek, Karin Blair explores the relationship between the initial formula narrative of 'going where no man has gone before' and the complexity of processes of Americanization when the spaceships themselves contain a range of nationalities and aliens. She considers the implicit politics of identity in Star Trek, and the way in which these have changed with each series or film, as the social context has itself changed. By identifying versions of alien beings over the decades of the Star Trek series, Blair offers a Utopian strand of pluralism which may counteract a more straightforward reading of Star Trek as an American fantasy of (and later apology for) neo-colonialism. John Dean's personal critique touches on the relation between American and British rock festivals at a pivotal social moment to explore the connections between music and social action through the heroically constructed male figure of the bohemian/hippy. Dean traces the tradition of autonomous lifestyle politics from Romanticism onwards, from Europe to America, and back, in the sixties. Writing of the extra-

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ordinary surge of festival culture in the USA in the sixties, Brian Hinton compares things with Europe: All this was reflected, on our side of the Atlantic, in an innocent, humorous way which lacked (as yet) the dangerous overtones of the States. Here Vietnam was an issue, not an ever-present threat; long hair was met with disapproval, not a possible hail of bullets (Hinton 1995: 9). Richard Pells periodizes the 'cultural ascendancy' of the United States, identifying 'America's moment of cultural dominance in the 1940s and 1950s, and the gradual erosion of its influence since the 1960s'. Pells goes on to describe 'America's tarnished image in the 1960s' (1993: 67), presumably tarnished by event at home like Civil Rights and the counterculture, and overseas by the Vietnam War. This is altogether too neat, overlooking as it does the discourses of liberation that functioned as export rhetoric during the sixties and early seventies: feminism, student uprisings, the peace movement throughout Europe. Even rock festival culture—as translated into the free festival movement in Britain, for instance—can be seen as a significant contribution from American culture in the 1960s, one where (American) sixties utopianism lasted in some form through the 1970s, 1980s and up to the 1990s, with rave culture. It is worth taking issue with Pells's model of attenuating American cultural influence in the sixties: Free festivals are most notoriously framed in America in 1969 by the Utopia of Woodstock and—a mere four months later—the dystopia of Altamont ... Woodstock and Altamont are so early in the timetable of British free festivals, they've almost been and gone before the British scene is in any way established. (It may be that the influence of Woodstock is felt later, when the movie is released and distributed in Britain.) (McKay 1996: 14). Yonka Krasteva explores the tensions in a still resonant, even traumatic, militaristic process of Americanization, that in and following the Vietnam War (1964-75). She looks at ways in which postmodern culture blurs the real to offer a 'new American version of Vietnam'. That readings of American cultural representations of the Vietnam War and experience vary is illustrated by John Fiske. He offers an illuminating version of a local, and resistant, reading of a key American popular text, which is significantly also one tarred with the brush of empire.

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Rambo was one of the most popular movies among Aborigines living a tribal life in the deserts of central Australia. They made their meanings out of the text, for they understood the major conflict to be that between Rambo, whom they saw as a representative of the Third World, and the white officer class—a set of meanings that were clearly relevant to their experience of white, postcolonial paternalism ... The Aboriginal meanings of Rambo were pleasurable because they were relevant, functional meanings produced from the text, not by it. Presumably, Ronald Reagan experienced his own pleasure in the very different meanings that served his political purposes ... [Reagan's] pleasures, though, were hegemonic, preferred by the text, and thus required little, if any, productivity from him. The Aboriginal meanings, on the other hand, were resistant and were produced by a more productive and popular process (Fiske 1989: 57-58; emphasis original). Developing a strand introduced by John Blair above, Richard Walker looks in more detail at Australia as a site of Americanization. (There is a pertinent issue here in terms of empire: one of the ways in which Australia can escape the 'cultural cringe' of Commonwealth loyalty to the British monarchy is by looking to America as a model of republicanism.) Walker's close reading of cultural texts and intertexts takes us from 1950s rock and roll through Elvis Presley to a 1980s subcultural embracing of a Southern American Gothic sensibility. The singer Nick Cave is read as a reconfigured and Australian Elvis: in other subcultures such as British punk in the late 1970s Elvis is seen as part of the problem, to be resisted; for Australian Goths he offers a way into a mode of (life)style and imagery that is co-opted for subcultural resistance. As a further part of the book's focus on popular music as a significant cultural form in which dramas of Americanization and national identities are played out, particularly for youth audiences, Mel van Elteren interrogates tensions between American popular culture and local European ones, with specific reference to Holland. Elsewhere (see van Elteren 1994) he has argued that the export of much contemporary American youth culture is mediated through Britain, and then on to other European countries, which has led him to suggest the operation not of American but of '(Anglo-)American cultural imperialism'.17 Here he focuses on the appropriation of African-American rap music by Surinamese youth in Holland as an expression and construction of local ethnic identity. Andre Prevos also looks at the relation between rap

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music and ethnic expression and identity, but in France, which has itself of course long been an active site of Francophone African expression: in the 1930s, for instance, African exiles from colonialism expounded the identity theory of negritude, blackness, in Paris. It seems that while official France tries to ban American culture and the English language, unofficial France embraces and appropriates American pop culture for its own critical ends. Bearing van Elteren and Prevos in mind, it is worth noting a similar appropriation and partial recontextualization of recent African-American music that has taken place with other national youth, like the funkeiros of Brazil. Here predominantly black youth in poverty have chosen other black dance music, funk, as one focus for resentment, possibly resistance, to the dominant narrative (fantasy?) of Brazil as a multiracial society centred on the democratic dance culture of samba. If Brazil as a nation could ever have been characterised by samba, that is no longer the case ... Funkeiro culture, on the other hand, from the late seventies to the present has rejected the promise of citizenship by politicians and intellectuals, whether populists of the left or right, or even of the black movement... In Rio, cultural critics have generally seen funkeiros as nonpolitical and alienated ... [However, t|he depiction of funkeiro culture that I have provided here certainly recognises the active role of these youths in staking out their own territory, and constructing their own means of pleasure, often against the grain of national or regional cultural identity (Yudice 1994: 203, 208-209). As I hope the reader will have already seen to some extent in this introduction, and will develop a greater awareness of in the following essays, the connection between superpower and what Christopher Bigsby called superculture, remains as problematic as it was when Bigsby wrote about Americanization and popular culture over twenty years ago. In fact in the intervening period we may well have been seeing the continuing ascendancy of America, of its culture, of its popular culture to a global extent signified by the technological developments of, for instance, satellite broadcasting and the Internet. The extent to which Americanization can be said to constitute a discourse of globalization seems to be an increasingly insistent question of power at the turn of the millennium. It is certainly one with which students of American Studies and popular culture should be engaging. It is also one which the academics involved in American Studies may need more self-consciously and self-critically to consider. Yankee Go Home (& Take

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Me With U) is located in that ambiguous zone reserved for imperial culture, which is both criticized and rejected as another apparatus of empire and celebrated for its auratic and otherworldly energy.

Blackface Minstrels as Cultural Export: England, Australia, South Africa ]ohn G. Blair

In the present state of the world, 'Americanization', especially in its most ominous form of 'American cultural imperialism', seems all too obvious and indeed inescapable to observers in many countries. Whether the focus is on film or television or pop music or blue jeans, the message seems the same: an inexorable intrusion of American cultural artifacts into domains formerly reserved for indigenous products and styles. With a bit of historical perspective one can indeed trace increasing American cultural exports from early in this century. On the other hand, the sheer quantity of exports does not suffice to understand the cultural transactions involved. Unwanted artifacts of foreign origin are simply ignored; hence those that are adopted or adapted for local consumption must speak to local concerns in some way. My concern here is to isolate for study cultural factors that condition the reception of American products.1 Extending historical perspective back to the nineteenth century has the signal advantage of separating out issues of cultural exportation and importation from the media that so dominate these matters in the twentieth century. That choice allows us to focus on the relevant cultural issues affecting entertainment forms before film, records and tapes, television and the Internet came into existence. By this strategy we can seek fresh insights into culture studies in a broad sense as well as American Studies and the complex concerns bundled under the label 'Americanization'. My test case for the export of American entertainment forms is blackface minstrelsy, the first American performance innovation to have

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notable success abroad, though for reasons we will see, its acceptance was largely limited to the English-speaking world.2 The point of comparing American originals with their spin-offs abroad is to define by comparisons American characteristics as well as the relevant traits of the borrowing cultures. 1. American Beginnings: The Original Jim Crow' Song-and-Dance Routine First of all, what does the label 'blackface minstrels' refer to: a genre of stage entertainment that flourished in American cities and towns, particularly in the northern states, from the 1830s through the end of the century. The heyday of the form lasted from the 1840s through the 1880s, the period when a whole evening's entertainment was assured by a company of performers in blackface. By definition the performers were white (mostly Irish-Americans) who blackened their faces with burnt cork.3 Before 1845, the time by which the conventions of the genre were fully established among American theater-going publics, their sheet music quite often depicted the performers both in and out of blackface. There was at the outset a palpable need to reassure American audiences that they were not watching black actors. The interest of the genre for American Studies turns largely on this fundamental racial ambivalence, too complex a subject for the present context.4 What went on in early blackface performances? If 'Jim Crow' is nowadays associated with a complex of laws and practices segregating black Americans from whites, formally ratified by the 1896 US Supreme Court decision Plessy vs. Ferguson, two-thirds of a century earlier it referred to a new entertainment success. Though the precise origins of blackface performance disappear into anecdote, by the 1830s Thomas Dartmouth Rice hit it big with his impersonation of a pseudo-plantation slave 'Jim Crow'. His raggle-taggle costume (tattered pants, oversize shoes with gaping holes) may have made him seem pitiful, but his rambling ballad narrative recounts drinking and fighting and sexual adventures already associated with white folklore figures such as the shamelessly boastful Mississippi basin flatboatman Mike Fink. The white folklore associated with almanacs was limited to print or to amateur amusements, whereas Rice opened up a new and vigorously professional entertainment. In the USA Rice's early lyrics dramatized a hard-drinking roistering braggart:

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Anoder day I hit a man, De man was mighty fat; I hit so hard I knocked him in To an old cockt hat. Chorus: Weel about and turn about and do jis so, Eb'ry time I weel about I jump Jim Crow. I whipt my weight in wildcats, I eat an alligator; I drunk de Mississippy up! Oh, I'm de very creature.5 Instead of a white frontiersman offering himself as a rough but admirable national icon, Jim Crow's boasting exploits seemed fundamentally ludicrous. He portrayed a happy-go-lucky hard-drinking type, freed from the urban industrial cares that might burden his watchers, but by the same token one who could not be taken seriously. A broad-gauged analysis of blackface minstrelsy suggests that nothing that took place in blackface seemed serious. 'Jim Crow' is a dressed-down figure of fun, a dancing fool, a boasting nobadaddy, a model for multiple generations of laughable black character types.6 The 'Jim Crow' figure not only had a rollicking ballad to sing but a vigorous and startling dance unrelated to standard reels and square dance figures. This dance, like the others it spawned, involved exaggerated, unnatural bodily contortions. Hans Nathan, as part of his useful recuperation of the blackface archive, summarizes the dance itself: Rice, according to his own words, wheeled, turned, and jumped. In windmill fashion, he rolled his body lazily from one side to the other, throwing his weight alternately on the heel of one foot and on the toes of the other. Gradually, he must have turned away from his audience, and, on the words 'jis so', jumped high up and back into his initial position.7 Reviews make it clear that Rice carefully varied his movements and his lyrics so that each verse seemed to offer something new, no mean accomplishment when he might be called for numerous encores. 8 This was a spectacular act, well suited for presentation before audiences of the newly citified associated with the growing urbanization of Jacksonian America. The primary audience, all studies agree, was male, workingclass and young. The same act went over well in London as of 1836 when Rice appeared at lower-echelon houses like the Surrey and the Adelphi.9 Two years later The Times, citing a New York paper, marvels that to date Rice had sung and danced 37,000 verses in the USA, England and Ireland.10

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As of the later nineteenth century, particularly after the end of slavery, rationalizations of minstrelsy tended to claim that the performers were motivated by a desire to depict authentically the life of blacks, either on the plantation or in the cities. This after-the-fact justification does not hold up well under inspection. The shows were above all stage creations whose primary motivation was to entertain successfully while drawing on only the most sketchy and distant evocations of life under slavery. Even the 'black' English the minstrels delivered on stage was far from authentic. William J. Mahar shows that the earliest minstrels did draw initial inspiration from black vernacular but rapidly congealed these into an inflexible stage dialect that showed none of the evolution typical of a living language: another limitation in the 'blackness' of blackface.11 Mark Twain is a useful witness because he not only delighted in 'the nigger show' but had direct awareness of living conditions for blacks under slavery. Here is the way he recalls the first such show he saw back home in Hannibal in the 1840s: The minstrels appeared with coal-black hands and faces and their clothing was a loud and extravagant burlesque of the clothing worn by the plantation slave of the time; not that the rags of the poor slave were burlesques, for that would not have been possible; burlesque could have added nothing in the way of extravagance to the sorrowful accumulation of rags and patches which constituted his costume; it was the form and color of his dress that was burlesqued. Standing collars were in fashion in that day and the minstrel appeared in a collar which engulfed and hid half of his head and projected so far forward that he could hardly see sideways over its points (Twain 1959: 64). That is, the audience was engaged by rank preposterousness that left no room for comparisons with slave realities, particularly for those spectators who knew plantation conditions first hand. 2. English Adaptations The issue of authenticity is important for different reasons in England. The British Isles offered little direct experience of blacks and none of slavery.12 Hence audiences there were still more free than Americans in the urban North to interpret blackface performances as they wished. They did just that, assimilating Jim Crow and the groups that extended such premises into a whole evening's entertainment of songs and patter

Blair, Blackface Minstrels as Cultural Export to distinctively British concerns of the middle nineteenth century, notably Africa. Here is The Times in 1843 praising the four-man 'Virginia Minstrels' on grounds that served congratulated British egos in more than one way: The spectators and auditors of the wonders exhibited at this theatre [the Adelphi] have during the week been amused by what is called an Ethiopian concert, by four Virginian minstrels, in which some of the aboriginal airs of the interior of Africa, modernized if not humanized in the slave states of the Unions and adapted to ears polite, have been introduced by the musical conductor of the theatre (26 June 1843). Now here is a contextualization of minstrelsy which could not be imagined in the USA, where Africa was of no concern whatsoever except to a few missionary societies. But given the ethnocentrism implicit in all cultural perceptions, this Times assessment redoubled the prestige claimed for the home country. The obvious inferiority of any African artefact was implicitly transferred to the USA since it was there that the 'interior of Africa' was 'modernized if not humanized'. The British by this twist could imagine themselves as having it both ways, feeling superior to the Americans as merely a partially humanizing way-station that gave Africa enough polish to make a spectacle entertaining. The reference to 'slave states of the union' was, of course, total fantasy, since the minstrels had only the most distant and stereotypical ties with plantations and the life of slaves. The primary differences between Britain and the USA, then, was the actuality of race as a domestic presence and issue in the latter, but additional ethnocentric concerns involving imperial involvement in Africa promoted the importation of an American entertainment form into Britain.13 Minstrelsy in Britain profited from the general condemnation of slavery that continued after the 1838 abolition of that practice in the colonies. Minstrel performances preceded the successful tours of Frederick Douglass and other escaped slaves who spoke under abolitionist sponsorship. The association of minstrels with this moral cause conferred on them an indirect stamp of approval which, in the words of J.S. Bratton, authorized 'the dissenting lower middle classes, the ministers, shop keepers, and respectable ladies who were in some ways the most deprived and repressed cultural group in the land' (Bratton 1981: 128) to attend minstrels as a kind of 'moral theatre'. By the 1860s 'it was firmly established in the popular mind that England was the land of

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the free, and that the revolted American colonists proved their inferiority by their refusal to recognize black men as brothers' (Bratton 1981: 132). A little discreet self-congratulation has never hindered a cultural importation. Another important factor in the British success of Rice and other early performers was the ease with which they could adapt the original format to local settings. Even before 1840 songsters appeared in London which showed how readily 'Jim Crow' could travel: I came from ole Kentucky, A long time ago, Where I first learn to wheel about, And jump Jim Crow. Wheel about and turn about, And do just so; Ebey time I wheel about, I jump ]im Crow At last I went to seek my fortune, Got up by break of day; Left my old shoes behind me, And off I ran away. [N.B. violation of 'slave' premise) Wheel about, &c. Den I jump aboard de big ship, And cum across the sea, And landed in ole England, Where de nigger be free. Wheel about, &c.14 From there on it was easy to generate topical songs with titles such as 'Jim Crow's Trip to Greenwich' or 'Jim Crow's Trip to France', which compliments the local audience with such verses as But, say de jolly Englishman, It is my firm belief, No country like the country Of plum pudding and roast beef. Wheel about, Now 1 says, look here white folks,

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Yankee Go Home (& Take Me With U) De country for me, Is de country whar de people, Hab make poor nigger free. Wheel about (Crow 1836: 4).

How could British audiences resist such an entertaining and congratulatory self-image? To assess reception more precisely it is indispensable to define just who was attracted to watch blackface minstrels, and here the class differences between the USA and Britain are startling. In New York and comparable American cities, the initial appeal was frankly to male working-class audiences, though couples began to appear more frequently as time went on.15 In England, by contrast, the appeal shifted in the mid-1840s from the middle or lower-middle of theatre-going publics to the very top. In 1846 the Virginia Serenaders, a fiveman troupe, innovated by appearing in full concert regalia of white tie and tails. They played a command performance for Victoria and Albert and parlayed this status into an impressive run not only on stage (in London at St James's Hall, Piccadilly) but as featured entertainers at private events sponsored by nobility.16 The Harvard Theatre Collection preserves a remarkable pamphlet whose title tells the essential story: A List of the ROYAL FAMILY, NOBILITY & GENTRY, who have honoured the ETHIOPIAN SERENADERS, Germon, Stanwood, Harrington, Pell & White, With Their Patronage at the St James's Theatre, London, Together with the Opinions of the London Press. The highest patrons are identified as Her Most Gracious Majesty, THE QUEEN, and His Royal Highness PRINCE ALBERT, followed by a careful ordered list of the programs from private entertainments as sponsored by the Duchess of Kent, the Duchess of Gloucester, the Duke of Devonshire, the Duke of Northumberland, the Duke of Beaufort, the Viscountess Beresford, the Baroness Rothchild and Madame la Duchesse de Cambridge (see illustration, p. 49):,7 The group offered a core program of minstrel songs with occasional variations as was their habit on stage. The marketing strategy was brilliantly adapted to the British scene; from then on the legitimacy of blackface minstrelsy was unchallenged. An American named George Washington Moore stayed on to become the resident expatriate organizer of minstrels groups and performance for the rest of the century.18 In terms of audience, then, the primary differences between Britain

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and the USA were the actuality of race as a domestic issue in the latter and as of 1846 aristocratic sponsorship in the former. Thus the importation of an American entertainment form into Britain depended very much on local factors which cannot in any sense be construed as American in origin.19 During the middle decades of the last century, British and American troupes began diverging in their emphases. Harry Reynolds, for example, reads this history from a British point of view: 'In the early days of burnt cork minstrelsy, the comedian usually depended upon the quaintness of the melody and the broken English dialect of the American negro— more than on the wit and humor of the words—to gain his comic effect' (Reynolds 1928: 58). The rise of 'wit and humor' should be read, among other terms, as the triumph of puns over malapropisms, the latter a continuing American emphasis, as in stump speeches satirizing any number of topics of popular concern from politics to feminism to 'science'. Malapropisms carry an implicit condemnation of social and educational self-promotion which does not apply in a display of wit. American minstrels, in short, continued the social-satirical play on blackface as preposterous expression of laughably inferior creatures. 3. Australian Action In the first years of minstrelsy, British and American performers developed roughly in parallel, involving frequent tours in each other's territory whenever economically feasible. Parallelism does not imply identity, as we have seen, and we can learn more about what differences emerged by turning to Australia where minstrels were imported with great success starting before mid-century. Here was yet another variant of English-language culture and the Australians could choose whether they preferred to engage American or British performers. In general they praised British troupes for the quality of their music; the Americans had good humour but were likely to indulge in unwelcome satire on public events. Thus in the 1850s visiting Americans like the classic Christy's Minstrels dropped their political stump speech routine for the Australian swing. The stump speech as set piece epitomized the satirical potential of blackface within the American context. No blacks, of course, could vote till decades later, but in blackface the politician could appear as generic, neither Republican nor Democrat but blockhead. The

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Australians, like the British, delighted in blackface premises for entertainment but both wanted, as we have seen, no religion or politics to mar the laughter. Thus an American troupe might well put on a 'British' program in Australia, implying (in the 1860s for example) avoidance of topical allusions in favor of Irish and English songs such as The Lancashire Lad' or 'Come into the Garden, Maud'.20 Unlike Britain, Australia had, obviously, its own native coloreds, so abolitionist sentiment did not flourish unambiguously there. Minstrelsy offered one layer of conventions that might be called on to figure the Aborigines; as early as 1844 stage-American-black was placed in the mouth of at least one Aboriginal character.21 Later in the nineteenth century the linguistic and literary evidence is even stronger that, as Richard Waterhouse puts it, 'the prism through which white Australians viewed Aborigines was one which was cut by the minstrels'.22 The strongest differentiation of Australian minstrel performance from British or American tendencies emerged after the Civil War when black troupes tried to get in on the action. In Britain the early performers were panned, as witnessed by this dismissal of Sam Hague's Georgia Minstrels as reported by Harry Reynolds: The public compared this crude representation of real negro \sic\ life with the educated, refined minstrel companies that were then so popular in England and naturally the troupe suffered by comparison ... It appeared that the emancipated slave was all right for an advertisement, but the public wanted an entertainment with it ... The white men gradually replaced all the coloured men, as the public seemed to prefer the imitation nigger (1928: 163-65). Similarly in the USA, black performers either adopted the stereotypical conventions, as did Billy Kersands, famous for opening the biggest mouth in the world, or went unemployed. In Australia, however, black companies like those of Sam Hague, Charles B. Hicks and Irving Sayles put together long runs both in Sydney and on tour. Unlike the musical Britons and the satirical Americans, they featured plantation material. As of the 1870s and Charles Calendar's Georgia Minstrels, such companies played up three aspects of plantation life, religious, sentimental and comic, all flexible enough to include a wide range of unserious songs and set pieces (Waterhouse 1990: 47-97). In Australia as well as Britain and the USA, minstrelsy was extraordinarily popular as a basis for amateur entertainments. In all three

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settings publishers marketed books and paraphernalia that told every amateur group how to do it. These were sold to social clubs (including in the USA the YMCA and YWCA), parishes, fraternities and sororities, school groups, all of whom wanted to have fun while raising funds.23 As of the later nineteenth century and up to World War 11 there was a large American mail-order industry equipped to supply all the props and appurtenances plus joke books, funny orations, patter, songs and the like. The churches and schools deemed it 'good clean fun' free of the sexual innuendo common in vaudeville, burlesque and other professional theatricals of the time. 4. South African Assimilations In South Africa blackface minstrelsy arrived first by geographical happenstance. In the coal-powered era, ships from England stopped regularly at Durban en route for India and Australia, lust as the Canaries provided not just coal but a resident British community who patronized one-night stands, Durban and also Cape Town offered initial exposure to travelling companies. The earliest traces go back to 1848.24 In the mid-1860s Christy's Minstrels performed in South Africa for a month and numerous other reputed companies from both Britain and the USA followed them over the next decades.25 The distinctive South African turn, however, emerged as of 1880 with a group known as Kafir Christy Minstrels, which refers, according to the Natal Mercury, to a troupe of genuine natives, bones and all ... who really get through their songs very well' (Cockrell 1987: 420). The point is not that this group went on to fame and fortune, which it did not, but that the assimilation of minstrel materials and conventions to black performance conceptions had begun. In addition, the late nineteenth century saw the importation of new black forms from the USA, the spirituals associated above all with the Fisk Jubilee Singers. Such groups traveled all over the Western world to audience acclaim, but in South Africa they took hold in an especially big way. The most influential person in this process was Orpheus Myron McAdoo, born in North Carolina as a slave and educated at Hampton Institute shortly after the Civil War. The troupe of blacks McAdoo brought to Cape Town as of 1890 offered a mixed bag of minstrel material and spirituals. His success was so great that he stayed on for most of the

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next decade, despite having to recruit more American performers from time to time and despite the rampant segregationist atmosphere of South Africa at the time. The degree of racial hostility shocked even one hardened to the American South, as McAdoo wrote back to the USA: Everyone seemed captivated with the singing; never heard such singing in their lives, and they said, 'and just to think that black people should do it'. The latter remark will give you some idea of a feeling of prejudice; well, so it is ... The native to-day is treated as badly as ever the slave was treated in Georgia ... Do you credit a law in a civilized community compelling every man of dark skin, even though he is a citizen of another country, to be in his house by 9 o'clock at night, or he is arrested.26 Inescapably there were incidents involving local authorities and McAdoo's black American performers, but none serious enough to drive him away. He had found an audience, which sometimes included black spectators in segregated sections (common in the USA as well) or performances reserved entirely for blacks (Americans who patronized black performers were largely blacks). In the long run there was less demand for American performers like McAdoo because black South Africans assimilated the American premises for entertainment into their own practices. By early in this century cakewalks and fancy-dress carnival costumes for blacks had become commonplace, including lips made up in minstrel fashion with exaggerated white surrounds ,27 In the words of music historian Charles Hamm, Stylistic features of American minstrel songs were absorbed into black South African performance traditions. Thus acculturation had taken place, a repertory had been created drawing both on indigenous and foreign elements, and new genres appeared distinct from those found elsewhere.28 In short, minstrelsy, rather than maintaining an identity as a cultural importation became so assimilated as to be, in time, indistinguishable from 'folklore'. Similar assimilations are reported to have taken place during the present century in other English-speaking parts of Africa, notably in Ghana.29

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Americanization? In retrospect these four cultural settings fostered distinct developments of blackface minstrelsy. The differences show up most clearly in relation to twentieth-century survivals. In the USA blackface acts no longer sustained evening-long programs as of the 1890s, but individual acts survived in vaudeville or variety show formats. In South Africa, as we have seen, minstrelsy disappeared into local performance practices. In Australia too, minstrels gradually died away only after a long life in amateur theatricals, as was notably the case in the USA as well. In Britain full-scale blackface performances persisted until 1910 when the St James's Theatre was finally torn down after decades as a minstrels-only house. Blackface premises, however, continued in Music Hall and variety shows. The middling classes seemed to find this racially loaded material endlessly entertaining. On BBC television the Black-and-White Minstrel Show was a long-running favorite until forced off the air by the 1977 Race Relations Act, much to the regret of many well-meaning folk who saw this entertainment as harmless, just as childishly amusing as the gollywog dolls that helped to sell jam (another victim of the 1977 Act). In the USA the white majority was similarly resistant to acknowledging the negative stereotypes that had been implicit in blackface entertainment all along. Even after the 1954 Supreme Court decisions banning segregation in the public schools, some (white-only) high schools, in the North as well as the South, continued to hold minstrel shows.30 In professional entertainment of this century, blackface moments survived up to the 1940s on film, the most famous instance being Al lolson's 'Mammy' in the 'first talkie', The ]azz Singer of 1928. The most startling survival, however, started in the 1930s on radio, which then carried over into television. The idea of blackface radio may seem contradictory until you realize that two white actors adopted thick 'black' dialects to sound out Amos 'ri Andy. On the television prolongation of this show the blackface was technically abandoned in that the actors were black, but familiar blackface stereotypes persisted: the characters were bumbling, garrulous, shifty ne'er-do-wells. After a time the television networks dropped the show amidst controversy. In later years a television documentary brought together diverse black responses to the show: black performers associated with Hollywood approved Amos 'n' Andy as entertaining while militant community leaders condemned its prolongation of negative stereotypes.31

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What happened to 'Americanization'? The original American entertainment premises were initially exported and then to one degree or another assimilated to local cultural practice and racial concerns. American performers competed for a time with their local imitators and then in the longer run each cultural setting went along its own way. In matters of exportation and importation of cultural artefacts, it has been ever thus.32 One-way domination would not be possible except temporarily even allowing for aggressively capitalist intentions. A quick example from our own time suggests how little the basic elements have changed since the last century. MTV has often been thought of as an epitome of American cultural imperialism via television, but in 1996 it is reported to be losing viewers' share to competitors in such diverse markets as Germany, Brazil and Hong Kong. In each case the local competition features the native language and home-grown performers. This development should not be an occasion for surprise but for recognizing the parallels with cultural interactions as venerable as those incited by the American exportation of blackface minstrelsy as an entertainment premise.33

The War of Words: Literature for German POWs in the United States, 1943-1944 Row Robin

During the course of World War II over 430,000 enemy prisoners of war (POWs) were incarcerated in prison camps strewn throughout the United States. Most of these prisoners had been captured in Italy and North Africa. Due to the many security and logistical problems of maintaining prison stockades in the vicinity of battlefields, these German, Italian and Japanese captives were shipped to American shores, where they remained for the duration of the war. Most of these accidental tourists were transplanted to remote locations in the United States suffering from acute labour shortages. Until their repatriation in the spring of 1946, these enemy soldiers provided essential services as agricultural labourers and factory workers in America's food processing industry and other understaffed sectors of the civilian war economy (Krammer 1979). The largest group of these military captives—some 380,000—were Germans. Their conspicuous presence in the vicinity of hundreds of small towns throughout the continental United States could not, of course, be a secret. Indeed, both ordinary citizens and influential journalists inundated military authorities with advice and complaints regarding the handling of these representatives of America's most powerful enemy. The most common complaint was that the army was pampering the prisoners, lavishing on them abundant food and easy work, even as American troops were laying their lives on the line. Other prominent news reports decried the lack of an appropriate American response to persistent Nazism among the prisoners. These reports urged

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American authorities to seize the moment and expose these supposedly fanatical Germans to the principles of democracy. Civilian authorities were quite reluctant to initiate any significant re-education campaign. Both military and civilian officials expressed fears of German retaliation, noting that such acts of propaganda in POW camps contravened the Geneva Convention. By late 1944, however, the government reversed its position. Re-education appeared by this stage of the war to be a small price to pay for improving the army's public image. The fall of Germany was imminent; fears of German reprisals and the contravening of the Geneva Convention were no longer deemed relevant in these late stages of the war. Thus, the US government decided to breach both prevailing military etiquette as well as the Geneva Convention by establishing a 'reorientation' program for these soldiers of the Third Reich. The program's ultimate objective was to provide ideological alternatives to National Socialism, through an appreciation of democracy, American-style.1 The architects and instructors of the re-education program, known as the 'Special Projects Division' (SPD), were mostly professors from a variety of liberal arts colleges. These mobilized humanists had a vested interest in proving that true and profound conversion could be achieved through intellectual discourse; their formula for achieving such an objective was quite predictive. As humanists, the idea of behaviour modification was anathema to them. They advocated, instead, a rational learning process. The 'knowledge' they sought to impart to the prisonerstudents had a distinct binational slant. As Americans, they advocated that spreading an awareness of their nation's culture of tolerance and fluidity would benefit the postwar world in general, and a new Germany in particular. As students and admirers of nineteenth-century German culture, they argued that exposure to the underlying liberalism inherent in that golden age would sooth the Nazi beast. The re-education program utilized various didactic formats, ranging from lectures to the screening of movies. But for the most part, SPD educators focused their attention on devising an instructive reading program for their prisoner-students. In a world dominated by contests of technology and brute force, these American educators in uniform remained convinced that a rational, literary exposition of ideas could solve the scourge of global conflict. They argued consistently that controlling intellectual development by such means as the regulation of

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reading material, represented the key to ultimate and enduring victory. Technology might decide the battle, but winning the war hinged upon the triumph of ideas conveyed through the written word. In their war of words, the SPD's commanding officers did not limit their concerns to the curtailing of enemy propaganda. The literary program strove to replace the false consciousness of Nazism with an alternative, democratic cultural agenda. Most SPD officers agreed that the point of departure for such an exercise was the regulation of the prisoners' reading material as the primary conveyor of ideas. SPD officials did not limit their concerns to the censoring of Nazi literature. They were equally preoccupied with ostensibly innocuous material, including popular escapist literature. Such material was considered highly prejudicial to the war effort because of the demands it made upon the reader's time and interest. Major Maxwell McKnight, the assistant director of the SPD, argued that the 'distribution of books which serve no other purpose than to entertain' severely undermined the command and control of POW camps by providing distractions and avenues for avoiding the painful issues of the period.2 These concerns prompted SPD officials to move beyond the mere weeding out of anti-democratic literature and to publish their own book series of appropriate reading. This series, known as the Buecherreihe Neue VJelt/New World Bookshelf was

a collection of ideologically correct fiction and non-fiction published by the SPD and sold exclusively at local camp canteens. The initial premise behind this New World series was, of course, a variation of the 'Great Books' tradition that the drafted professors brought with them from their college campuses. It was mainly for the purpose of planning such a literary endeavour that the SPD commanders had recruited a number of literary scholars, including the esteemed Harvard scholar, Howard Mumford (ones. lones and his colleagues experienced no major difficulties in devising the German segment of the series. The chosen authors were the most outspoken critics of National Socialism. All German authors included in the series were prominent exiles. Thomas Mann led the field with three books. Mann's Lotte in Weimar/The Beloved Returns (1939), a revival of 'humanistic traditions of the Goethe period' and the collected speeches of the author in Achtung Europa/Europe Beware (1938), were included in the series alongside Der Zauberberg/The Magic Mountain (1924), his magisterial saga of a tuberculosis sanatorium

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as a symbol of an ailing world. This challenging political allegory of disease was chosen, according to SPD records, because of the Socratic dialogue 'between a defendant and a critic of western civilisation'.3 The SPD apparently hoped that at least some of the POWs would see the analogy between Hans Castrop's entrapment in the mountainous sanatorium, and their own state of imprisonment. Cut off from the wrenching experiences of reality, the prisoners, like Castrop, would undergo a 'hermetic pedagogy'; they would learn to appreciate the redeeming qualities of western humanism without having to deal with the distortive affects of contemporary events. Imprisonment, like confinement in the sanatorium, represented, paradoxically, freedom; it liberated the inmate from preoccupation with the overpowering events of the real world beyond the barbed wire, or below the Magic Mountain.4 Guided by the adage of 'divide and conquer', the New World series included numerous works aimed at reviving a uniquely Austrian sense of identity. For these purposes, the SPD chose Joseph Roth's Radetzkyrnarsch (1932), 'a historical novel with an Austrian background with special appeal to Austrian prisoners of war'. The Austrian section of the New World series featured as well two of Franz Werfel's books: Die Vierzig Tage des Musa Dagh/The Forty Days of Musa Dagh (1933), and Das Lied von Bern dette/The Song of Bernadette (1941). The SPD described The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, the story of the 1915 Armenian genocide perpetrated by the Turks, as a 'particularly appropriate' historical novel of 'resistance of a suppressed people against the brutal methods of their conqueror.' The novel featured, of course, a German as its most positive character. Dr Johannes Lepsius, a German protestant missionary, pleads incessantly, although futilely, with the Turkish authorities to cease their policy of genocide. As for Werfel's other selection, The Song of Bernadette, the SPD obviously hoped that this strong appeal to the latent national-Catholicism of many Austrian prisoners would serve as a tool for undermining any residues of pan-Germanism among the prisoners. In addition to this fostering of national differences through literature, the series attempted as well to slaughter the sacred cow of German militarism. Carl Zuckmayer's Der Hauptmann von Kopenick/The Captain of Kopenick (1930), 'a very amusing satire on the stupidity of the German adoration of uniforms and officialdom', was complemented by Arnold Zweig's Der Streit urn den Sergeanten Grischa/The Case of Sergeant Gris (1932), 'a novel which makes an impressive case against the war policies

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of the central powers of this last war'. This sub-section of anti-militarist literature included Erich Maria Remarque's great pacifist novel \m Westen Uichts Neues/All Quiet on the Western Front (1929), 'because of its objective account of the horrors of war' and the fact that it was 'extremely popular in Germany but was viciously attacked by the Nazis ever since its publication'. The German and Austrian authors selected for inclusion in the series shared other important denominators aside from their impeccable antiNazism. They had all demonstrated exemplary positive assessments of the United States, and most had resided at one time or another in the United States. Thomas Mann and Franz Werfel, both with multiple selections in the New World Series, spent the greater portion of the war years in California. Werfel, who died in the Californian diaspora, had made the transition from an outspoken critic of American materialism to one of its warmest advocates. The admiration was reciprocal. Millions of Americans read his Song of Bernadette after its acceptance by the Book-of-the-Month Club and Werfel reached the height of his popular success when a screen version of the book was filmed in 1943 (Fortin 1982). Carl Zuckmayer and Erich Maria Remarque had also resided in the United States during the war years. Zuckmayer's major claim to fame, and presumably an important reason for his inclusion in the New World Series, was his leadership as spokesman for the anti-Nazi literary movement (Pfaffer 1983: 122). Another noteworthy feature of the New World's German section was the disproportionate number of lews included in the series. Among the nine contemporary German-language authors chosen by the SPD, three were Jews: Franz Werfel, Leonhard Frank and Arnold Zweig. The Jewish selections studiously avoided introspective Jewish subjects, and were chosen apparently for their more ecumenical qualities. Werfel's compassionate portrayal of Catholicism in The Song of Bernadette was particularly in line with the didactic objectives of the SPD. Here was a member of National Socialism's most despised minority displaying empathy for, and comprehension of, a faith that had bound together many of its persecutors. Werfel's other selection, The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, was a particularly attractive novel due to its subtle interplay of Jewish and Christian elements and motifs drawn from the New and Old Testament, all focusing upon the ecumenical message of deliverance from oppression and communal responsibility.

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While the selection of German authors for the New World book series proceeded with no apparent complications, Howard Mumford Jones and his colleagues were quite unsure about the choices for appropriate American counterparts. Jones contended that any comparison between the 'German tradition of art and literature' and the supposedly vulgar nature of contemporary American literature—'determined by values in a land of billboards, headlines, commercial broadcasting, sky-writing, and the comic strip'—was quite self-defeating. It is ... unfortunate that Germans cannot be confidently referred to a body of contemporary writing admired and respected by the Americans themselves, writing which is not involved in violence or in abnormal psychology or in the tensions on which the modern novel has been stretched as on a rack ... If one refers the German reader to Jefferson, Emerson, Thoreau and the American classics, he is likely to ask: 'Very good, indeed. Now who follows them?' If one answers that the many notable literary names are not representative of American values, the German answer is: 'Why not? Do your critics admire what is essentially unrepresentative or are you whistling against the wind? If the flood tide of your literature is one picturing an America that is violent, restless, unhappy and ill at ease, how do we know, how shall we be assured these quieter and perhaps lesser books you want us to read are not the propaganda from your OWI (Office of War Information)?' (Mumford Jones 1945) Jones was not alone in these thoughts. Captain Walter Schoenstedt, the German-born, American officer charged with supervising the publication of Der Ruf, the POW newspaper distributed by the SPD among the prisoners, advocated the removal of all trappings of supposedly crass Americanisms from this widely distributed publication. Despite constant appeals from outside consultants and the prisoners themselves, Schoenstedt refused to incorporate comic strips and an extensive sports section in Der Ruf. Schoenstedt damned these items as the epitome of trivial American journalism. He argued that Germans in general, and the POWs in particular, would never treat the United States seriously so long as its most visible cultural manifestations were frivolous. In the eyes of many POWs all things American were lightweight, unimportant, fleeting. 'If we had a full page of funnies,' Walter Schoenstedt explained, 'we would get the wrong type of reaction from the prisoners of war like: Ah, ha American culture!'5

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A partial solution to this acute sense of under-culture was to avoid 'trivial' contemporary American fiction as much as possible, and focus instead on non-fiction for the American contributions to the New World series. Out of the original twenty-four titles in the New World series, only five were the works of American authors. None appeared to belong to the category of American classics; all were non-fiction, or semi-autobiographical. Stephen Vincent Benet, modern American storyteller, and creator of such seminal tales as The Devil and Daniel Webster, led the list. From all of Benet's wonderful tales and exciting panoramas of Americana, the SPD chose America (1944), an unfinished and pedestrian documentary survey of American culture and society, published posthumously by the Office of War Information (OW1) 'Explicitly written with the aim of making the foreigner familiar with the main features of American history and American life', America was retranslated and presumably purged of any ambiguous prose 'to fit the needs of the prisoners of war'.6 The two other works of a documentary nature were Wendell Willkie's One World (1943), a political manifesto of internationalism, and John Scott's Behind the Urals (1942), the very positive reminiscences of a young American worker in the Soviet Union. Both these books were chosen as manifest proof that isolationism, another of America's supposedly pernicious qualities, was, according to the SPD, 'definitely dead'.7 Given the acute sense of under-culture that seemed to characterize the faculty of the SPD, it comes as no surprise that only two works of contemporary American fiction were included in the New World series: William Saroyan's Human Comedy (1943), 'a fine picture of war-time America by an American author of foreign stock', and Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), which the SPD described laconically as 'a representative novel of an American writer'. Hemingway was a fortuitous choice. He was a highly popular American author in pre-war Germany, appealing to many different sectors in German society. He was also one of the most widely translated American authors until the banning of his books in 1933. An additional reason for Hemingway's inclusion in the New World Series was, presumably, his prominent critical attitude toward fascism and National Socialism, as well as his ambivalent attitude towards institutionalized communism— the nemesis of the American creed. In fact, liberal Germans admired Hemingway because he appeared to display animosity towards all forms

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of rigid ideologies. Writing on the eve of Hemingway's disappearance from German bookshelves, the literary critic Max Ditreich praised the American author for the elevation of his characters' personal feelings above the ideological struggle portrayed in his books. The hero's individuality was a recurring motif; the typical Hemingway saga avoided overriding subservience to a greater cause. Howard Mumford lones, the renowned Harvard member of the SPD staff, concurred. He called For Whom the Bell Tolls 'one of the finest and richest documents of the last decade', noting that the novel's most redeeming quality was its ability to rise 'out of partisanship into imaginative comprehensiveness'.8 Jones was particularly intrigued by the fact that Hemingway's hero, Robert Jordan, never displayed unquestioning ideological commitment, even though he fought for the communist cause. Quite the contrary: Jordan—Hemingway's alter ego— acknowledged quite openly a variety of other motives for fighting other than political allegiance. Hemingway's representation of his main characters as free spirits rather than embodiments of political ideas served a central facet of the SPD's re-education program: the linking of all political evils to an uncritical acceptance of rigid ideological dogma of either left or right. For Whom the Bell Tolls reiterated the central tenet of the SPD's curriculum that unbending 'moral principles', rather than the acceptance of compromise and 'constructive' ad hoc assessments of crises, were the causes of war and human tragedy.9 The SPD's various learning materials hammered home the idea that the American system had succeeded because it was based on an ideology of improvisation, individualism and ad hoc solutions to crises, rather than subservience to principle. Hemingway illustrated this point neatly and with great literary skill. The many similarities between For Whom the Bell Tolls and Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain represented another important reason for Hemingway's inclusion. Literary scholar William Adair has suggested that the similarities are so numerous 'that it is easy to believe that Hemingway found in Mann's big book something of a model'. Both books are, indeed, novels of education that take place atop a mountain. Adair points out that Robert Jordan's initial contact with the Spanish guerrillas in their mountainous hideout bears striking resemblance to Hans Castrop's encounter with life at the Berghof sanatorium. The education of the main heroes—Hans Castropand Robert Jordan—occurs

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by their experiencing of a series of unexpected, powerful events, introspective memory and their exposure to a series of dominant characters who represent various attitudes towards life. Jordan realizes that the guerrillas, who have seen no action in three months, are out of touch with the war; they are withdrawn from time, motion, the change that has been going on in the war below. They lie in a hermetic (one of Mann's words) atmosphere, 'dying of boredom' ... tough they 'eat very well' (meals are a major time killer at the Berghof) ... they are among the soon-to-die, the virtually moribund living on a hermetic, removed mountaintop ... Mann's book features the same basic situation ... (His characters) live in an estranged, hermetic atmosphere, cut off from the flow of time, and events on the flatland. Thus, they do not realize war is coming, but when it does, it will touch them, too (Adair 1984: 435-36). The books' parting shots are strikingly similar as well. The two heroes from these central books of the SPD's literary program eventually descend from the mountain and die a somewhat futile although inevitable death. The inclusion of William Saroyan alongside Hemingway had little to do with literary merit or notoriety in Germany. Saroyan was unknown outside of the United States; The Human Comedy was Saroyan's first venture in writing a full-scale novel. Moreover, this tale of wartime in small-town California received scathing criticism when first published in the United States. Wallace Stegner described the novel's moral that 'good always drives out sickness and evil, and that love conquers all', as naive and trite (Stegner 1943: 28). William Philips, who wrote a highly unfavourable review for the Nation, characterized Saroyan's world as an affected, overstocked and 'enormous Five and Ten seen through the eyes of a child'. In the course of his uncharitable review, Philips did, however grudgingly, acknowledge the wide appeal of the novel and, presumably, the underlying reasons for its inclusion in the New World series for German POWs. He [Saroyan) has a touch—as the doctors used to say—of everything, a little of Eddie Guest, Billy Sunday, Ring Lardner, Henry Miller, even Hemingway. Hence he has been able to appeal to so many different kinds of readers and keep alive a sense of uncertainty as to whether he is a genuine enfant terrible, or merely an engaging raconteur (Philips 1943: 318-19).

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Such wide appeal, as well as Saroyan's studious avoidance of branding any one person, nation or ethnic group as 'bad' or incorrigible, made The Human Comedy a particularly appealing choice for re-education. The novel was all the more attractive, because, like other material employed by the SPD, it portrayed ethnic and class divisions in the United States as non-issues. The America sought by the SPD was represented vividly in the ancient history classroom of old Miss Hicks, where the poor rub shoulders with the rich, and Catholic immigrants sit side by side with old Protestant stock. When, during the course of her lessons, tempers flare between the rich and the poor, the newcomer and the native-born, Miss Hicks swiftly places these altercations in their correct proportions. Whether one of my children is rich or poor, Catholic or Protestant or Jew, white or black or yellow, brilliant or slow, genius or simpleminded, is of no matter to me, if there is humanity in him—if he has a heart—if he loves truth and honor—if he respects his inferiors, and love his superiors ... each of you will begin to be truly human when, in spite of your natural dislike of one another, you will still respect one another. That is what it means to be civilized (Saroyan 1943: 72-7). It is, of course, quite unclear if the POW reading public unravelled the rationale behind the choice of this reading material or even noticed such issues as the authors' backgrounds, the hidden messages in the texts or the overarching American designs behind the selections. In fact, the SPD never attempted any systematic monitoring of its literary program. Quite predictably, the reports of the SPD contained very positive assessments of the reading material. These reports were accompanied by a small selection of made-to-order comments from cooperative inmates. An unidentified German officer from Camp Concordia, Kansas, stated in typical fulsome fashion that the appearance of the series 'was the cause here of general rejoicing and gratitude'. In lavishly worded prose, the anonymous reader ordained the series as 'a ray of light', which would bring 'comfort and strength to all who do not close their hearts and minds to the signs of the coming new world (Neue Welt)'.10 Not everybody within the ranks of the SPD shared these assessments. Howard Mumford Jones, in fact, remembered his experimentation with indoctrination through literature in quite negative terms. The problem of the literary approach to indoctrination, Jones summarized in an article written after the dismantling of the re-education program, was the erroneous idea that one could invoke a democratic disposition by means

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of a carefully chosen list of books, lones argued that the most severe limitation in such literary exercises for either 'cultural understanding' or indoctrination was the so-called tyranny of the reader. He explained that even the great works of literature produced multiple interpretations, which were more a product of an individual reader's frame of mind than of some abstract cultural common denominator. One could not rely on any standard evocative message in great works, Jones stated quite categorically: Take as an instance the case of Homer. Consider the image of Homer in the mind of Virgil, in the mind of Chaucer, in the mind of George Chapman, in the mind of Madame Dacier, in the mind of Alexander Pope and in the mind of Lawrence of Arabia! In the course of this wonderful transformation we do not so much use Homer as a means of understanding Latin, medieval, Elizabethan, neo-classic and modern cultures as use these cultures to understand the minds of those who understood or misunderstood Homer! (Mumford Jones 1947: 315). Despite the limitations of this or any other aspect of the re-education program, Jones and his colleagues still maintained an unshaken belief in the exemplary significance of American culture. Moreover, Jones's critique of literature as tool of re-education never challenged the assumption that a rational exposition of ideas would bring about an American-inspired democratization of German society. As so many of the SPD faculty had hoped, the United States did indeed achieve the role of cultural arbitrator in the post-war years, but the cultural trailblazing of the post-war years was not accomplished through the medium of literature or any other trapping of high culture. The source of American cultural hegemony was the rapid and methodical spread of an American brand of massified, popular culture, that very potent, and levelizing cultural force in which the mobilized intellectuals of the SPD had placed little faith. It was only behind the barbed wire of POW camps, where a fairly docile group of prisoners tried to live up to the expectation of their jailers, that these humanist educators could entertain the illusion of high culture as a potent form of cultural change in the post-war world. The faculty of the SPD had charged into the battle for the hearts and minds of the enemy armed with the wrong weapons. Ironically, the war was won without them, and despite their efforts.

Star Trek Old and New: From the Alien Embodied to the Alien Imagined Karin Blair

In the USA Star Trek (ST) began in 1966 as a television series that, by the time it was cancelled in 1969, totalled 79 episodes. On reruns the series attracted an unprecedentedly large and loyal fan following that spawned conventions and realia marketing for years. In addition there have been six Star Trek films. Reruns of the original series continue, only somewhat diminished after the start in September 1987 of a new series, Star Trek: The Next Generation (STTNG). This has now been supplemented by Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (STDS9) and Star Trek: Voyager (STV). The amount of Star Trek that Americans (and others) can not only absorb but relish seems remarkable. In all of these manifestations the show continues to explore the boundary that lies between the known and the unknown. The first formulation of its mission was to go where no 'man' has gone before (ST), but then no 'one' in STTNG and now in STV we have a woman as captain. In outer space the possibilities for imagining alien beings are unlimited. The starship Enterprise episodes encountered anything from robots to gaseous blobs roaming the universe. In the later spin-offs many of these life forms take their place among the crew. The original Klingons were the bad guys always ready to kill for questions of honour, then STTNG incorporated Worf into the crew. The image of ultimate evil in STTNG was the Borg, dehumanized beings that become machine-like having lost any capacity for reflection, no sense of self or responsibility. Whether or not they could learn was the issue on at least two episodes

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in which one was given a name and invited to cultivate a sense of identity. In STDS9 the setting is a space station, no longer a starship on a mission of exploration, and the lem'Hadar are the embodiments of unlimited evil, no longer based in their physical natures but in their training by the Dominion, all-powerful shapeshifters like Odo, the station's security chief. In STV evil is represented by the Vidiians, a people afflicted with the phage, a disease that erodes their body parts. Obsessed with their survival they comb the quadrant seeking to use others as spare parts. Culture comes to play a more and more explicit role. In STDS9 there are continuous tensions among the many beings that live on and pass through the space station. Captain Sisko's job is to protect and maintain more than explore; business as usual takes on new importance as a basis for continuity. For example, even though Sisko is taken to be a holy Emissary by Major Kira and the Bajorans, in the episode entitled Destiny, he continues on with his mission in the process of which everyone discovers that prophecy can have many meanings. It must be explored just as distant planets have been. Similarly although Klingons have been at peace, they remain restless and ready to go to war, as is their nature. Culture may be a veneer but frequently it suffices. In STV an encounter with a mysterious old man called the Caretaker has thrown the ship 75,000 light years from home and the motivation to return home commonly overrides the mission to explore. If in STDS9 we have the vision of a world where diverse beings are thrown upon each other in a situation of mutual dependency, the Federation is still on call. In the STV, the ship is out of hailing range of the Federation, and hence the crew must assume responsibility for itself. There is no higher authority to turn to in cases of criminal acts or negotiations or desire for career trajectories. Authority becomes localized. Years ago, in a book which attempted to analyse the structures of the original show in order to explain its popularity, I tried to take into account this vast potential for diversity among characters (Blair 1979. The cubal model was later developed independently in Blair 1983.). Such diversity has in fact remained throughout all the spin-offs. The process of analysing the various 'Others' encountered on the Star Trek series requires a model that could accommodate all characters, in spite of their differences. I identified an analytical matrix calling on three dimensions: duration in time, extension in space and animation by an

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energy source. The liminal figure, Spock, was crucial as a bridge in relation to such a vast collection of others. As the resident half-human alien Spock is the character through whom contact with the Alien, often by means of a 'mind meld', typically allows the evening's episode to be brought to a successful resolution. For example, in the episode, The Devil in the Dark, the Horta, a kind of animated silicon creature, has been helping miners by feeding on rock they wish to get rid of. When they break into the chamber that holds her eggs, which look like ovoid rocks, she attacks them. Once Spock learns this by means of a mind-meld with the grieving Horta, a mutually beneficial agreement between the two parties can easily be reached. On other occasions he has direct mental contact with people from other planets who reveal to him situations otherwise unknowable. In ST the character of Spock was unique in bridging oppositions that usually remained separate. This binary pattern is not surprising. Not simply during the Cold War but through all of its history the Western world has tended to dichotomous ways of thinking. One knows one thing in opposition to the other. The dichotomies created by this kind of conceptualization are almost always subjected to a hierarchy of value—one binary pole is valued more than its opposite: masculinity over femininity, youth over age, white over black and so on. Spock, however, had both masculine intellect and feminine intuition, both youthful vigor and ageful wisdom, both terran humanness and extraterrestrial otherness. By scrambling traditional stereotypes, he implicitly called them into question. Some stereotypes, resulting from the simplified applications of a symbol system to these dichotomies, are rooted in levels of experience that we can change; for example, clothing. Some, more insidious, however, claim to reflect our physical existence, nature itself. Thus some cultural values have come to seem based on actual age, sex and race characteristics. Agefulness, for example, is commonly assumed to be acquired as part of the one-way process of aging. Gender distinctions between masculine and feminine appear to be as exclusive as the physical differences between the two sexes. Distinctions between insiders and outsiders have often been rooted in physical characteristics such as race. On a military vessel, even in the distant future, it is not easy to imagine a unique hybrid being like Spock; his very presence opens fundamental issues.

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On the one hand ST as popular entertainment portrays a world shaped by familiar stereotypes: women crew members are revealingly if imaginatively clad, Kirk likes his alien flirtations and frequently uses them to obtain needed information. On the other hand ST as science fiction has a post-sexist freedom to modify biology and thereby release some attached stereotypes to be independently examined. Such stereotypes that claim a basis in nature can be removed from the realm of biology, thanks to the imaginative license to manipulate matter, and hence returned to the realm of culture, which is open to rethinking and change. In the process one can see that Spock's personal characteristics have no necessary basis in sex, age or race regardless of the apparent grounding of many stereotypes in 'nature'. Spock's ability to 'mind-meld', however, is based on his special hybrid Vulcan-human biology. The gulf between T and the 'Other' has been bridged but still by relying on biologically conceived talents as opposed to the more cultural concerns that will surface in the later series. As a composite character, Spock counters any specific stereotype with its opposite—masculine computer-like intellect with feminine intuition, for example—thereby inviting us to see our stereotypes for the arbitrary concatenations they are. In addition he makes impossible the familiar strategy of explanation by reference to a second 'real' layer of perceptions and judgments. He cannot be second guessed: no one can explain his feminine intuition ('mind meld' in narrative terms), for example, by referring to repression, which would give priority to his masculinity. His sexuality is made up of both masculine and feminine characteristics, neither can be considered primary or used to explain the other. By taking space as the final frontier, ST may be showing us something about the everyday encounters with 'Others' that twentieth-century technology is making possible. Whereas the frontier in the Western delineated the savage essential 'Other', no such easy binary distinction applies today. There are too many 'Others' and options for simple dichotomies to flourish. The easy recipe of conversion, expulsion or extermination that has been applied to the 'Other' is appropriately replaced by the Enterprise's ongoing voyage of discovery. Fascination with the frontier as unknown returns us to our own preconceptions. Outer space as a final frontier for familiar stereotypes is returning us to the inner space where generalizations and preferences flourish. The second television series STTNG, which ran for seven seasons

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starting in 1987, continues the trajectory of the original: the starship Enterprise continues its voyages of discovery. It has, however, separated Spock's various capacities and redistributed them among characters of the 'proper' sex and age according to traditional stereotyping. In STTNG, the android Data has Spock's intellect and the Betazoid Counselor Troi his intuition, making their physical nature the basis of their key characteristics. As a Betazoid, that is, a member of a clairvoyant race, Troi has been born with her intuitive powers, and Data as an android truly is a computer whereas Spock was only likened to one. Although the irreplaceable Spock as composite has been lost, STTNG does presume a more sophisticated audience in thematic terms and moves into the new territory of exploring cultural questions as such, without the need for imagining them as based in nature. In the episode Suddenly Human the situation arises in which culture is explicitly taken as more important than biology. A human raised on an alien and more barbaric planet still wants to return there and is ultimately permitted to do so because it is 'home'. Acculturation, not biology, is acknowledged as having shaped his identity. In STTNG characters are often animated less by their inherited characteristics than by the unpredictability of people who think, feel and choose in the process of acting. Among the STTNG Enterprise crew, the chief engineer, Geordie, who is blind but sees through surfaces with a brain-enhancing visor, must weigh whether or not he regrets not having normal human vision. Counselor Troi is challenged at different times in opposite ways: circumstances at one time provoke an overload in her intuitive capacities, leaving her unable to turn them off. In another episode conditions cause her intuitions to cease temporarily and she cannot turn them on. The character most open to questioning his origins and limits, however, is the android, Data. For example, in various episodes Data is involved in encounters with avatars of 'Homo Faber'. As an android, he is especially interested in his maker and his not-quite-identical twin who has turned out to be antisocial. God-like functions and the power associated with them are central to numerous episodes. In the process, a more cultural view of identity evolves. Machines are accepted as part of life, and therefore accessible to cultural networks. In the case of Data his self-consciousness results in uniqueness, which, in turn, preserves him from being exploited as

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one instance of an essentially disposable category. In this instance it would be machine vs. human rather than the more conventional oppositions of black vs. white or female vs. male. Data's humanity rests on his awareness of having a unique place in a communication network, not on his nature, whether biological or physical. Although man-made, Data as a unique being cannot be exploited by people in the name of research or efficient use of resources (as in the episode The Measure of a Man). The lines drawn are not around human/machine but social exploitation through the reduction of unique beings to expendable types, whether they be male/female, young/old, black/white or human/ mechanical. Self-conscious experience and communication makes the human and the unique—the uniquely human. The concept cluster 'Homo Faber' is itself under scrutiny. The challenge is less to make things than to make oneself, along with a livable environment. If we are the sum-total of relations we make, then self and environment must go beyond co-existence to cooperation. The Enterprise encounters fewer 'beings', which in the old series frequently resembled deities of the past, but instead renders more 'forces' accessible through interacting with them. In the process, conventional boundaries are blurred: selves and others interpenetrate, as do even life and non-life. In another episode, entitled Darrnok, we can see representative issues: Darmok's language is based on metaphor, a medium of communication for which a shared cultural base is needed in order to grasp the vocabulary. The episode develops because both captains share a faith that by sharing a common experience they will through the reciprocity of their situation gain mutual understanding and respect. Captain Picard at the end does not know if he has made friends with the new culture, but at least they are not enemies. Each respects the other as a being in a communication network that can cultivate meaning. STDS9, which began even before STTNG left the screen, takes place on a space station that guards a wormhole, a variable-geometry space tunnel to distant dimensions of space. Maintaining peace in this sensitive area of access to other quadrants involves mediating between various groups, especially between the imperialistic Cardassians and the Bajorans whom they tried for years to occupy and dominate. In addition there are innumerable space inhabitants who come to visit or to trade, including the quintessential big-eared capitalists, the Ferengi.

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We see the world of outer space through those whose paths cross this outpost. In STDS9 episode Hippocratic Oath the doctor, Bashir, and the chief engineer, O'Brien (a transplant from STTNG), are taken off by Jem'Hadar rebels in a manner similar to that which whisked Captain Picard off the starship in Darrnok. On a distant planet they are desperately searching for a medical cure that will give them freedom from the Jem'Hadar. While the medical science officer becomes involved in his experiments and wants to stay on to complete them, O'Brien remains skeptical and finally destroys the experiments and with them the hope for a cure. Because of the preemptory manner in which they were taken off to work on this project, he could not be sure of the intentions of the others and was not willing to risk his return home to his family on the space station for the sake of science or a Hippocratic oath. Here we see a certain tension between a mission to gain knowledge of the unknown as opposed to persevering, of returning home to live with one's family. In the stationary world of STDS9, the representation of gender and age also have new things in store for us. Jadzia Dax is apparently a young woman serving as science officer. As a Trill, however, a race electing some to be symbiants, she is host to one whose longevity has persisted already through the lifetimes of several hosts, some appearing male, some appearing female. Each time the composite being enjoys the accumulated experiences and knowledge of the present being and its previous hosts. More than a mind-meld, it might be called a beingmeld. On the original ST Dr McCoy's fussing about Spock and his ears seems benign ethnocentrism compared with the rages of envy Dax encounters in one episode in which a jealous Trill who was refused symbiant status attempts to force her to give up her status at the risk of her life. Similarly she has to deal with the negative side of a former host to the symbiant who was overly susceptible to the power his new status gave him. The dark side of melding with others is carried a step further in STV in the episode Meld in which the Vulcan Security Chief Tuvok melds with a criminal. His good intentions, to help the criminal control his impulses, are not sufficient to prevent him from being overwhelmed by the very feelings he wished to help the other control. If the lines between the 1 and the Other, the young and the old, the male and the female

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have been blurred in STDS9, especially in the character of Dax, in STV the ambiguity spreads to moral issues. The Voyager, hurled 75,000 light years from the earth by the Caretaker, needs the help of other civilizations whose technology might speed up its return to earth. In several episodes, hope seemed to emerge that some new contact would help them, but in the end it proves empty if not costly. In Alliances the crew finds itself caught between warring factions and attempts to mediate, of course, with its own interest of creating a stable environment for itself as well as the others. Having combined forces with the side that seemed most 'like us', Captain Janeway is brutally betrayed when the allies try to use the alliance to destroy the others, showing that they cannot move beyond the warring mentality. In the course of the program there was much discussion of whether or not the Federation guidelines of non-intervention could apply so far out in space; in the end they prove applicable as Janeway refers to them as the ship leaves the area and the factions to their own devices. Thus we are left with an image of the contemporary situation: no longer is there one force able to impose a structure of the variety of cultures and people that are aware of being different, often at odds with one another, yet mutually dependent for survival. In Cold Fire the crew of Voyager meet the mate of the Caretaker, who blames them for killing her 'husband', the being who is responsible for their being so far from home. Although, according to Captain Janeway, he died of natural causes, his mate blames her. Janeway, who could kill the female, does not. The Caretaker's mate is shocked at such mercy, since she had just tried to destroy Voyager. Captain Janeway, however, reflects that the mate is now the only known being with the power to help them get home. The ambiguity of moral issues is also present in the framing of the quest which retains the elements of exploration and knowledge but situated now in the larger context of going home. For example, mercy was shown to the Caretaker's mate but also enlightened self-interest was at work since she could help them later on. The role of humanitarian doctor is now given not to a human but to the medical emergency holograph, Dr Zimmerman, whose memory banks contain the medical wisdom of numerous worlds and cultures. Instead of motherly McCoy we have a virtual reality. At first, he complains about being the doctor on the ship since the emergency medical

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kit was created to help in emergencies, but since there is no doctor on board, he has to take over. Why there was no doctor taken on the ship even for a short trip seems to indicate poor preparedness. There is no sense of promotion involved in Dr Zimmerman's advancement since here on Voyager every one has been thrown together by accident rather than Star Trek Academy protocol and planning. There are Maquis rebels incorporated into the crew as well as a remarkable array of space wanderers. The doctor is involved in many discussions about his programming, which of course includes adaptation to new circumstances. Like Data he goes through a humanizing process: he begins to feel the need for a name in order to be treated with respect. Unlike Data he does not seem as concerned with his 'father' perhaps because his body can be turned off at any time and stored in the ship's computer. Therefore, if Voyager ever did return home it would have to sacrifice the doctor whose home is only that part of the ship which has holographic capabilities. In one episode, Life Signs, he uses holography to create an alternative body for a Vidiian woman while he repairs her body. This species, the Vidiians, has been presented as genuinely repulsive: afflicted with the phage, which eats away parts of the body, the entire population is devoted to scavenging the quadrant, killing whomsoever it can to pillage their bodies for spare parts in order to keep their people alive. The Vidiian woman's holographic body is beautiful, giving us a glimpse of what the people were like before they got sick. This individual woman rises above her rapacious fellow citizens by asking a voluntary donation of brain tissue that can help her to survive. In the act of asking rather than taking she shows an awareness of her condition and dependence on others. Half-Klingon Lieutenant Torres, who earlier in her life had suffered medical experiments at the hands of the Vidiians, was reluctant to cooperate until approached with respect. The Vidiian woman and the doctor fall in love, and enjoy the time they have together accepting their own limitations. The doctor cannot leave a very small part of the ship although within it he can create many virtual realities, she must return to her sick and ugly body and finally go home. One could see a more profound pluralism emerging at least as seen in the popular culture of these Star Treks. Pluralism requires that we find in others and otherness recognizably human possibilities, not incomprehensible alienness. Differences of outlooks and values involved

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may clash, but in the long run they co-exist. It is through such interactions that they become mutually comprehensible both in the social environment and in the individual consciousness. Darrnok ends with Picard's going off to reread the old epics of his culture; encountering the alien culture has given him new information and a new language, but more important is the experienced context, a new sense of the importance of cultural vocabulary, hence returning to familiar human classics. Whereas the differences represented by the other culture remain, they are no longer purely external or incomprehensible, as was encouraged by the older habit of basing culture in nature. Rather they represent human potentials which we must continuously encounter and interact with in the process of creating our own human networks and identities. If in ST and STTNG the direction was to move towards pluralism and open-ended diversity, in STDS9 and STV we return to a more bounded world, a stable dwelling or memories of home, however different it may be for people of different races and cultures. The human networks and meanings that serve as the matrices for our identities seem more fragile and circumscribed. From Spock's unforgettable mind-meld with the Horta we have passed through many visions of the alien to return to the eloquent image in Life Signs of the holographic 'emergency medical kit' dancing with the Vidiian 'collection of spare parts'. Everyone likes to feel at a unique juncture in history. One could see this moment as having a unique mission, to find a modus vivendi no longer based on one model imposed from the outside but on an inner attitude that can include humour, respect, politeness and a concern that goes beyond tolerant indifference or military protocol. Captain Janeway brings to her command a great deal of feeling; decisions are quickly taken often on the basis of gut reactions, as in Maneuvers when she decides to go after her Native American First Officer Chakotay, against her better judgment. In this way she is more like Kirk than Picard or Sisko, but dealing with a very different reality which reflects the changes our world has gone through since the sixties. Maybe one could say that the latest question raised by the final frontier concerns the same issues Las Casas (Wilson 1993) was reflecting on in the sixteenth century when he framed the question in terms of the voyages of exploration to the New World and whether or not the savages had souls, and if they did, they could not be treated as commodities.

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Soul may be something we all have but that needs a great deal of care and cultivation. Having reached a certain limit in outward exploration, we must come to know ourselves as collaborators in the making of our own networks and identities, which requires closure as well as openness, moral feeling and human decency as well as pragmatism, expansiveness and intelligent curiosity. Above all perhaps an acceptance of ambiguity is needed; values can give warmth as well as clarity. The Star Trek mission, to go where no one has gone before, has returned us to our own inner spaces. One could see the latest question raised by explorations in terms of how to respond when confronted by an awareness of irreducible difference concerning that which bounds and binds individuals however they are conceived of and wherever they are. In the United States tolerance is frequently based on pragmatic reciprocity rather than moral philosophy: if you respect my differences, I will respect yours. Star Trek can be seen as testing this model in a world where the lure of new discoveries has been tempered by the need for making and maintaining a habitable local environment. On the one hand, once the 'Other' has become ordinary the problem of tolerance becomes one of concern that is no longer only a matter of individual personal choice but one that involves the social environment as an interactive network, something one might call family-like. On the other hand, science fiction encourages a larger perspective on our immediate reality by presenting us with Others. At least in the West we still need to know ourselves in relation to others whether they be real or fictional, actual or virtual.

The Bohemian Transformed: America, the Malcontent and the Alterations of the 1960s )ohn Dean

First Moves: Definition Occasionally a new way to represent the nature of human existence comes along, a new symbol that produces a change in vision wherein disadvantage is turned to advantage and the inferior becomes superior. Such was the figure of the bohemian. When first adopted into the language and culture of Germany, France, Britain and America in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, there materialized a human dream of liberation by sheer force of will and creativity. The degraded Gypsy vagabond—the rejected, stateless, inhuman, Cain-like, eternal wanderer, the bohemiens—became the name for the creative noble savage.1 The tradition of the bohemian is the product of a romantic world vision: a nonsystematic philosophy of life which believes in eternal realities, universal truths, honest emotions, an imaginative sympathy for the down-and-out, and the world of Nature. Bohemianism is deeply opposed to the harsh, work-a-day realities of the middle-class, ever-industrializing and industrious world. The bohemian is the romantic who does it for love, not money. He is not a machine; he is human. In principle he does not serve the world of material appearances, but the greater reality of Truth. The bohemian is fired by the indecent difference that improves. 'Improvement makes straight roads; but the crooked roads without improvement are roads of Genius.'2 In Western Europe and America, bohemians traditionally served as a

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negative reference group for middle-class society. Its values, norms and attitudes were guides to what should be rejected and opposed. The bohemian was a cultural minority whose identity was based on the special interest of creative freedom. It was the social category of people who lost control of their emotions, took leave of their good senses. Historical Context, National Identity To exist, bohemianism had to transcend the boundaries of nation or language. And in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it was particularly encouraged by the negative reinforcement of stark, political contrast. This contrast was specially acute in the political reality of the 1930s and 1940s (and repeated in the political rhetoric of the 1960s and 1970s). For bohemianism is the diametric opposite of fascism. As Mussolini's first Minister of Education, Giovanni Gentile, argued, fascism is rooted in the individual who is nation and fatherland, which is a moral law, binding together individuals and the generations into a tradition and a mission, suppressing the instinct for a life enclosed within the brief round of pleasure in order to restore within duty a higher life free from the limits of time and space; a life in which the individual, through the denial of himself, through the sacrifice of his own private interests, through death itself, realizes that completely spiritual existence in which his value as a man lies. 3 Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's propaganda minister, repeated and reinforced the same ideas with regard to the fascist control of artistic output. Fascism of the Italian and German World War 11 kind meant self-sacrifice for the nation, army discipline, state monopoly of communication, collective organization dominated by the cult of the leader. Society's great enemy in this fascist context were all forms of expression that did not live up to the ideal unity of the nation, that were thus 'entarte'—degenerate, debased, contaminated (a critical sentiment uncomfortably echoed in 60s establishmentarian rhetoric about 'dirty hippies' or US Vice-President Spiro T. Agnew's famous assessment of TV journalists as 'an effete corps of impudent snobs'). Bohemianism, in contrast, is insistently democratic. It encourages an individualistic, romantic personality that promotes self-advancement rather than sacrifice to broad social or institutional goals. Thus

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bohemianism assigns individuals their place in society on the basis of their developed talent, rather than family or accident of birth or place in a hierarchically organized and centralized state authority. Bohemian values are essential to a social and economic world system in which people are encouraged to find their own way of doing things. This is the personification of the romantic urge to seize the moment, play a dramatic part, prevent life from escaping you. And it must be done creatively, with style. Modern, democratic society becomes a vast, common playhouse of style. The power of style becomes an expression of the brilliant, attractive, emotional masks that the modern creator fabricates and the modern audience can use. 'Before Romanticism, literary style is shared discourse. After Romanticism, style is persona' (Paglia 1992: 59). Play the bohemian for each bohemian acts out a small, turbulent Eden of possibilities—planting a paradise, tempted by serpents. This is subversive, not Judaeo-Christian. The bohemian life story does not begin with Adam and Eve, but with Prometheus and Pandora. Populist Bohemianism Over time the bohemian extended beyond music hall, theatre, movie studio, academy or cafe. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries they are the Romantics, Transcendentalists, Pre-Raphaelites, Flappers and Sheiks, Dadaists, Surrealists, the Lost Generation, Boogie-Woogie, Swing, Hep, Zazou, Angry Young Men, existentialists and existentialism, beats and beatniks, hip, hipsters and hippies, flower power, the counterculture, the underground, the movement, the yippie, the funky, the punk, rappers, ravers, hair-whipping grungers and heavy metal freaks, the whole, cool, colourful, video-sizzled world of MTV, down to the hyped-up hip of mass-marketed, commodified, 'Woodstock 94. Live it. Love, Pepsi'.4 For, over time, two social groups that existed as cultural sidestreams and parallel attitudes, that reflected similar distrust for established, adult society—artistic outsiders and youthful protesters, artistic unrest and youthful disdain—eventually merged into a powerful mainstream expression. A unified, populist bohemianism came of age toward the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. Groups of the Unknown, the Mediocre, the Amateur and the Real accumulated and developed from The Dial and The Masses to Ramparts and Rolling Stone.

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This huge social and cultural combination was ultimately drawn together in unprecedented gatherings by the politics of anti-establishment unrest that drove the 1960s in Western Europe and America, a 1960s merger encouraged by the commercial seductions of fad and style, the entertainment industry and the integration propaganda of US mass media.5 This development confuses bohemians of the old school. In his autobiography, Bohemia: Where Art, Angst, Love and Strong Coffee Meet (1993),

American author Herbert Gold tried to insist that two essential elements for bohemianism have been devotion to one of the seven arts and poverty. Then, as he mulled it over, Gold was not so sure. Must bohemian equal artist-, must artist equal bohemian? Why should the bohemian be poor? The process has become more supple, more malleable, than this old, single-minded equation. Bohemianism has become a multiple equation. As Gold looked around, he realized the net must be cast wider. In all honesty, bohemia has now become the few and the many: 'Bohemia is not a secret society limited to actual practising artists, innovators, and revolutionaries.' The audience fits in. For 'consumers, life-stylers, and hopefuls, those who survive best in a tentative and prospective atmosphere, form the Bohemian masses'. One must see bohemianism as a popular, mass phenomenon (Gold 1993: 12, 50). Updating Bohemianism For most of the past two hundred years, with bohemianism one was talking about either a middle-class luxury (those who had the free time and the money to spend), the periodic needs of the young or the concerns of the rootless artist, the romantic vagabond, the homeless psychotic. What has an accumulation of two centuries of exuberant bohemian eclecticism led up to? First, like many a plant, god or spiritual-organic growth, it died and was then reborn. This happened in the postwar years of World War 11. Postwar years are always times of turbulence. An army comes marching home that has either been tragically emptied or joyously inflated. The wake and aftermath of World War 11 was no different from any other postwar period in its essentials, but very different in its manner and style of transition to postwar life. A very ordinary, unusual people were at the helm of Western civilization: the Americans. They came home

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the wealthy winners and appropriated many forms of advancement and pleasure. They took possession of the right to mass, creative expression. In late 1950s America, Kenneth Rexroth warned that bohemianism was becoming extinct as it became a popular, cultural trend. Many try, but few are chosen. You cannot fake the Real. This danger was always present in the USA with the amateur bohemianism in the middle class patronage of the arts or in youth protest groups that threatened to dilute the whiskey of genuine, creative dissension with the water of their whine. But museums are dusty corners of society and generations of sheiks and flappers settle down to Babbitthood. These forms of creative turbulence, the threat of new creative forms, kept their place, slowed their pace, went away. By mid-century, however, mass bohemianism spread. The creative protest natural to the type became another, optional lifestyle like suburban living, church going, union membership or record collecting. Rexroth insisted: You're going to kill it. It cannot go mass. It is not done this way. There has to be a circulation of the elites even among the outcast. Genuine creativity must be earned. It should not be reduced to a hobby, to advertising, to fun, to amiable forms of self-expression. In 1958 he wrote, Do you think jazz is something you just get up and blow out of a cloud of pod? Do you think being beat comes easy? You don't get that way growing an embouchure moustache and painting nail holes on your hands and feet. Do you know about Lester Young, clinging to his saxophone in the army stockades in the piney woods of the savage South? Do you know that story? (Rexroth 1987: 76) Guard the original, the real, the unbridled creative impulse. Beware the danger in claiming creative, bohemian equality. The man was not a snob. Tempered by leftist-populism of the 1930s, champion of the beats, an open-minded, unaffiliated free thinker and well-respected social critic, Rexroth just feared for the life of his kind. But, in retrospect, it is surprising that the destruction he foresaw took so long to happen. The inert mass of a nation ... is in its middle section. The decent, average people who do the nation's work in cities and on the land are worked upon and shaped by minorities at both ends—the best and the worst (Hoffer 1951: II, 29).' And there, for years, had been bohemia just at the edge of society working upon the growing, increasingly educated middle classes in America through their literature, art, and teachers.

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The American ritual of youth from the popular figures of Henry Fleming, Ethan Frome and Nick Carraway onward had been of people encouraged to presume too much—however tragic the outcome. Add to this brew the American penchant for disobedience. And find, at root, the romantic period that gave birth to the bohemian as it perpetuated the legend and glory of gods of disobedience: Prometheus and Pandora (or, much later, James Dean and Natalie Wood, Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love—old wine in new bottles). Animated by the stories of Goethe and Schlegel in Germany, Balzac and Hugo in France, Byron and Shelley in Britain, Melville and Hawthorne in America down to contemporary literature and art; Prometheus and Pandora, these symbols par excellence of rebellion against religion and state, rejected the absurdity of the human condition, and held forth. All Chosen Outcasts It usually goes unrecognized that, by the mid-1950s, the underground bohemian beats were not publicized in mass market overviews of the time (like John Gunther and Bernard Quint's Days to Remember |1956|). They were not really needed. Other mass market messages of the same kind were already there. The US bestseller of 1955, Sloan Wilson's The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, ends as the main character rejects an average American businessman's life. The hero, Tom Rath, quits his profession, abandons the older, father-figure businessman he once worshipped, and moves to Vermont with his wife Betsy. He went to ground by yeoman choice and found extraordinary resources inside his ordinary self. Nowadays, our ads would say: just do it. Bohemian freedom had claimed the masses. And this was significantly more than the older tradition of individualism; this was bohemianism as free expression, self-expression, creative expression and consumption as ruling style—bohemianism industrialized. Under the century's morning stars of 1912, Woodrow Wilson saw that today, the everyday relationships of men are largely with great impersonal concerns, with organisations, not with other individual men. Now this is nothing short of a new social age, a new era of human relationship, a new stage-setting for the drama of life (Wilson 1913).' The force that called and directed Tom Rath, that Rexroth feared, that invited people to 'paint by numbers' in the 1950s, was the age of mass

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bohemianism. Our contemporary, mass-mediated life in Western Europe and America has become a crowd culture, minus the one important ingredient of fascism. The crowd has gotten bigger, fed and directed by mass media in general and American popular culture in particular. And the song we sing together is the bohemian claim to immediate pleasure, that each be different amid a community of chosen outcasts, that each lay claim to gifts of spontaneous creativity and use whatever censorship of our rights that may occur against us to protest and preserve our peculiar freedoms. People do not build temples and churches until their businesses are established and doing very well. Postwar America, and gradually postwar Western Europe, became a time devoted to the church of self-expression. The French journalist Raymond Cartier wrote in 1953, The only profound difference in the human condition right now from one side of the Atlantic to the other is in the tangible inequality of the material goods of well-being now available at all socioeconomic levels. If the American worker's refrigerator, the fur coats worn by their help, and the use of body deodorants by the working masses are reprehensible—well, then the 'American Way of Life' must be condemned (Cartier 1953: translation mine). But condemn it he did not; au contraire. Just like Harold Macmillan in his Bedford Football Ground speech of 20 July 1957: 'Let's be frank about it; most of our people have never had it so good. Go around the country, go to the industrial towns, go to the farms,- and you will see a state of prosperity such as we have never had in my lifetime—nor indeed ever in the history of this country.' 6 And America was the model of material wealth and free expression to which the majority of Western Europeans aspired. Where once a nation, a people, a group might be slowly joined over a time of months, weeks, days by spreading song, political events or the written word, Western Europe and America were drawn together instantly by the thickening network of mundane electrical devices: radio, telephone, TV, CD players, computers, Internet. By century's end we are plugged into a hive mind of morning and evening news, entertainment and information, changing styles and controversies. 'In a mass-media world, there's less of everything except the top ten books, records, movies, ideas. People worry about losing species diversity in the rain forest. But what about intellectual diversity—our most necessary

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resource? That's disappearing faster than trees' (Crichton 1995: 311). This is a two-edged sword: bohemianism as crowd power slowly suffocates dissimilar, individual expression, while at the same time allowing differing ideas and opinions to exist. Taming the Malcontent: Americanization Deep down, there is something very disturbing about real bohemianism. Prometheus and Pandora are not a quiet god and goddess. They had to be tamed. The alcohol of bohemianism would gradually be filtered out and removed. They had to be civilized.7 And this was done mainly through a process of assimilation, of Americanization. Here lies the secret to the history of bohemian crosscultural diffusion between Western Europe and America of the last fifty years. This began with the wholesale development of a bohemian youth culture in the American 1950s, which spread to Europe first by way of the GIs' AFN and RIAS radio stations, and then by way of Elvis Presley. Germany, where Elvis was stationed not by chance, has consistently ranked second since World War 11 in world consumption of American pop music. Resistance was simultaneously a record, a song, a cherished expression of the inner life, longings, fears and the necessary defiance it takes to be an individual—and a popular product diffused and defused within a commercial system built on rapidly changing styles.8 The maker moves beyond the message; at the same time, powerful meaning gets delivered. It is a commercial process animated by contradiction: create, annihilate, recreate—and soever onward. Fashion and death renew the world. Then there is the international, intellectual bohemian period of postwar angst, when new voices of dissent formed after World War II in France, Germany, Britain and America. It was existential, ruined, angry and beat: the Existentialists of Paris and St Germain des Pres, the German sensibilities of 'the literature of the ruins' marked by Gruppe 47, the Angry Young Men of England, and the American beats and hipsters. Each country spread and over-spread the angst-ridden word in their own way. The beats no sooner existed in the USA than they became a mind and society fad in American high schools and college campuses. As for the French existentialists, 'American college students read every word of their novels, plays, and essays ... they grappled with the big

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questions of life' (Hoffman and Bailey 1992: 128). But if it spreads, it thins. In France itself, by the 1980s, the most banal name for a high school would be Lycee Albert Camus. A two-fold pattern unfolded here that would be repeated time and again. First would come a clique of bohemian creators. This would spark a fad. A fad would become a trend which would become a way of life which would become a tradition—and in this process made boring, unoriginal, rejected by most (that is, to read Sartre's Nausea or Camus's The Stranger in Humanities or Philosophy 101). The profound would become popular, thus trivialized and euphemized (for example, a T-shirt personally seen in Boulder, Colorado, summer 1996: a tie-dyed, dead-head, T-shirt emblazoned with the phrase in bold, matt black and burnished gold lettering: 'Beauty is unbearable—Albert Camus ©Hanes T-shirts'). Dangerous by-products of free, creative mass expression? The profound becomes trivial. The difficult truth becomes inaccessible once its rarity can no longer be experienced. When media changes the messages are lost in translation and a new message replaces the old. The buyer is offered an illusion: get the same thing for a cheaper price. But you do not. The powerful, public, pragmatic lock-step of commercial reason replaces the private, intuitive, impractical process of insight. With 'Beauty is unbearable—Albert Camus ©Hanes T-shirts', Camus's work was not reduced; it became something else: 'Read, Wear, or Buy this T-shirt. Only $11.99'. Translated this way, all meaning resides on a Pop Art surface. American popular culture can be sandwich-board culture. What you see is what you get. It has to be seen so you can get it. The truck driver's daughter marries the outlaw saint. Mick Jagger marries Jerry Hall. Get it? Now buy the product. Back to the 1960s Pivotal for this change was the mass, bohemian protest movement of the 1960s. Back in the 1950s, Rexroth played a beautiful King Canute who could not stop the advancing tide. The one eclectic force always there was removed. By the end of the twentieth century, around the corner from the beatnik 1950s in the hippy 1960s, bohemianism had fully become a mass movement—driven and transformed by a middle-class, youth protest, and fueled by the popular music of the time, rock 'n' roll. If everyone or anyone can join in an elite (for the bohemian is an elite

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of creative spirit, the outcast is always in a minority) then does not equality replace quality? Look back to the 1960s, a decisive moment when the popular myth of political resistance against a ruling establishment and the lyrics, rhythm and popular heroes and heroines of rock music were inextricable. When bohemianism was simultaneously nationalized and internationalized on an altogether new scale. It was celebrated as a 'time of violence, new hysteria, confusion and rebellion' which would 'replace the time of conformity', when 'Hip would end by being absorbed as a colorful figure in the tapestry' of America and Western Europe.9 Is this what the period achieved? With American rock blasting out the sacred hymns, and the icons of the USA building the church, American mass culture finally and fully appropriated bohemianism. The dialectical hymns of liberation so dear to that pivotal time among the disaffiliated young of Western Europe and America championed the extraordinary possibilities in each and every ordinary individual. If intellectual, one could call on Herbert Marcuse or Norman Brown for the idea of sexual, social, psychological liberation, a codified bohemianism. Or, if one just wanted to live the lifestyle and 'be', then consumption of American-styled bohemian products was de rigueur. To revolt was to buy and wear: from roach clips to love beads to Bob Dylan's and Joan Baez's music, down to Aquarian, US Army jackets. Most who got hold of the books, never read them. But those who bought the consumer paraphernalia put them to good use. The bohemian style was something everybody could use; unlike the books, they were accessible. The twentieth century belongs to the mass. And to understand this we must study costumes. Here was the all-American, universal promise of transformation—work the ordinary, make it grow, make it sacred; a promise that went way back in native American traditions to the first settlers who transformed the rocky, swampy land that others considered undesirable. Sixties bohemian transformation was used to change the crowd into angel-headed hipsters hungry for the starry dynamo of night—overnight. Also, beginning in the 1950s and 1960s, there was a music and a message that championed the mythic vision of a democratic universe where all men belong to a single class ... "lower" on account of its Romantic virtues rather than its socioeconomic status', a democratic universe in

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which a person may even 'share the usual ambition to move up the social ladder and become affluent, but at the same time ... move down' (Pattison 1987: 154). Down to the heart, the gut; for the primary virtue of this new Americanized phase of bohemianism was to feel, to let it out, to let it happen, to 'Get down!' (in the hoary argot of the time). Restrictions of class, race, age were annihilated by the promise of the music. Bohemianism and American traditions met, coalesced and reinforced each other. The physical and psychological spontaneity of bohemianism, its appeal to immediate, natural response also matched a traditional American reading of human nature. The sense of the beautiful and the ideal in mainstream American culture encouraged relation to soil, earth, water, mountains, and raw human feelings; often because there was so little transformed nature, such an absence of the antique beauty of Christian cathedral and classical temple, long-cultivated landscape and ancient city found throughout Europe. Traditionally 'American beauty resided far more in nature than in culture' (Hughes 1994: 174) Bohemianism, once rooted in a period of moral and social revolt and the American cult of nature and the natural, has never been the same since. Revolutionary Bohemianism The slow movement, timidity, mundane vulgarity or outright failure of 60s revolutionary theatre, irritated some people into developing a radical, militant, revolutionary bohemianism. Some people were fed up; they wanted more. These people first cut their teeth in the culture of bohemia: living in communes, participating in social or cultural movements of all kinds. Then they split off to become a violent vanguard, the shock troops of establishment opposition and tomorrow's better world. This was a pro-guerrilla elite, highly intellectual, deeply committed. A fascinating development of bohemianism, revolutionary bohemians had the potential to become a fleet of tough, powerful tug boats that could move the bulky ship of state. But they drifted, lost their direction, were destroyed by self-destruction or outright attack. As a result of the 1960s, every country produced revolutionary bohemians native to its own needs and anxieties. In America one had The Weathermen, The Black Panthers, Angela Davis, Patty Hearst and the Symbionese Liberation Army, down to Cathlyn Wilkerson (the 'bomb

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factory' Weathermen group member who came out of hiding in Fall 1980), and the Unabomber affair that culminated in Winter-Spring 1996. In France there was Action-Direct-, in Britain The Angry Brigade; and in Western Germany the Baader-Meinhof Gang.10 In political or social terms they were labelled 'domestic terrorism'. In cultural terms, they were revolutionary bohemians. Their appearance and growth, added to the end of the Vietnam War (c. 1961-75), led to an irreparable split between counter culture and the culture warriors. Once the Weathermen or the Baader-Meinhof Gang came on the scene, the millions of young people who had been talking violently about change now had to put up or shut up. Most followed the instinct of mass, herd, middle class obedience; a very few ignited with the fire of their thoughts. Counter culture then became a matter of life style, of products, not violent, opposition politics. The others burned, went underground, waged their war and were hunted to extinction by police. Woodstock, Isle of Wight, Altamont With the culture warriors eradicated, the claws and teeth of bohemianism were removed. Bohemianism became a nonalcoholic drink; like much of the American academic narcissism and self-satisfaction of poststructuralist 'radicalism' that characterized high-level US intellectual life in the 1970s, 80s and 90s.11 Radical thought and action became a euphemism rather than the real thing. In Charles Murger's original terms, and in very many other ways, bohemianism had gone from Real to Mediocre. In American, crowd-culture, festival entertainment, there was a direct line of break up and escape. People eased away from a dangerous, contagious, politicized, mass, revolutionary bohemian culture to a safe, depoliticized, life-style, make-love-not-war counterculture. One went from Wavy Gravy Woodstock (Bethel, New York, 15-17 August, 1969), to the 'Lay Lady Lay' Bob Dylan Isle of Wight concert (29-31 August, 1969), to the Rolling Stones and the Hell's Angels at Altamont (8 December, 1969). The Altamont atrocities were the Waterloo of American 60s bohemia; where the potent 60s American bohemian cocktail died. Equivalent snuff outs in Western European revolutionary bohemianism would be the prison suicide of the gifted intellectual and bandit

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queen Ulrike Meinhof (on 8 May, 1976; with bitter, brilliant, j'accuse irony, date of the World War II Armistice) and the equivalent incarceration or death of radical bohemians in France and Britain.12 Americans overdosed with entertainment; Western Europeans did it with popular music serenading the guillotine of state. The Mob's Vengeance? All of which is not to say that the audience is dumb or bohemianism in its contemporary form is dead. But the game has changed. The irony is cruel. Most people wish to be free. But how many are? Most people wish to create; few are artists. Bohemians worked into the cultural blend of Western Europe and America because they functioned as outsiders, as a small, subcultural elite that daringly created new visions for the many. But once this universal power of creativity was validated, there remained the question of how it was to be received and expressed on a large scale. Here stings Rexroth's warning: a democracy of emotional equality that lacks aesthetic or moral quality. All kinds of cultures have their limitations. High culture is fine, but is it deep? Low culture is accessible, but is it moral? Any public has its strengths and weaknesses, both high and low. The high culture public is inclosed by a fence of its own making, exclude all but the chosen few, often elicited by station or status, nourished by the conditions of education. The low culture public lets the whole damn crowd in, has an unscrupulous hunger, insists on the subjective impulse of like and dislike. As Pound noted, 'the concept of genius as akin to madness has been carefully fostered by the inferiority complex of the public' (Pound 1934: 8). Are we to read the mass appropriation of bohemianism as the vengeance of the mob's inferiority complex? Cyberspace and Crowd Power Last but not least, are the contemporary claims that bohemianism has been reborn in Cyberspace. There, now, as you read these words, are the true, samisdat cries of Real bohemia in the on-line pages of Suck, Hotwired, Word, Feed, Salon. Cyberspace doesn't stop at national borders. A cultural power has come full circle: an internationally creative force of cultural diffusion, underground humanism, distributing unconventional

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trends in lifestyle and artistic expression among a wide range of influential people. The Net, declares Salon, allows people to burst the bonds of caution and banality and 'to howl again'.13 Maybe, maybe not. Is it possible? The Internet is an American medium in style, as much as rock 'n roll or the Big Mac. Style is the man, woman or PC. America is the inexhaustible market that absorbs its irreconcilable enemies. American culture can chew up anything into an easily digestible cud. American culture masticates; makes the unconventional conventional, domesticates destruction. This is not a brutal power. It is a softening, smoothing, sweetening Crowd Power. As the Supreme Court ruling on cyberporn declared in June, 1996, the internet is 'the most participatory form of mass speech yet developed'.,4 Free expression flourishes, at cost. In a world-wide, Americanized forum where everyone is allowed a place to speak—does this freedom neutralize dissent? Could it be that, in our contemporary period of fin de siecle twentieth century, we are closer than at any other time since before World War I in Western Europe and America to being one mind? Then, the nations about to go to war were joined by currents of nationalistic frenzy. Now, we are united in the informative, entertaining, necessary hive mind of mass media and high technology—of which the Internet forms the latest, hard-working, bee-like cell. 'We're planning to put five billion people together in cyberspace', ruminates the pop chaotician Ian Malcolm, 'and it'll freeze the entire species. Everything will stop dead in its tracks. Everything will think the same thing at the same time. Global uniformity. Oh, that hurts' (Crichton 1995: 31-12). Is this fuddy-duddy, future-shock fear, or did old bohemian Ian Malcolm have a point? Edgar Allan Poe (that fine free thinker from the very beginnings of American popular culture) shared this sense of unease and danger regarding the human 'throng ... the tumultuous sea of human heads ... passengers in masses ... This Mob ... a giant in stature—insolent, rapacious, filthy; had the gall of a bullock with the heart of a hyena and the brains of a peacock.' It expressed the 'most obvious and unsupportable despotism than ever was heard of upon the face of the earth'. It leads and is led by its dream hunger. For 'the nose of a mob is its imagination. By this, at any time, it can quietly be led.',5 Alternately, do Americans and their Americanized systems of creative expression strengthen the abilities of self-control? As John Le Carre said of American ways, they have a guile that is only there to protect their innocence.

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A fantasy that fires but never owns them. 'A capacity to be swayed by everything, while still remaining sovereign' (Le Carre 1986: 585-86). When does the liberty of bohemia become the licence of the crowd? Have these developments made America and Western Europe stronger or weaker? Has the bohemian become our common blessing or mutual monster?

Popular Culture and Political Discourse in American Narratives about Vietnam Yonka Krasteva

War is a catalogue of sounds. Our ears direct our feet. A bullet crunches into a wall. Somebody starts singing: M.I.C. ... K.E.Y. M.O.U.S.E. The Short-Timers In his book Postmodernism, Frederic Jameson defines the Vietnam conflict as the 'first terrible postmodern war' and draws attention to the eclectic way in which the language in Vietnam narratives 'impersonally fuses a whole range of contemporary collective idiolects, most notably rock language and black language' (1991: 44). Jameson locates the problems of representation in the fact that the hyperspace of postmodern warfare has become another leisure time space, an analogue to the complacent and entertaining space on the order of Disneyland, thus establishing the intimacy between the discourse of war and that of popular culture. At home the war was largely waged by the media whose contrary function it was, it has been argued, to help America forget. Most representations of the Vietnam War, such as Dispatches, by Michael Herr, Philip Caputo's A Rumor of War, Ron Kovic's Born on the Fourth of ]uly, Gustav Hasford's The Short-Timers, Tim O'Brien's Going after Cacciato, Stephen Wright's Meditations in Green, Bobbie Ann Mason's \n Country, to mention the most widely acclaimed narratives, trace the disorder of the conflict back to the lack of critical examination of the way

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in which cultural phenomena and their interpretation shape individual and public life. This study will examine one of the major themes of the above mentioned works—the symbiosis between fiction and fact, the real and the imagined in the construction of the American war scenario in Indochina, which is seen to have been staged to a great extent through the ideological power of national frontier mythology, as well as through heavy reliance on and emotional involvement with hi-technology utilized for the purposes of destruction, pleasure and repression. The texts mentioned above foreground the duality between self-other, America~the Orient, democracy-communism (read goodevil), and see 'Americanization' as a negative discourse in the services of the imperialist agenda. The novels about Vietnam do not fall into the category of the war novel since their focus is not on accurate representation of historical events but rather on the re-creation of the self through intense questioning of cultural practices and contestation of the mechanisms through which dominant discourse propagates political action. There is almost no plot in these works, but clusters of images that are read and deciphered on 'playback', years after the events took place. The structural principles are that of collage and free association, hence the highly 'scenic' quality of the texts. The war got broad coverage in newspapers and on TV through apocalyptic scenes of destruction; images of helicopters pouring out fire and death, bombs and napalm devouring and scorching the earth, but there was no front line, there were no names, the enemy was faceless. Despite the overwhelming information in mass media, as Herr says in Dispatches, It is impossible to know what Vietnam looked like from reading most newspapers as it would be to know how it smelled (1978: 98). Even when the picture was sharp and clearly defined, something wasn't clear at all, something repressed that monitored the images and withheld their essential information (1978: 18). The books offer numerous commentaries on the desemanticized, sterilized language used to 'explain' the nature of the developments in Vietnam. The indiscriminate killing of people is called 'search-anddestroy' operation, the war itself is nothing more than a 'pacification'; military service—'tour of duty'; the total annihilation of wild life and nature—'deforestation'; a deadly toxic chemical bears the innocent

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name of Agent Orange; the military operations are waged to 'engage', but it is not quite clear who, or what; they are given the mythic names 'Phoenix', 'Pegasus' and soon. A marine suffering from a nervous breakdown is diagnosed as having an 'acute environment reaction'. As Herr says; 'Vietnam has sprawn a jargon of such delicate locutions that it is often impossible to know remotely the thing being described' (1978: 91). Another revealing example of tampering with information and language in political discourse is the description of the press conference in Dispatches. A colleague of Herr's questions Colonel Launds about the marines at Khe Sahn, expecting to hear about the near destruction of the base: 'I am glad we've come to that', replies the colonel, 'I was at Khe Sahn for several hours this morning, and I want to tell you that these Marines are clean.' There was a weird silence. We all knew we'd heard him ... (He said 'clean', didn't he?, but no one could imagine what he meant (1978: 159). In the texts under discussion citations from official documents and newpaper coverage function as a context with misleading information. Media language cannot function as a mediator, it blurs and distorts events, throws them off focus. The parallel between American military performance and the notorious defeat of the French at Dien Bien Phu is quite conspicuous, yet it is totally misrepresented by the media: Khe Sanh said 'siege', it said 'encircled Marines' and 'heroic defenders'. It could be understood by newspaper readers quickly, it breathed Glory and War and Honored Dead. It seemed to make sense (111). This stubborn refusal to acknowledge the existence of 'otherness' as a self-sufficient world by naming it with an appropriate language is characteristic of the official linguistic strategies employed to re-write Vietnam. The cleansing of the narrator's speech of their deluding rhetoric is seen as the first step to acquiring self-knowledge and a more accurate knowledge of the world. The Vietnam narratives, both novels and film, abound in images from mass culture, in fact the latter construct the better part of the 'reality' in which the protagonists live. Protagonist/author Michael Herr in Dispatches describes his first reaction to battle thus:

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The first time that I fired at or saw combat deaths, nothing really happened, all the responses got locked in my head. It was the same familiar violence, only moved to another media; some kind of jungle play with giant helicopters and fantastic special effects, actors lying out there in canvas bags waiting for the scene to end, so that they could get up and walk it off (1978: 210). Entire divisions would function in a bad dream state, acting out their weird set of movies without any connection to their source. (1978: 55). These excerpts illustrate the process by which jean Baudrillard's 'simulations' are produced, that is, 'the generation by models of a real without origins or reality: a hyperspace' (1983: 2). Hyperrealism is the characteristic mode of postmodernism. Fact and fiction, reality and simulation are experienced by the soldiers as without difference, functioning along a fantastic rollercoaster continuum. The characters inhabit a hybrid space of converging 'realities' that construct the hyperreal. Postmodern war is made even more exciting and glamourous with the introduction of the computer which very often produces the effect of deja-vu with its associations the video games. Griffin, the protagonist in Meditations in Green, is an 'image interpreter'. He was required to translate pictures into letters and coordinates that were instantly telexed to such important addresses as III MAF ... IIMAG ... and most impressive, JCS. The data went round and round and where it came out he preferred not to hear [ 1983: 39) His job was to interpret the film, find the enemy in the negatives ... Where ever he put circles on the film there the airforce would make holes in the ground (1983: 40). Griffin inhabits a kind of kaleidoscopic reality constructed according to the rules of video games, in which real objects and people begin to assume the qualities of the 'dummies' in the games. Important in this situation is the illusion of total control and power of the 'player'. The protagonist feels like a playful and destructive demi-God, in total control of the powerless 'targets' that are seen as non-human. He believes he is absolved of total responsibility for his actions, for it seems the machine is actually doing his job, since he himself 'is being played' by somebody else. The pseudoreal has become an endless regression of repetitive sameness: Memory and desire screaming through my living room at the speed of light, me clinging to the coach. Of course, I was in it too, but I was being

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played by someone else. The computer opened with a jaunty singsong rendition of 'Chopsticks'. I gripped the plastic handles of my weapons system. A tiny figure darted out into the sights. I swiveled and squeezed. The tiny figure somersaulted into flying fragments. The computer played 'Charge!' ... Everything blew up. 'The Yellow Rose of Texas', sang the computer... The longer I watched the less I felt ... It was like drowning in syrup. It was like TV. Everyone on the helicopter was dead except us ... I touched a button. Rockets leaped out ahead of us, streaming away into bursts of black and white and orange. We landed inside a gray crater. Scattered about were arms and legs and heads and other miscellaneous parts (1983: 14-15). Image, action and meaning do not relate in any significant ways, levels from different ontological worlds overlap all the time, creating the kind of intensity and excitement associated more with virtual than physical reality, until the fantasies become experience which afterwards the 'actors' cannot handle anymore. On the third day in Vietnam while riding a helicopter attacked by the enemy, Herr watches with a growing fascination a boy ... tied up to jump out of the straps and then jerked forward and hung there ... a dark spot the size of a baby's hand showed in the center of his fatigue jacket. And it grew—I knew what it was, but not really—it got up to his armpits and then started all down his sleeves and up over his shoulders at the same time. It went all across his waist and down his legs, covered the canvas on his boots until they were dark like everything else he wore, and it was running in slow, heavy drops off his fingertips ... Oh, but this isn't anything at all, it's not real, it's just some thing they are going through that isn't real ... he was dead but not (I knew) really dead (1978: 177-78). And again, the immunity to the reality of death is acquired through frequent encounters with it on the TV and in the movies, the 'familiar violence' to which Herr refers in the excerpt quoted above. The reactions of the soldiers hinge on the aberrant and the abnormal, they seem to believe they have been taken on 'A Magical Mystery Tour' (Herr 1978: 108). In Dispatches the gunner of a helicopter is hit and falls to the ground from two hundred feet, and there are marines who cheer when he hits the ground. Others keep running hither and thither 'staging war movies in their heads' when they are aware of a television crew around. Almost all novels about Vietnam offer numerous examples that

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illustrate the process by which mass media deprives a historical event of its actuality, and invests it with familiar meaning. Thus the viewer or the reader is lured into putting the new experience into the old 'moulds' so that things again 'make sense' and are comfortably framed. Five months after protagonist Herr sends his dispatch about the battle of Hue, it appears in the Esquire and now it sounds like 'a lost dispatch from Crimea' (1978: 226) which has nothing to do with the immediate reality of Vietnam. Such facts echo again Hemingway's idea in A Farewell to Arms about the imperfectness and falsifying character of official rhetoric. Lyndon Johnson's speech, 'A Model for Peace in Southeast Asia', is a case in point. The President draws strongly on what he believes is an analogy between modern history, 'created by our sons in the jungles of Vietnam' and their ancestors who 'fought in the plains of Pennsylvania' (In Mclnerney 1981: 94). Here the parallel with the mythic past and the equally 'mythic' present lacks the ironic twist we encounter in the novels under discussion. The writers foreground the dangerous exhilaration such rhetoric excites and debunk the official discourse that is deliberately employed for misinformation and manipulation. In almost all works about Vietnam, the foreign land is perceived as a scene, devised by history for the staging of some kind of a movie, a terrain for the development of a familiar, American script, an attitude that amounts to the domestication and 'Americanization' of the new territory, as the quotation from President Johnson's speech undoubtedly illustrates. In A Rumor of War, Philip Caputo repeatedly highlights this urge to appropriate and contain the strange and the foreign: We had become self-confident and proud, some to the point of arrogance ... they were all to a man thoroughly American, in their virtues as well as in their flaws; idealistic, generous, direct and provincial in the sense that they believed the ground they stood on was now forever a part of the United States, simply because they stood on it. Most of them came from the ragged fringes of the American Dream (1977: 27). The image of the American soldier that emerges from this passage is undoubtedly implicated in the imperialist discourse and is to be read as part of the grand narrative of homogenization/Americanization. Indicative is the soldiers' 'sameness'—'all to a man thoroughly American', which implies levelling of differences and the circulation of the 'same' and the 'familiar'. The fact that they are all shaped by the cultural and

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ideological underpinnings of the 'American Dream', which with its 'ragged fringes' seems either inadequate or outdated, implies both the urge to proclaim the universality of American values and their irrelevance to reality. One need only remember Sergeant Gergheim's words in Gustav Hasford's The Short-Timers—'We are here to help the Vietnamese, because inside every gook, there is an American trying to get out' (1979: 18)—in order to understand that it is not so much the defeat of communism that is at stake as the propagation of 'Americanness', assimilation and annihilation of ethnic and racial difference through military aggression. The foreign landscape itself needs certain 'corrections' both through political discourse and popular representations so as to sound familiar, similar, 'ours' and ultimately American. The map of Vietnam in Herr's narrative has undergone a drastic change: it was a marvel, especially now that it was not real anymore ... The paper had buckled in its frame after years in the wet Saigon heat, laying a kind of veil over the countries it depicted. Vietnam was divided into its older territories of a kingdom ... It was late '67 now, even the most detailed maps didn't reveal much anymore (1978: 2). The map of ancient Vietnam is evoked to signify contemporary Vietnam in the same way in which America's past is evoked to explain the new war effort. The 'cosmetic' corrections on the 'face' of Vietnam are prompted by the effort to remodel and reconstruct a whole culture, an alien cosmos. It has been a military necessity to impose a set of references over Vietnam's older, truer being, an imposition that began simply with the division of the country into two and continued—it had its logic—with the further division of Vietnam into four clearly defined tacticle corps (Herr 1978: 92). The new American version of Vietnam is not a document, it is fabulation. Fact and fiction have again swapped places in 'reality', and what we have is another 'real' image without an original. Cartography has always been considered a difficult science, striving for exactitude and perfection. In this case, it clearly flouts the claims of this particular scientific discourse. The 'updated' map ignores history and landscape, and creates a false image of the enemy as well. The label 'Indian country', commonly applied to Vietnam, is illustrative of the mechanism through

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which the history of an entire nation is deleted and on the presumably blank page a fantastic, distorted version appears. The images of Vietnamese landscape in Hollywood productions are also 'simulations'. The eighteen-year old heroine in In Country, Samanta Hughes, is aware that all her notions about Vietnam come from the movies filmed in Mexico, in which 'she was surprised to see soldiers marching through corn. It bothered her so hard to find out the truth. Did corn actually grow in Vietnam? The landscape of Vietnam was so hard to envision' (Mason 1985: 99). She knows that language endows a specific place with value, thus influencing the way in which people relate to it. The notion that the foreign landscape is 'in country' triggers and legitimizes a familiar kind of violence that places the modern war within the mythological time of the sacred beginning. It is another illustration of Althusser's theory about the ideological practices of culture, the fact that 'In ideology men ... express, not the relation bewteen them and their conditions of existence but the way they live the relation between them and their conditions of existence' (1969: 113). The soldiers' perception of Vietnam as another Indian war does confirm Althusser's point about this peculiar vicarious experience of reality. The shock comes from the total discrepancy between the culture-bound expectations of the 'enemy zone' and the real, ubiquitous enemy. As Caputo remarks in A Rumor of War, 'They had whipped themselves into such a fever of anticipation that reality proved to be an anticlimax ... Yes, the wagons were here in the form of the supersonic warplanes, but the Indians were not' (1977: 56). This disappointment with reality seems to urge the soldiers to act out their own expectations, to 'create' themselves according to the current cultural icons that are out of place and out of context. The narrator/correspondent loker in The Short-Timers (screen version Full Metal \acket), often dwells on the ecstasy and pleasure of such reincarnations: Cowboy is listening to me mutter to myself. 'John Wayne? Hey, Joker's right. This ain't real. This is just a lohn Wayne movie. Joker can be Paul Newman. I'll be a horse.' 'Yeah.' Crazy Earl says, 'Can I be Gabby Hayes?' 'The Rock can be a rock', says Donlon, the radioman. Alice says, 'I'll be Ann-Margret.'

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'Animal Mother can be a rabid Buffalo', says Stutten, honcho of the third fire team. The walls are assaulted by werewolf laughter. 'Who'll be the Indians?' The Little Enemy folks audition for the part—machine gun bullets rip across a wall to starboard (Hasford 1979: 98-99). This short excerpt illustrates the way in which popular culture can function through substitution. The soldiers identify with characters from popular culture—Gabby Hayes, a comic character who provides side-kick relief in horse operas; Ann-Margaret, the sex symbol of the late 60s and early 70s who paradoxically also stood for the liberated woman; and the character types associated with the pale faces/red skins epic. By identifying with these cultural stereotypes the characters are under the illusion that they occupy the position of the subject, yet they are 'playing' an imagined version of themselves, while in actuality their real selves are suppressed. The racial and ideological underpinnings of such 'inventions' of the subject are quite pronounced in the derogatory equation of t h e little enemy folks' with the American Indians. In such fantasies ideology exists to dispel contradictions in lived experience, between culture-bound expectations of Vietnam and the real Vietnam, between the thirst for excitement, adventure and instant gratification of desire that 'new frontiers' promise, and the anonymity and dullness of everyday existence. Vietnam representations illustrate the way in which products of mass culture are used 'creatively' in the process of self-identification and personality building. Paul Willis defines this activity as 'symbolic' and 'artistic', which involves 'the application of human capacities to and through, on and with symbolic resources and raw materials (collection of signs and symbols—for instance, the language as we inherit it, as well as the texts, songs, films, images and artefacts of all kinds) to produce meaning' (1990: 10). The examples above clearly show that it is the concept of masculinity and national identity that is in the focus of this symbolic activity. Gender and nationality are inextricably connected in the construction of a certain cultural type of 'self, created by popular culture, that has no original, but is being circulated in the cultural economy as a role model, thus affecting and producing the 'real'. Indicative in this respect is Kovic's appropriation and utilization of popular images for his personality building: '1 was fascinated by the muscle man ads in the beginning of the superman comics, showing

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how a skinny guy could overnight transform his body into a bulk of fighting steel' (1976: 49). The young protagonist is literally hypnotized by such visions and they become his wish-fulfilment images: '1 was a natural athlete and there wasn't much of anything 1 wasn't able to do with my body. I was proud and confident and there was a tremendous energetic bounce in the way 1 moved' (55). It is clear that the dominant norm is imitation and not self-expression. In such instances mass culture functions as a form of repression. The control of the physical body by these images of masculinity is unquestionable. Hero-worship blinds the person to his own needs and potentials for development. Though enslaved by their idols, the worshippers entertain the illusion that they are free to choose for themselves. The commercials, rock music, pin-ups of movie stars, slogans, inscriptions, images from comic strips, create the notion of trivia, and of the every day thus undermining the boundaries between 'high brow' (epic representations of war) and 'low brow' (war as game construct) art. The effect of this massive invasion of popular culture images is to deprive the event of its content, make it look innocent, distant, innocuous. The recruit listens with one ear to rock-and-roll, with the other to gun-fire. After a week in the nightmare of the jungle he enjoys a week of R&R at luxurious hotels and beaches. Ultimately war is perceived as pastime, ecstatic and unique experience, constructed out of conflicting images and notions belonging to different time levels and different orders of reality. All texts about Vietnam refer in some way to the major icon of the age, the John Wayne tough macho image that motivated many young men to emulate his characters on the 'new frontier'/Vietnam. The generation's misconceptions and false pride are generally blamed on the war movies and the officially sponsored disinformation about Vietnam. Herr reasons about the way in which 'somewhere all the mythic tracks intercepted, from the lowest John Wayne wetdream to the most aggravated soldier-poet fantasy' (1978: 19). 'Already I saw myself charging up some distant beachhead, like John Wayne in The Sands of Iwo ]ima, and then coming home a suntanned warrior with medals on my chest' (1977: 6), remembers the narrator-protagonist in Philip Caputo's A Rumor of War. The whole block grew up watching television' (1976: 54)'... and studying The Marine Corps Guidebook' (42), confides Ron Kovic in Born on the Fourth of ]uly. Remembering his enthusiasm over the visit of some

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recruiting officers at his school, from the position of the writing and assessing self, Kovic perceives the adolescent and immature character of his fantasies: There is nothing finer, nothing prouder than a United States Marine ... As I shook hands and stared up into their eyes, 1 could not help but feel that 1 was shaking hands with John Wayne and Audie Murphy' (1976: 6). In this case the ideological implications of the text conflate American exceptionalism with American expansionism. The protagonists' identification with national symbols of America's macho image illustrates the point made by many cultural historians about the media being 'potentially the source of national identification when they act as the "arenas of mass ritual" of specific sports and political ceremonials' (Tomlinson 1991: 88). In A Rumor of War, Caputo comments on 'the tribal ritualism of ceremonies that marked anniversaries or comradeships formed long ago on distant battlefields' (1977: 22). 'The Marine Corps was more than a branch of the Armed Forces. It was a society in itself, demanding total commitment'to its doctrines and values, rather like those Teutonic Knights of the Theban Band' (1977: 101). In American iconography the ultimate 'arena for mass ritual' is the frontier. Culture and politics converge in all 'frontier' or borderland texts. The broadcasting of John F. Kennedy's acceptance speech on 16 July, 1960 in Los Angeles became a 'mass ritual' in which President Kennedy used Wild West metaphors in his attempt to invoke strong traditions in American political rhetoric: I stand tonight facing west on what was once the last frontier. From the lands that stretch 3000 miles behind me, the pioneers of the old gave up their safety, their comfort and sometimes their lives to build a new world here in the West ... But the problems are not solved and the battles are not all won, and we stand today on the edge of a new frontier - t h e frontier of the 1960s, a frontier of unknown opportunities and paths, a frontier of unfulfilled hopes and threats ... For the harsh facts of the matter are that we stand on this frontier at a turning point in history. Following Kennedy's example, Richard Nixon urged Americans to leave Vietnam only 'as cowboys, with blazing guns, backing out of a saloon'. The metaphor of the frontier, then, has proved instrumental not only for the explanation of the progress of American civilization; it has also been used as a code for the interpretation of the world and America's place in it. Ultimately this complex system and a collection of fascinating hero-tales has acquired ideological power and provided

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'an appropriate language for explaining and justifying the use of political power' (Slotkin 1986: 15). The soldiers' performance in Vietnam is perceived as a modern projection of America's 'manifest destiny'. Indicatively Vietnam and the Vietnamese are absent from the story, for this is not a story about America in Vietnam but about Vietnam as America. Revealing in this respect is Herr's observation about soldiers 'whose madness it was not to know always which war they were actually in, fantasising privately about other, older wars, War 1 and II, air wars and desert wars, obscure colonial actions against countries whose names have .since changed many times' (1978: 188). Vietnam itself is transformed into another image of America by the invasion of the world of hi-technology, rock music, mass media cult figures and so on. More than twenty years after the end of hostilities in Vietnam the war of interpretations, the battle for the ideological appropriation of the conflict continues unabated. Vietnam still haunts American consciousness in disturbing ways—from 'the ignorant Ramboesque obstinacy' (Pratt 1989: 236) of Hollywood productions through Robert McNamara's book, \n Retrospect: The Tragedy and the Lessons of Vietnam (1995), in which

the author openly acknowledges that the Pentagon had known all the time that the war was wrong and unwinnable, to recurrent anxieties about a President who had evaded the draft. Internationally, the attitude towards American involvement in Vietnam has varied from identification with American politics to stringent criticism. Initially the latter had been voiced in the former communist countries and by such imaginative interpreters of history as Graham Greene. In the years of the Cold War period during which the Vietnam War was in progress, in the ex-communist countries, America was seen as an aggressive imperialist power trying to mould other people's fates according to its own vision. In Bulgaria, for instance, this attitude was confirmed by the publication in 1956 of Graham Greene's novel The Quiet American. The title of the book, has become symbolic of, and anonymous with, the fate of the American soldier in Vietnam. After 1989, given the political turmoil and pressing problems at home, the subject of Vietnam representations has not received much coverage, and the Bulgarian audience at large has acquired a new perspective on literature and film about Vietnam with the publication of Bobbie Ann

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Mason's novel \n Country and the distribution of the film, Born on the Fourth of ]uly. In my MA course on Vietnam in novels and film, 1 have been able to discuss with my students these representations as cultural phenomenology rather than historical narratives. My students in general were not overwhelmed by the general appeal of the Myth of the Frontier. Most of them saw a parallel between the fate of the American Indians and that of the Bulgarian nation during the five centuries of Ottoman domination, five centuries of non-existence that, conditioned also the present marginalization of our country. Most important is the young people's insight into the links between culture and political action, between forms of signification and subjectivity, between pleasure and power. Given the current identity crisis experienced in the former socialist countries and the rise of nationalistic discourses in some of them, an understanding of how popular fictions are produced, circulated and consumed will provide an adequate knowledge to our understanding of ourselves and our relation to the world.

I Am the King: Cultural Appropriation in Australia's Gothic Graceland Richard Walker

Since Nick and the film crew for his video are all Australian, they called and asked the Australian Consulate to see if we could come over and check out this party celebrating Australian filmmakers. They said we could attend so we went right over... All these people dressed up ... and then there was us. Nick had his bright green skintight Elvis outfit on. Looked like he hadn't slept for a few days. — Henry Rollins (1995: 103) Ugh! Gross . . . . Elvis!' — Dogs in Space

Little Euchrid coughed, short and sharp, his tiny pink tongue lapping at his lower lip then curling back inside. And as if waiting for a signal and recognizing it in Euchrid's timid hack, the brave little first-born closed his eyes and fell into a slumber from which he would never wake. — Nick Cave (1990: 7)

On the 18th of June 1984 Mute Records, one of the leading independent labels in Britain during the 1980s, released the first single by the Australian singer-songwriter Nick Cave and his solo project The Bad Seeds. Cave had been the front man with The Birthday Party, a group that emerged out of the punk scene in Australia in the late 1970s and, arriving in London in the 1980s, had earned a reputation as an experimental, explosive, violent and hedonistic outfit.2 Cave's first

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post-Birthday Party single therefore came as something of a surprise to fans and the music press alike; utilizing a tape loop of the original orchestration and replacing his trademark screams with a stately croon, Cave covered Elvis Presley's epic ballad 'In the Ghetto'. As an influential figure both upon and within Australian subculture during the late 1970s and 1980s, Nick Cave's decision to cover a song by Elvis Presley has significant implications, particularly in terms of the ramifications of punk and post-punk rhetoric; it seems to signify a transition from rebellion to incorporation, a shift from experimentation to reliance upon more traditional musical media. Such a reading, which is ultimately more troubled than it initially seems, effectively mirrors the colonization of Australian youth culture by American rock 'n' roll in the 1950s. Rock 'n' roll music from the United States hit Australia in 1955 with the release of the film Blackboard Jungle and its accompanying soundtrack, Bill Haley's Rock around the Clock. Its infiltration into Australian popular culture largely reflects the impact that the medium had upon public consciousness in the United States and Britain; as Michael Sturma states, 'adults responded to rock 'n' roll in Australia as if told they had a terminal disease' (1992: 124). The fact that the formula for rock 'n' roll lay in a fusion of black blues or rhythm and blues and country music is crucial to an understanding of the influence of American rock 'n' roll upon strands of Australian subculture music in the 1980s. What is significant at present is that rock 'n' roll's import into and influence upon Australian culture in the late 1950s and early 1960s is tied up with concepts of rebellion and undesirable subculture. In 1962 Sam Dunn, writing for Music and Dance and anticipating the confrontational tactics of bands like The Birthday Party, referred to the new sounds as The Music of Violence' (quoted in Sturma 1992: 125). Ultimately the Australian media responded to American rock 'n' roll in a manner that evoked similar reactions in Britain and the United States themselves; rock 'n' roll was equated with juvenile delinquency, sexual laxity and a variety of other configurations intrinsic to a burgeoning youth culture. Conversely the idiom effectively created a sense of solidarity rather than disintegration amongst its aficionados; Sturma states that it 'fostered a sense of solidarity, of belonging to something larger than themselves' (1992: 128). For the Australian media, anxieties about the impact and influence of rock 'n' roll upon its indigenous youth were very much equated with anxieties about Americanization in general. Sturma crystallizes

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the situation whereby '|iImages of teenagers driven towards disorder by American music, in part symbolised broader fears about Americanisation' (1992: 129). In effect rock 'n' roll encapsulated a two-fold threat: juvenile deviancy and Americanization. Anxiety about the latter was not necessarily a novel thing, the introduction of jitterbugging to Australia by American servicemen during World War II was viewed with a similar suspicion, indeed a contemporary description reveals the ambivalent appeal of a dance where participants 'jitterbug at terrific speed ... kicking, belly-wobbling, bum-popping, tapping, whirling insanely like people possessed by devils'.3 The manic and possibly mania-inducing properties of the dance reveal two things: firstly the sheer physicality of the experience and secondly its potentially demonic (and demonizing) attributes. Both features can be significantly applied to the initial impact of rock 'n' roll in Australia, however it is the latter element—the intrusion of the diabolic—which is most significant in terms of the influence of America upon Australian subculture in the 1980s. The blues, that essential ingredient within the rock 'n' roll formula, is after all the devil's music. As is so often the case with subculture mediums, by the 1960s rock 'n' roll in Australia ultimately had its properties of resistance and difference translated into incorporation; rock 'n' roll effectively became sanitized. Max Harris, writing in 1960, noted that rock 'n' roll dancing was 'sexually prim', dispelling anxieties about the physicality of the form that had previously troubled the media (quoted in Stuma 1992: 132). In addition, coinciding with the more subdued post-army Presley performances, the Sun-Herald noted that the music itself was changing: '|t|he trend, it seems, is towards quieter songs and more restrained arrangements' (quoted in Stuma 1992: 133). Music became an agent of control and containment, assimilated into church meetings and the temperance movement, or relocated into the world of business and commerce; rock 'n' roll therefore shifted radically from the margins of undesirable youth culture to a central position of being something to aspire to, socially and commercially respectable. In Australia this transformation of reception is most effectively seen in the arrival of the dance known as the Twist, along with Chubby Checker's song of the same name. Sturma points out that the dance 'proved as popular with adults as teenagers' (1992: 137). This popularity indicates the extent to which rock 'n' roll became sanitized and distanced from previously held notions

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of youth rebellion and subculture. In addition the anxiety about Americanization is dispelled with the incorporation of the Twist into Australian popular culture, a move epitomized by Johnny O'Keefe's EP Twistiri Australia-Way. Rock 'n' roll remained a central feature within youth culture, developing during the 1960s into a site for more articulate expression and a medium for possible protest. However, it also led to the growing incorporation of youth culture into public life rather than existing in some marginal and alien sphere created via the representations of an anxious media. Arguably it is with the arrival of punk in the mid 1970s (the jury is still out on whether its genesis was a British or American phenomenon) that the position and practices of popular music are shaken up. Punk, in spite of its jumbling of musical, visual and political sources, claimed a year zero approach as a subculture, what Duncan Webster, highlighting the ambivalence of such a declaration, refers to as its 'pose of amnesia and ... clean break with history' (1988: 168). As with the arrival of rock 'n' roll the subculture brought bugbears with it, and once again one of the main points of objection was, certainly in Britain, Americanization; paradoxically however this phobia was now expressed by the subculture itself. This anti-American stance was explicitly spelt out by The Clash with the track off their eponymous first album 'I'm So Bored With the USA', which Jon Savage, in his definitive study of British punk England's Dreaming, calls 'a brilliant rant against the popular culture of the day' (1991: 233). I do not intend to provide an overview of punk, Savage's monolithic tome does that comprehensively enough, nor to identify its inconsistencies, which are manifold, other than to add that, as with rock 'n' roll in the 1960s, with time punk also becomes incorporated into the mainstream, achieving a respectability at odds with its anarchic pretensions in the mid 1970s. However, it is worth noting just another instance of punk's apparent break with tradition; in the Zeitgeist defining '1977', the flip-side to their first single 'White Riot', The Clash chorused 'no Elvis, Beatles, or Rolling Stones', effectively a blasphemous denouncement of rock history and one which clearly epitomizes Elvis Presley's central position within the established pantheon of popular music. My main concern is with the impact and influence of American culture upon representatives of Australian subculture in the 1980s. The arrival of punk is intrinsic to this dynamic inter-relation, especially as a point of opposition in that so much Australian alternative popular music that

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emerged out of the punk scene in the late 1970s rejected the antiAmerican slant and parochialism of British punk. Similarly it is impossible to avoid referring to Britain in relation to Australian alternative music, as Britain, in the period conveniently labelled post-punk, seemed to represent a breeding-ground for experimental and creative music. This Utopian vision ultimately proved to be illusory, certainly for The Birthday Party, and it is his ensuing disillusionment with the British music scene that arguably pushed Nick Cave to explore the possibilities offered by American imagery and more orthodox musical forms.4 Part of the problem for a group like The Birthday Party in the Britain of the early 1980s was the intensification of political rhetoric and activity in the musical climate. George McKay identifies this in Senseless Acts of Beauty, his study of politicized counter-culture and cultures of resistance. Assessing the impact of the anarchist group Crass he states that '|i|n the slightly later and somewhat ignored post-punk culture, the earlier political thrust (of punk) was more keenly developed and deeply explored' (1996: 75). Crass were effectively a counter-culture collective; nonetheless the increasing politicization of the music scene during the early to mid 1980s is also evident within a more mainstream subcultural and independent context. )on Savage, citing the influence of Rock Against Racism, the left wing anti-fascist organization, notes that in spite of the apparent liberation of their rhetoric, many of these groups painted themselves into a corner: there were so many things you could not be—sexist, racist, entryist, Rockist—that the negatives overpowered any potential jouissance ... the music was no fun at all. And, for a while, just like the rhetoric of RAR, the organisation that had inserted the Left discourse into Punk, the ideological rigour of these groups brooked no disagreement (1991: 516). Duncan Webster, admittedly referring to more significantly mainstream artists than Savage, paints an alternative picture of a bland musical climate revelling in new technology and in its own commercialism: With the pervasive presence of pop videos, the massive coverage that the new pop stars (Duran Duran, Wham, Boy George) got in the Fleet Street press rather than in the rock press, the 1980s seemed to promise music without either the unifying factors of punk or much promise of diversity, a homogenized pop of laundered black styles (1988: 168).

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As a 'rock' band (in as much as they used the basic rock formula of guitar, bass and drums when synthesizer and computer treatments of music were de rigeur) the Australian Birthday Party were torn between apparently vapid commercial music and the strictures of the politicized subculture which frowned upon 'rockism'. Within this context the group were frequently loathed by the music press because, as Louise Gray puts it, 'unlike the punks, The Birthday Party had no political agenda of any kind' (1997: 24). Apart from their evasion of political agendas, what separates The Birthday Party from any of their subcultural peers is their emphatic embracing of what Roland Barthes calls jouissance. In many respects the whole precept for the group is the hedonism implicit in jouissance, a principle that was anathema to many of their contemporaries. As a result The Birthday Party, with their emphasis on the body, reclaim the original rock 'n' roll moment that was experienced in Australia in the late 1950s with the import of American music, where the dominant responses to the music were physical and sexual for the participants and anxiety on the part of its detractors. However, The Birthday Party's rock 'n' roll jouissance inverts the original 1950s experience: where early rock 'n' roll was about 'Saturday night without the concept of sin' (Webster 1988: 166), a comparatively innocent exercise, The Birthday Party are all about sin and excess. In the 1982 song 'Junkyard', off the album of the same name, Nick Cave sing-shrieks 'there's garbage in Honey's sack again / junk in Honey's bunk again', revealing a perverse pleasure/disgust dialectic which effectively conflates the traditional hedonistic rock trinity of sex and drugs and rock 'n' roll into something unsettling, self-destructive and, particularly in the climate defined above by Savage, misogynistic.5 It is in this song that Cave also makes one of his first grandiose and regal pronouncements. Apparently identifying himself with Elvis, he repeatedly claims 'I am the King'. However, if Elvis is Webster's King of rock 'n' roll and Saturday night, then Cave, in his inversion of the original rock 'n' roll moment, becomes the King of the lunkyard and of sinful pleasure. It is possibly their category-defying apoliticism and certainly the apparent darkness of their lyrics and music that led to The Birthday Party being represented in the British music press as one of the progenitors of the post-punk gothic subculture. In spite of his protestations to the contrary, most obviously encapsulated in a letter to the New Musical Express at Christmas 1982, where he rejects The Birthday Party's

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'honorary title of forefathers to the "New-Super-death-Tribe"',6 Cave's work with both The Birthday Party and The Bad Seeds is frequently gothic. However, the stimulus for British gothic music and fashion essentially came from Europe, and featured the incorporation of traditional literary and cinematic motifs, the iconic vampire in particular, albeit read via Hollywood in the case of Bauhaus's seminal goth single 'Bela Lugosi's Dead'. By contrast Cave's gothic is clearly located in the American Deep South of William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor and the blues, where religious lunacy, extreme passion and macabre events all coexist. It is this environment that increasingly informs much of Cave's work with The Bad Seeds in the mid 1980s as he moves away from the more abrasive and avant-garde music of The Birthday Party and into more conventional idioms. However, as Duncan Webster points out, the 'South seems to offer both extreme Gothic marginality and central American authenticity' (1988: 165). Although the relocation of Cave's work seems to promise a compromise compared to the sonic obnoxiousness of The Birthday Party, his choice of location presents a possible ambivalence with regard to his lyrical and thematic preoccupations. The South after all is both authentically American but also disturbingly other. Where America and Americanization are apparently rejected or demonized by British punk and its immediate subcultural successors, American music and a particular niche of America, namely the South, become a focal point for the work of Nick Cave and other Australian groups from the mid 1980s onwards. This transcultural and transcontinental pollination is rather strange and seemingly inexplicable. However, it does appear that there is an attempt to symbolically invest the music of the subculture in Australia with the 'authenticity' referred to by Webster, to provide it with a sense of origins and reclaim the memories erased by the amnesia of punk. Webster goes on to note that 'there have been many post-punk hybrids of rockabilly, country, the blues (all styles generally associated with authenticity, specific regions, specific histories) with a trash or punk sensibility' (Webster 1988: 167). Webster is applying this notion of generical mutation to American music, however it is also as, if not more, emphatically applicable to Australian subcultural music in the 1980s. At first it seems rather an obvious connection to make—where else is Australian subcultural rock music going to look for its reference points other than to American rock 'n'

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roll or, in the late 70s, British punk? The influence of rebellious American music can be traced in Australian subculture from the pre-Twist Johnny O'Keefe in the 1950s, through Sydney's Radio Birdman, essentially a facsimile of Iggy Pop's Stooges (themselves an important reference point for punk) to The Birthday Party's cover of 'Cat Man' by Gene Vincent and the Blue Caps. However, from the mid-1980s onwards a plethora of groups emerge in Australia determined to mine the blues or country vein, those idioms which, when fused, created early rock 'n' roll in America; groups such as The Beasts of Bourbon, The Triffids, Rowland S. Howard's These Immortal Souls, Hugo Race and the True Spirit, and Dave Graney's Coral Snakes. One of the most interesting of this conglomerate, Simon Bonney's Crime and the City Solution, also emerged from the Australian punk scene of the 1970s and at various points in the 1980s included ex-members of The Birthday Party; their work, from the 1989 album The Bride Ship onwards, with its trilogy of songs The Bride Ship', 'Free World' and 'New World', presents a discourse on empire, colonization and democracy and deserves a study in its own right. However, the problem remains as to why Australian post-punk subculture should choose these musical idioms, which are not only nationally but regionally and historically specific, and claim them for their own. I don't necessarily have a solution to this conundrum. However, as a leading figure in Australian subculture from punk onwards, and because the appropriation and utilization of America and the Deep South in his music is complex and contrary (and because it is perhaps the latter feature that is so significant within this discussion, indeed any discussion that has Elvis at its core), 1 will use Nick Cave as my paradigm to address some of the issues manifest in the pervasive presence of America in Australian alternative music. As stated in the opening of this discussion, Nick Cave's 1984 cover version of Elvis Presley's 'In the Ghetto' can be viewed as a troubling phenomenon, not least for its apparently paradoxical properties, lust as Cave seems to be moving from an avant-garde idiom (post-punk dissonance) to a conventional one (the ballad), the ex-front man of the apolitical Birthday Party chooses to cover one of Presley's most socially aware songs. Cave compounds these contradictions by disturbing punk's rejection of Elvis, re-deifying him, and at the same time challenging the 'homogenized pop' of the 1980s by juxtaposing his own image as alienated, post-punk

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misfit with that of the Vegas-period Elvis. In a similar fashion to The Birthday Party's inversion of the innocent hedonism of original rock 'n' roll into Baudelairian excess, Cave recreates the bloated, 'white whale' Vegas-Elvis in his own black-clad and skinny image. However Cave's reading of Elvis is more problematic than an ironic or anarchic act of bricolage.7 His appropriation of Elvis is eminently appropriate given Cave's reputation in the 1980s as a notorious drug user and his interest in Albert Goldman's demonizing portrait of Presley as deluded junkie in the Biography Elvis. What Cave does is create a parallel between his own subversive iconic status and that of Elvis in his final years.8 The influence of America on Cave's work is encapsulated in this obsession with Elvis; as Henry Rollins suggests in his tour diary with the hardcore American band Black Flag, Cave comes close to being an Elvis impersonator in his 'bright green skintight Elvis outfit'. However, the unsituatedness of Cave's cover of 'In the Ghetto'—simultaneously reverential and bewildering—reflects Elvis's own contrary cultural status after his death and crystallizes his representative position within Australian subculture. In Dead Elvis Greil Marcus identifies this unlocated placement with reference to Presley's significance in America and Britain, where he is a 'vague symbol of displaced identity ... a weird icon ... an emblem of working-class bad taste or upper-class camp' (Marcus 1992: 33). By contrast, in Australia this displacement—Marcus's references to the vague, the weird and the oscillation between the class-based bad taste/camp dichotomy—is repositioned: the shifting, dislocated and transplanted Elvis becomes central to the identity of the subculture, an iconic figure symbolizing both musical authenticity and cultural rebellion. Presley's reception in 1950s Australia echoed his initial impact upon the mass media in the USA, his music was demonized: However a paradox emerges in that it was not his early frenzied performances that inspired outrage but his first major hit, 'Heartbreak Hotel', which the disc jockey Bob Rogers refused to play.9 The song, a loping, bluesy lament with an isolated guitar break, is one of Presley's more haunting and haunted hits. In pulling apart the blues/country fusion that constitutes early good time rock 'n' roll, it is songs like 'Heartbreak Hotel' that provide the strategic prototype for Australian subcultural blues. If the Australian establishment, in the last gasps of colonial excess, tentatively maintains its Commonwealth Queen, then significant members of the alternative music scene have their cultural King(s).

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It is this defusing of rock 'n' roll fusion, into country and blues, which informs the music in question. In Nick Cave's case the activity goes a step further than that implicit in Elvis's 'Heartbreak Hotel'. In spite of his apparent and persistent interest in Vegas-period Elvis, it is the birth of Elvis and the very origins of rock 'n' roll that inscribe and infect his work. On Cave's album The First Born is Dead (1985) the song Tupelo', which refers both to Elvis's birth-place in Mississippi and to John Lee Hooker's 'talking' blues of the same name, depicts the birth of Elvis and his dead twin brother Jesse Garon as 'a child is born on his brother's heals / Come Sunday morning the first-born's dead'.10 It is in this song and on the album as a whole that the influence of Presley really starts to become apparent and to take on quite unsettling dimensions. The song invests the birth of Elvis with a biblical significance. His arrival in Tupelo is accompanied by an apocalyptic Old Testament storm that rumbles 'hungry like the beast' and is heralded by both strange portents and the disruption of nature—'no bird can fly no fish can swim ... Until the King is born'. The song effectively represents the birth of rock 'n' roll and establishes Elvis as its messianic saviour. In addition, through utilizing John Lee Hooker in 'Tupelo' and closing the whole album with an elegy to another bluesman, 'Blind Lemon Jefferson', Cave shifts Elvis out of the kitsch or camp environment that marks his displaced position in America and Britain, reclaiming his musical roots and, by implication, authenticity. However 'Tupelo' also reveals the extent of Cave's immersion in the gothic properties of the Deep South; the presence of Elvis's dead twin brother Jesse mars the miracle birth, indicating the duality which Marcus claims 'has dominated Presley iconography for thirty years' (1992: 131). We are again presented with that oscillation in images of the South between authenticity and marginalization. The birth of Elvis is a central feature within popular music as a whole, but it is what Cave does with the event, investing it with religious and supernatural connotations, that shifts it out of the bounds of the familiar. Marcus identifies this reconfiguration of Elvis's birth and the otherness of Cave's vision: His Tupelo' takes its energy not from the gospels but from the black arts that hang over the Mississippi Delta blues like a travelling cloud: Cave seems to be less making the music than carried away by it, less a performer than a messenger. You forget everything you think you know about Elvis Presley... Cave combines parable with nursery rhyme, shoots the hybrid forth with hoodoo power, and it's not easy to catch: plenty of

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first-rank black American pop musicians have described entire careers without a touch of hoodoo conjure ... But Cave has it—or, as the game goes, it has him (Marcus 1992: 122). There are a number of issues at stake here. Cave, like the jitterbuggers of 1940s Australia, is possessed by demonic American music, 'carried away by it', and, as Marcus indicates, his stimulus is less the Gospels that constitute the lyrical content of the song than the Devil's music. Marcus suggests that Cave captures the hoodoo of the blues in the song, rendering both his own vision and his subject authentically located in terms of idiom, yet also apparently dislocated. As Marcus points out, the 'burning roots of rock 'n' roll and jazz (lie) in kidnapped African religion' (1992: 122). We therefore have an effective two-fold displacement of rock 'n' roll origins from 'kidnapped' African religion, through gothicized Delta blues, to white, middle-class Australian subculture. This migration, from Africa to the USA to Australia, also effectively unites two colonial discourses: one of black slavery, which feeds into and gives authority to the existential anguish of the blues, and one of culture, where the original constituents of American rock 'n' roll emerge in 1980s Australia. Australian subculture is arguably therefore engaged in a search for origins, reclaiming the 'kidnapped' hoodoo features of rock 'n' roll as central to the medium and embracing them as their blue(s)-print. What Marcus also identifies is the sense that '(ylou forget everything you think you know about Elvis'. The song is unsettling precisely because it disturbs our conventional wisdom, our consciousness of the iconography of Elvis (slim hillbilly cat or bloated Vegas parody), and recontextualizes him in a landscape of Old Testament imagery and hoodoo incantation. This disorientation is also tied up in the fact that Cave efficiently deconstructs our understanding of rock 'n' roll and, in a more sweeping manner than punk, renegotiates the history of popular music. Cave's perspective is one of both retrieving and reinventing the past by resituating the original constituents of rock 'n' roll. A Duncan Webster suggests, if early rock 'n' roll promised the escape of hillbilly hedonism from the fear and quietism of country music, and the pain and sin of the blues; if the concept behind (it) was Saturday night without the concept of sin, good times without the price to pay, then what Cave re-introduces is precisely those themes of guilt, pain, and anxiety (1988: 166).

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What Cave therefore does is to dissolve the unifying features of rock 'n' roll and, perversely in the context of his work with The Birthday Party, strip it of its jouissance. However, if the song involves a practice that Webster refers to, in the context of post-punk hybrids, as 'archaeological excavation' (1988: 168), Cave's appropriation of the origins of rock 'n' roll, embodied in the birth of Elvis Presley, is also subsequently recycled as he moves increasingly into the mainstream and more conventional media. The Elvis obsession reaches its apotheosis in his novel And the Ass Saw the Angel (1988), a work influenced by the literary gothic of America, where the narrator and protagonist Euchrid Eucrow is born directly after his dead twin brother. For Cave the revisiting of Elvis's birth seems compulsive, and Tupelo's Bethlehem as important as Graceland's Jerusalem. If we take Nick Cave's work as representative of a dominant strain within post-punk Australia's subculture, and Elvis as a Deep South symbol of the fusion of blues and country into rock 'n' roll, what we have is a specific appropriation and assimilation of Elvis and the American South. Elvis is transformed into a gothicized creation who, as opposed to the camp/bad taste dialectic defined by Greil Marcus, is both messianic saviour and hoodoo King. Cave apparently resurrects Elvis and reinvests him with the original spirit and constituents of rock 'n' roll. However, the act is not akin to the amnesia of punk, for in also covering Vegas-Elvis Cave presents himself as aware of Presley's history. The act of reconfiguration is therefore both reverential and iconoclastic—by appropriating Elvis Cave manages to offend both the Elvis-faithful and the original punk agenda with its anti-America, antiElvis bias. This simultaneous consciousness of beginnings (Tupelo') and ends (the cover of 'In the Ghetto') dislocates the position of Elvis to a further degree. Like Webster's discussion of the centres and margins manifest in the variety of discourses on the American South, Elvis is both central and marginal, central through the birth of rock 'n' roll and marginal in his decline in the 1970s, a position that is itself troubled when the popularity of Vegas-era Elvis is considered. Part of this confusing of boundaries lies in Cave's own use of musical idiom. Webster describes the work of Tom Waits (a kindred spirit for Cave) as a collage of the 'avant-garde and the traditional, the small town and an international landscape' (1988: 162), a description as applicable to Cave in his cross-pollination of musical styles and literary sources and his apparent

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but unspecified use of location.11 Through this oscillation Elvis, in Cave's work, becomes an unlocated 'weird' icon, but in a way dissimilar to that suggested by Marcus. For the Australian subculture, filtered through the work of Cave, he symbolizes the avant-garde leanings of alternative music, with its genre-hopping, but also invests it with a sense of history and tradition. In addition, if the original effect of rock 'n' roll upon 1950s subculture in Australia was to introduce a feeling of solidarity amongst its participants, and if the musical climate of the 1980s was largely dominated by a standardized 'ideological rigour' (Savage) or 'homogenized pop' (Webster), the effect of the origins of American rock 'n' roll upon Australian alternative music invokes both alienation and selfelevation, another contradiction implicit in the variety of discourses surrounding Elvis. As Nick Cave states on 'Junkyard', '1 am the King', on 'The Moon is in the Gutter', '1 am the King of the Blues' and on the track of the same name from The Firstborn is Dead, parodying his gothic status, 'I am the Black Crow King'.12 Cave's appropriation of Elvis and his transformation of our received understanding of Elvis-iconography is an act of resistance, to the punk conventions from which The Birthday Party emerged in the late 1970s, to the music press with its generical categorizations and pigeonholes, to the record industry that expects an artist to adapt to rather than confound expectations, and to his own fans. His assimilation of Elvis and America (and Australian subculture's interest in the blues and country in general) is weird, as weird and displaced as Marcus's depiction of Elvis, and as mythologized and mythic as any other image of the American South. It is an 'archaeological excavation' of sorts, but a constructed one based upon American popular myths surrounding the Deep South that reveal what Webster calls his 'almost caricatured blues knowledge' (1988: 166). At the same time his perspective is stamped by an idiosyncrasy that refuses to have any interest in the traditional trappings of rock 'n' roll rebellion, implicit in Elvis's early work, in 1950s American popular music in general, and in the concept of the good-time Saturday night. Instead, blurring historical chronology, Cave projects himself, particularly in 'Tupelo', as an Australian John the Baptist to Elvis's Christ, a 'messenger' rather than a 'performer', as Marcus puts it. The result is a final dichotomy. Marcus argues that Cave has the authentic hoodoo power of the blues in his song of Elvis's birth, then adds that 'as the game goes, it has him'. The act of possession suggests

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the presence of the diabolic within the blues idiom, but, given the colonial and imperial discourse implicit in the transplanting of hoodoo from Africa to America, the possession of Cave can be read as another instance of demonic cultural imperialism by American popular media, echoing the similar possession of Jitterbuggers in 1940s Australia. Just as the original subcultural otherness of rock 'n' roll in 1950s Australia gradually became sanitized and achieved relative respectability, the 'possession' of Nick Cave by his own particular American myth, and the incorporation into and infecting of his work in the 1980s by Elvis, moves him closer towards the mainstream, into the Elvis industry and towards a new breed of Elvis impersonator. Postscript At the end of 1996, after nine solo albums, Nick Cave, ex-singer for The Birthday Party, was nominated for the award of MTV's Best Male Artist. His album of that year, Murder Ballads, which consisted of a series of songs inspired by the specifically American genre of ballads of that title, had been his most commercially successful. Cave requested that the nomination be withdrawn, and the award was eventually given to George Michael, ex-singer of 1980s pop group Wham.

American Life by Proxy: Dutch Youth and their Sense of Place Mel van Elteren

As yet 'America' remains the mythical location of popular culture for many Europeans (Schulze et al. |eds.| 1991: 50). Although the position of continental-European pop music has become stronger, and, very recently, there are the first indications of the emergence of a European consciousness among the young which, according to some Europewatchers, would wilt American pop culture in Europe, Anglo-American music's hegemony is still undeniable. Among advertisers, broadcasters and sociologists, there is a growing sense in Western Europe that America's preponderant influence in pop culture would be challenged, for the first time in decades, by this emerging consciousness among youngsters, reflected in a separate sense of music (e.g., rave and techno with a kind of electronic beat that is hot across Europe but less popular in the United States), fashion and even style (European labels like Pepe, a brand of jeans; European fashions by Kookai and Chipie). Several leading experts, however, emphasize that there is no vital pan-European identity among the young which would culminate in a widely shared European pop culture. They expect American popular culture—from the baseball caps worn by French, British and Dutch teenagers to the popularity of everything from World Wrestling Federation matches to the serial Beverly Hills 90210—to continue to have a powerful resonance in Europe (Schmidt 1993). In my opinion, too, this seems to reflect strong wishful thinking about a common European pop culture among the pan-European advertising agencies, marketing experts and sociologists. In this I also disagree with pop sociologist Simon Frith who expects 'Europe' to become a new mythical space (Frith 1991: 268-69).

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Paradoxically, the economic integration of Europe during the 1990s is providing even greater opportunities for exporting 'America', as advertisers look for themes that will sell throughout Europe without hints of specifically national, for example, French or Italian, origins. As French television commentator Christine Ockrent pointed out, 'The only truly pan-European culture is the American culture' (quoted in Tempest 1990). Advertisers find that 'America' sells, especially in the youth and young adult market. Japanese conglomerates are acquiring American entertainment companies not to change their cultural products but to cash in on them. Ironically, Japanese business will continue to export America, even if US firms cannot (Rosenberg 1993: 44). The structural changes in the popular music markets do not imply that shifts in artistic policy will immediately follow the changes in power balances between music industries of various countries. But since America as a market and also as the imagined country of hope and glory is losing some of its significance, one may expect that the future will bring a wider variety of musical genres oriented towards a wider variety of markets (Reniers 1992: 8). Despite the fact that the media-supply of MTV-Europe increasingly hails from Europe, according to marketing data, its audience is mainly interested in international acts, and these concern American idols and British stars operating in an American idiom. To be clear, it should be recognized that MTV orients its programs towards the four largest countries with regard to the distribution of its programs, and at present these are Germany, Sweden, Belgium and Holland (Rutten and Oud 1991: 202-203). In the densely cabled country of the Netherlands there are 4.4 million subscribers to the cable television network, a few million of whom watch regularly and among them are many youths who frequently tune in to MTV-Europe—with over 100 million potential viewers, from Glasgow to Moscow and from Helsinki to Athens (Versteeg 1993). Furthermore, we should take into account the contemporary imageculture, particularly as embodied in advertising, in which manifestations of 'Americanicity' are discernible everywhere in countries like the Netherlands. Many of these images concentrate around the issue of a youthful and dynamic life full of excitement, adventure and glamour, in the context of some imaginary 'American' setting. In recent European imagery of America—as in TV commercials and advertisements for Pepe jeans from London—an ironic, playful approach has been taken; for

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example, James Dean-like youngsters in retro fifties settings with streamlined American automobiles and other artefacts typical of that golden era, who act in ways that deviate from the filmic scenes with which many Europeans, too, are so well acquainted. This imagery has various layers of meaning that allow for diverse readings, including a camp version. Whereas Americans tend to take their popular culture seriously, Europeans may approach 'America' more ironically. Yet these images, too, can only be appreciated by Europeans who have been thoroughly socialized into American popular culture. Apparently, the meanings (symbols and signs) entailed in this audiovisual material have a strong appeal to the target groups involved, not only to contemporary youth, but certainly also to a part of the juvenile elders, those members of the postwar babyboom generation who grew up with rock music and associated forms of American popular culture (Biich 1991; Donkers 1982). The latter are also a significant part of the new middle class, mainly employed in the service industries and governmental organizations, who are the main carriers, and not infrequently also the cultural entrepeneurs of postmodernism and accompanying lifestyles (Featherstone 1987). Then a disconnection of rock and youth as a generation or age group takes place, in favour of youth as an ideology. Especially in the United States this tendency is at issue, but much less so in a country like, for instance, the United Kingdom. In this context one should compare the American magazine Rolling Stone, dating from the 1960s that has grown with its ageing group of readers, with the British magazine New Musical Express, which aims at an ever renewing group of young people (Frith 1984: 193-194). Holland positions itself somewhere between both extremes, leaning towards the American pole; the existence of Muziekblad OOR—a magazine with strong resemblances to Rolling Stone, albeit of a somewhat lower quality—indicates a similar trend as in America. In this country, too, the cult of youthfulness appears to flourish, which causes record companies to take the adult market in Holland rather than the youth market in Britain as a starting-point of their marketing and selling policies (Frith 1989 (ed.|: 265). Herein lies part of the explanation of the revivals of heavily stylized forms of postwar youth cultures, as well as the generation-transcending lifestyles that have been discernible for some time with regard to sartorial styles, and musical and other cultural taste preferences. Rather, independent of age, distinct categories of

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people opt for specific lifestyles, in which, nevertheless, some form of 'youthfulnes' often plays a crucial role. This development is also due to the dominant position of juvenile elders as gatekeepers, opinion leaders and strategic managers in the mass media and youth-oriented culture industries. Diverse Interplays of Cultural Localization and Globalization in Popular Music Since the mid-eighties diverse bands and singers have been heralding the return of American rock or offering a contemporary country music functioning beyond the stereotypes of rhinestones and red-necks, and expressing a thoughtful sense of place and tradition. Here the so-called back-projection mechanism that is involved in listening to American pop/rock music is of relevance. American popular music is often strongly linked to visions of an American landscape or well-known American localities. According to Duncan Webster it seems true that almost all of the various forms of music produced in Britain in the 1980s were somehow related to an imaginary America (Webster 1988: 158-63). This crucial element has to be taken into account, of course, when one tries to gauge the relative impact of pop/rock music from Britain in the Netherlands, compared to that from America. Of the leading figures in the New Authenticity Movement in the United States, Bruce Springsteen was by far the most famous in Holland. His first performance, as early as 1975, was on the RA1 podium in Amsterdam. He and his E Street Band returned to Holland in April 1981 when he gave two concerts at the AHOY Hall in Rotterdam. In the late 1980s and early 1990s Springsteen topped the charts in this country and all of his performances in the soccer stadium of Feyenoord in Rotterdam, when he was on tour in Europe, were major successes. Although other American musicians involved drew less attention among the Dutch, the Chicano group Los Lobos and more recently the self-willed rock group R.E.M. from Athens, Georgia, have also been popular. Besides, almost all American new authenticity bands have given concerts in the Netherlands. Although the Dutch context was in many respects quite different from the American, we find tendencies towards 'authenticity' in rock music here which bear some resemblance to the so-called New Authenticity

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Movement in American rock music (Frith 1990). First 1 want to refer to a new wave of Dutch rock groups in the early 1980s who sang their songs in Dutch, which was a clear break with a prevailing tradition of singing pop/rock songs in English, even when these songs concerned original compositions by Dutch musicians. The breakthrough of Dutchlanguage rock groups was reflected in higher audience figures for specialized radio programs, an expanding live performance circuit and high record sales. This Dutch-language rock music, played by groups like Doe Maar (Go On), Toontje Lager (In a Lower Key or Change of Tune), Het Goede Doel (Charity), Normaal (Naturally or Of Course), was first of all the outcome of changes in the existing structures of the music industry and pop scene in the Netherlands. Through the efforts of the Stichting Popmuziek Nederland (SPN; The Netherlands Pop Music Foundation), so-called 'pop-collectives' emerged (partly subsidized by the Ministry of Culture, Recreation and Social Work), providing practice facilities for unknown, inexperienced musicians. Their promotion of so-called 'non-commercial' pop music provided a strong impetus to Dutch-language rock (van Elderen 1989). This was also enhanced by an 'alternative' circuit of youth centres and social clubs. The crisis in the national record industry (declining numbers of record sales) was met by a new business-strategy: picking up and promoting the new trend of singing in Dutch. The emergence of a few small independent new labels and music magazines (like Vinyl) not only drew attention to punk and new wave developments abroad but to native language rock as well. In addition, the audiences for this native rock scene were to some extent 'constituted' by the mass media. The disc jockey of a very popular radio program, De Avondspits (The Evening Rush-hour), played a crucial role in this, promoting Dutch-language rock rather heavily. Various TV stations, which tried to win support by articulating their own identity—a significant aspect in the pillarized Dutch broadcasting system—featured some of the groups as well (van Elderen 1984: 99, 102-105). In this the broadcasting stations VPRO (formerly liberal Protestant, since 1968 with a broader, liberal humanistic orientation) and VARA (social democratic orientation) were especially active in promoting songs that went against the grain. I would like to add another significant factor that may explain this rise of Dutch-language pop/rock. It was no longer taboo to emphasize

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one's own Dutch identity in playing this music, especially since leading figures among the 'juvenile elders' of the pop/rock establishment succeeded in legitimating this stance vis-a-vis the higher educated, 'progressive' aficionados of rock. For the rest, this New Authenticity Movement also concerned an alternation of generations, with newcomers taking over the lead from their predecessors. In this tendency no direct American influences were involved. Rather similar, parallel developments occurred which may be explained in terms of counterreactions to broader modernization processes which took place in both the USA and the Netherlands. They concern a cultural-ideological problem of modern people longing for a comprehensible world view, that is, parochialism, in an abstract society (Zijderveld 1970). In the Dutch case, a link with the cultural crisis in the welfare state should be made which gave these responses a specific flavour. In the (few) political comments in the lyrics an international dimension was completely lacking; the culture of the modern welfare state seemed to be 'isolationist'. This might fit in with an often-quoted explanation of the emergence of Dutch-language rock songs: the welfare state is supposed to have halted (Anglo-)American 'cultural imperialism' and the native rock tradition has grown mature (a view mentioned, but not shared, by van Elderen 1985: 156). This does not seem to be very plausible though. For this the continuing influence of American rock was much too strong, whereas the indigenous rock culture remained underdeveloped. Nevertheless, some Dutch-language rock musicians do seem to have been inspired by American examples, particularly by rock groups from the Midwest or South who articulate their cultural-regional identities vis-a-vis mainstream America, albeit in the context of modern massmediated culture. This probably applies most of all to the rock group Normaal, who play a kind of rock 'n' roll, or what might be called 'farmer's rock' (taking black rock 'n' roll—Chuck Berry and Little Richard—as a starting-point, and sometimes mixing it with streetband music). Their music is very robust and rhythmic but does not make reference to the aggressive 'sounds of the city'. A kind of regionalistic rural chauvinism is involved among the members of the band, who have their roots in the Achterhoek, a distinct region in the East of the Netherlands near the German border that is considered backward, especially by people from the Randstad, the urban conglomerate in the West. They consist-

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ently sing in dialect and local slang, and express opposition to the cultural dominance of the Randstad area. Songs like 'Ik-Bun-Maor-NeEenvoudige-Boerenlul' (1 Am )ust a Simple Yokel) epitomize the Normaal image. They are about ordinary experiences, the simple things of life as they touch on everybody. And they make jokes about it—simple countryside humour and laughter, in which subtlety and irony are certainly not lacking' (van Elderen 1984: 107). Yet at their concerts Normaal and their audiences are 'having a ball' as they have often described these happenings. Their fans, who come mostly from the countryside, small towns and villages, tend to share such rural chauvinistic ideas with them. The type of music of the other Dutch-language groups originally had a regional flavour too. It first caught on in small towns, regional centres in the countryside—Nijmegen, Wageningen, the provinces of Noord-Brabant and Limburg. The real popularity in the Randstad only came after heavy TV exposure. Insofar as there still exist geographical differences in the Netherlands today, they are often related to differences in degree of urbanity. In this Amsterdam most often fulfills an avant-garde function. Here new cultural expressions and trends catch on most frequently, after which the diffusion to other towns, suburban regions and the countryside follows rather rapidly. To the extent that elements of regional cultures are still discernible, these run the risk of disappearing entirely (regional clothes, dialects, folk songs, marriage customs and so on), or—less frequently— they are incorporated into the national culture, for instance the Carnival and the Elfstedentocht (Frisian, eleven-towns skating race), which evolved from typical Southern-Dutch, respectively Northern, that is Frisian, events into national ones (Knippenberg and de Pater 1988: 206). In the case of Dutch-language rock, however, the new trends began in the periphery and not in Amsterdam. More recently, another wave of Dutch groups has become manifest. These groups not only sing in Dutch, a regional Dutch dialect or even the Frisian language, but also borrow from older musical traditions in the Netherlands, such as old sailors' ballads, accordion music, streetband (carnival-like) music, brass band music and polka dancing. A very good example is Rowwen Heze, a group from a small town called America (sic), part of the municipality of Horst in the North of Limburg, the southernmost province of the Netherlands, in de Peel—a poorer area where they used to dig peat, with a marginalized culture vis-a-vis

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the Randstad. Its members sing in the regional Limburg dialect and play a wild kind of Tex-Mex music, covering music by well-known American groups in this genre, such as Flaco Jimenez for whom Rowwen Heze opened live shows, during his European tour in 1991 and with whom they performed at the Uitmarkt, an annual national cultural festival in Amsterdam, in August 1992. But they also add their own creative contributions by using the accordion as played at fairs, and the trumpet of the brass bands. In a way, their interpretation of Cajun music is an almost natural result of playing a fast tempo version of traditional 'Dutch' accordion music. Like quite a few of the other new authenticity groups, they have a very good command of their traditional, 'pure' instruments, which enables them to make superb live performances without much audio-technological support. Rowwen Heze is named after a legendary freak who lived in de Peel in the nineteenth century and was famous as a faith healer. Their style is partly influenced by the American Chicano group Los Lobos—that is why they were nicknamed Los Limbos (a clear reference to their regional background). The impact of Los Lobos is obvious in their catchy song 'Bestel Mar' ()ust Order |a drink)) (1987), a cover of Los Lobos's 'Anselma', in its turn a faithful rendition of a hundred-year-old Mexican song (with which Los Lobos won a Grammy Award for folk music). Though their repertoire contains several polka songs played in a considerably faster tempo, on the basis of their inciting performances they might as well be called The Pogues from de Peel. The way Rowwen Heze deal with Tex-Mex and Irish folk is clearly influenced by rock 'n' roll—an undeniable resemblance with the Irish-London group The Pogues -, while it simultaneously has a strong affinity with the fairs' music and brass band ('oom-pah-pah') music in the region of Limburg. The strong resemblance between Tex-Mex music and the musical style of southern Dutch bands like Rowen Heze as regards the polka-like rhythm may be explained from the Germanic influences both regions underwent in the past. (See Lewis 1992 for this issue with regard to Mexican music in the US South-West.) Rowwen Heze have succeeded in 'naturally' combining various typical elements from the indigenous musical culture with Anglo-American rock 'n' roll. This may be the very reason why this band has become rather popular. One should recognize that for the generations who grew up in Holland after World War 11, Anglo-American pop/rock music was often

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part of their collective life history too! Another plausible reason for its popularity is that with its playful mixing of styles—and particularly the hybridization of indigenous and American musics—Rowwen Heze fits very well in postmodernist culture. It also entails a deliberate counterhegemonic practice with regard to mainstream (Randstad) culture. In both these respects there is a resemblance to Chicano rock 'n' roll musicians in the United States. Here the fascinating analysis by George Lipsitz of the central practices of Los Angeles Mexican-American musicians since World War II is relevant (Lipsitz 1990). He takes the vantage point of anthropologist Michael M.J. Fischer on the core components of the postmodern sensibility: bifocality or reciprocity of perspectives, juxtaposition of multiple realities, intertextuality, inter-referentiality, and comparisons through families of resemblance (Fischer 1986). In a very different way rap music, too, entails a response pattern in which a sense of community is emphasized, in this case among AfricanAmerican youths and kindred blacks and other people of colour all across the westernized globe. Identification with, and emulation of, the hip-hop subculture in the USA may help blacks in the Netherlands in enhancing their self-esteem and thus empower them in their struggle to obtain a better quality of life. Through this culture of 'secondary orality' disseminated by transnational mass media, kindred groups of youngsters all over the world may very well develop common cultural identities within a global hip-hop culture. Because of its Carribean connection, rap especially has a strong appeal to members of those ethnic groups who live in that area or have their roots in the Caribbean but live elsewhere; for example, people of colour from the West Indies in the United Kingdom, or the Netherlands Antilles and Surinam in the Netherlands. There are several factors that are favourable for a positive reception of American rap and the rise of its Dutch counterpart. Holland is a country in which the penetration of American popular culture has taken place very intensely during the postwar period. Holland has an underclass of ethnic minorities: people from Surinam and the Netherlands Antilles—former Dutch colonies that still have specific relations with the Netherlands and are part of the Verenigd Koninkrijk der Nederlanden

(United Kingdom of the Netherlands)—but also Moroccan and Turkish groups, highly concentrated in specific urban settings; the Bijlmermeer,

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a southern neighborhood of Amsterdam, and parts of the inner city of Amsterdam such as De Pijp, and of Rotterdam; 'het Oude Westen' (the Old West), the Afrikanerbuurt (all former white working-class districts). Among the young of these groups, the question of identity is often a hot issue. In their case a lack of economic opportunities and positive images has certainly not enhanced, if not really stifled, self-esteem. Most Dutch hip-hoppers have a Creole-Surinam background, and young people of Creole-Dutch origin have set the tone of the indigenous rap culture. Previously, in the 1970s and early 1980s, a significant minority among the Surinam youth—along with young people from the Netherlands Antilles, the Cape Verde Islands and Africa—identified with the Rastafari movement concentrated around reggae music. Then several black reggae groups were formed and reggae musicians from Jamaica and England had a steady audience in the Netherlands (Buiks 1983: 155-59). The important position that music and dance (bigi popu, kawina and kaseko) have in the Surinam culture, eased the way for Surinam youth to preoccupy themselves with rapping, scratching and electric boogie in their leisure time. The founding of so-called hip-hop posses fits in their tradition too. Primarily formed for the sake of joy, each posse consists of 10 to 30 youngsters who belong to the rap subculture, make the same music, have the same idols, live in the same neighbourhood or even street. They often have family ties, and resemble one another in social class, religion and education. The extended family ties of Surinam families make the relationships between brothers, sisters, cousins, and nephews closer than is the case in the average Dutch family. So the founding of extended peer groups fits quite well in the life-world of the Surinam hip-hoppers (Wermuth 1993: 91). However, there are also several factors that hinder a positive reception of rap in the Netherlands. The position of the black underclass in the Netherlands is not as bad as in the USA and in several other European countries (especially the United Kingdom and France), partly because of a rather elaborate welfare system with various forms of financial and social support for lower income groups that diminish possible social frictions. In the USA it is especially the physical setting of the ghettos that has a strong negative impact on the members of the social underclass. Holland does not have similar ghetto-like situations, and living conditions are relatively better, due to a governmental policy aimed at offering good housing to the lower income groups. Nevertheless, the

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working of the social security system—by taking in and absorbing many unemployed people—is expected to have negative effects on the longterm unemployed and their children, resulting in an economic underclass to which numerous Dutch black youths belong. Until now forms of blatant racism on a larger scale have not been at issue. Yet more subtle forms of racism—among other things discrimination in application procedures for jobs and in the work place—have been found in social research (Bovenkerk 1978; Elich and Maso 1984). All non-American rap may be derivative, given the form's unshakable identification with black urban youth in the United States. For the time being rap in Holland is still predominantly modeled after the American original, despite the fact that Dutch rappers may explicitly yell, This ain't no America!' Yet a 'Dutch' style has started to develop, with the Urban Dance Squad as musical avant-garde. This group lacks the Public Enemy-like toughness, and the hard-driving funk pulse of the best American groups though, which is very probably due to the more peaceful, egalitarian and welfare state character of Dutch society. 'Nederhop' is less extreme in its black political messages; blacks and whites living together in peace is more often a main issue than in the black hip-hop culture in the United States. This may partly be explained as a result of the presence of many white working-class youths in hip-hop crews rather than the fact that Dutch rappers would only be trend followers of their American role models and have domesticated the original rap style (Wermuth 1993: 101-102). There is a growing awareness among Dutch rappers of the relevance of adding local-'national' elements to a musical style that is globalizing more and more. The fully white Amsterdam group, Osdorp Posse, rap in Dutch and MC Sranang in Sranang, and try to give 'indigenous' interpretations of hip-hop. The content of their raps does not essentially differ from the American models though; money, violence, sex and women are the most frequent topics. Most of the male rappers display sexist and male chauvinist tendencies in their raps, and there are hardly counter-examples of rappers who join hands with deviants within American rap culture that are kind to women. (This even applies to the 'positive raps' of the politically engaged Dutch rap crews 24K and D.A.M.N.) Local elements are incorporated without any difficulty into a popular cultural form that is disseminated worldwide (Wermuth 1993: 96-98).

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Conclusions The 'local authenticity' involved in the New Authenticity Movement in American rock music is not a cultural form that starts only, or first of all, from indigenous cultural roots. It entails a response pattern with regard to larger cultural change processes that always takes the global context into account. In distancing itself from mainstream pop/rock and articulating its own regional-cultural identity against the hegemonic musical styles, it aims at reaching a clear sense of place and belonging to a real community. Paradoxically, however, this interplay between 'national' and 'regional' culture occurs through national and even global media networks. We can recognize such attempts, too, in the recent wave of Dutch rock groups that emphasize some local cultural identity, within the Netherlands or at the wider level of 'Europe', as against the USA or even broader: the Anglo-American world and the hegemony of AngloAmerican pop/rock. In this respect there is no two-way cultural exchange between America and Holland. In some instances Dutch musicians have actively appropriated Anglo-American pop/rock styles, and combined these with musical elements from their indigenous culture. However, thus far Dutch 'local authenticity' in popular music has not been exported as a form of ethnic pop or world music to America, nor may we expect this to happen in the future. For this, contemporary Dutch culture is not exotic enough, and too close to American culture. Most of the few musicians that have reached some popularity in the United States did so by accommodating to the prevailing moulds of American pop/rock, in addition to employing good marketing techniques; for example Shocking Blue and Golden Earring in the late sixties and early seventies; more recently saxophonist Candy Dulfer; the rock groups Bettie Serveert and Lois Lane—whose glamorous two lead singers (and sisters) toured together with Prince and also made a few records with him—and Sleeze Beez, a hardrock group, hardly known in the Netherlands itself (Rutten and Oud 1991: 137-138). An exception may be house music, often produced in home studios, with which Dutch mixers occasionally score an international hit. In this form of do-it-yourself dance music, which is so anonymous that nationality does not make any difference, Holland even belongs to the leading nations, along with America and England. Currently there are about eighty house-labels, and a couple of thousand producers in this genre in the Netherlands

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(Quint 1993: 4). Holland has become an important supplier of a number of house genres, including 'gabba house', an extremely rapid house variant that refers to heavy metal and is very popular, particularly in the gay scene and among soccer fans in the Randstad. Last but not least, with regard to the reception of American rock music, one has to be aware that certainly in the Netherlands—a small country, culturally firmly embedded in the US orbit—'America' often functions as a projection screen for people's fantasies. The backprojection mechanism that is at issue when playing or listening to this music may offer significant degrees of psychological freedom for those Dutch youths who grow up in a society that they experience as being too restrictive. In this context 'expressive individualism' as embedded in American culture may be highly attractive to Europeans growing up or living in societies with cultures that put much more emphasis on a 'communitarian' structure of feelings, at the expense of especially this kind of individualism. As a whole, there is an elective affinity between mainstream Dutch and American culture—as regards the Protestant strains in both. (This notwithstanding the large group of Roman Catholics, traditionally mainly present in the southern provinces of the country, and as significant minorities in other parts of the Netherlands.) But a major difference is very probably a stronger presence of expressive individualism in American culture. It is particularly the picaresque component in American popular culture that has a great appeal to these young people. American pop/rock music is strongly influenced by this tradition. Especially in country and western and country blues, the urge to 'travel on' is both celebrated and bemoaned. These musical traditions offered successive generations of American pop/rock musicians a cultural reservoir of picaresque themes, phrases and images, as well as complete songs (Hatch and Millward 1987: 16-18). In this connection one should take into account that Holland is still a welfare state with its characteristics of a rather 'predictable' way of life, caretaking from the cradle to the grave, so to speak. From this perspective, immersing oneself in an imaginary America offers a way out of everyday boredom. In this mythological reality of 'the land of unlimited opportunities' one feels free from everyday worries, from restrictions set by existing social structures. This concerns mostly either a venturesome life in the dangerous and desolate city or a vital experience of wide open spaces, in

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which one is continually 'on the move' by driving or hitchhiking (van Elteren 1992). At first sight, quite a different escape mechanism seems to be involved among Dutch musicians who try to distance themselves from hegemonic Anglo-American pop/rock music and emphasize their regional cultural roots within the Netherlands. On second thought, this is certainly not always the case. If they take American 'local authenticity' styles that go against the grain of mainstream American pop/rock (for example Cajun music, Tex-Mex, 'Midwestern' or 'Southern' rock) as their sources of inspiration, these groups may succeed in presenting a particular identity of their own in their home country. They then carve out a cultural niche that seems to offer the participants in this particular music scene some sense of place. In a postmodern world there is no space that we authentically occupy, and so popular culture fills the gap by manufacturing images of home and rootedness. There remains the question, however, whether or not such attempts are doomed to fail by their sheer eclecticism; if we could be as much at home here or there or anywhere else, can the place in question really be home? The home we miss is no longer a geographically defined place but rather a state of mind (Chase and Shaw 1989: 1, 15). A collective nostalgia may as yet remain a basic experience of postmodernity for most people, and a reflection in pop/rock music in the Netherlands too. But, as is more generally the case with regard to the current cultural complexity on the global level, there still remains a real possibility of a cosmopolitan attitude towards globalization processes, and transnational pop/rock music in particular. This is an option that diehard protagonists of postmodernism seem to ignore. In this connection it should be emphasized, as Hannerz does, that as collective systems of meanings, cultures belong primarily to social relationships, and to networks of such relationships. Only indirectly, and without logical necessity do they belong to places (Hannerz 1992: 39). And it need not automatically lead to a collective nostalgia, for there are opportunities here to become a cosmopolitan. A more genuine cosmopolitanism entails a certain metacultural position. There is, first of all, a willingness to engage with the Other, an intellectual and aesthetic stance of openness toward divergent cultural experiences. There can be no cosmopolitans without locals, representatives of more circumscribed territorial cultures (Hannerz 1992: 252).

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For these reasons we find cosmopolitans not only in the domain of 'high culture', but in popular culture, in our case popular music in the Netherlands, too. They are people who actively take part in musical cultures hailing from other countries and regions, and may be eclectic in their musical preferences, trying to do justice to each of the cultural forms concerned. These cosmopolitans may arrive at shared sociocultural identities with kindred people from elsewhere, across national and regional borders, and thereby actually undermining a still widely prevailing conception that conceives cultural transmission in terms of interactions between (inhabitants of) separate, 'autonomous' nationstates. Today more than ever, the 'local' is not so much defined by reference to a specific geography or community, but rather to a shared sense of place that is, itself, part of the global picture. In such a mapping process, one's sense of musical, or more generally, cultural locality, depends both on the immediate material circumstances and also on reference groups, on identities and fantasies that are themselves mediated globally. This is very well discernible in the case of the participation of youngsters from various countries in the current, transnational rap culture. 'Locality' is produced as our sense of difference from the global—it is not a spontaneous expression of given, hard-held local traditions (Frith 1991: 268). As yet I expect the audio-visual language of symbols and fantasies associated with 'America' to remain a core element in the global, mass-mediated culture (and its pan-European variant). This will enable both Dutch youth and Dutch juvenile elders to 'speak American without tears', in the words of British rock singer Elvis Costello.

The Origins and Evolution of French Rap Music and Hip Hop Culture in the 1980s and 1990s Andre J.M. Prevos

Owing to the particularities of the French society, artistic developments during the past decades (and even centuries) were most evident in Paris, the French capital. This was the case for all forms of artistic creations, imports or borrowings. This pattern was repeated during the 1980s and 1990s. This time, however, there were several changes, which will be outlined in this essay. The impact of rap music and hip hop culture in the United States and the subsequent cultural consequences have been well documented by researchers (Rose 1994: 219-27). In earlier essays (Prevos 1986, 1993), I have documented, catalogued and underlined some salient features of French rap but was unable to explore the more abstract side of French rappers. This essay will deal with the three steps that have marked the evolution of rap music and hip hop culture in France in the 1980s and 1990s: their arrival in France in the early 1980s, their adoption by popular artists from varied musical and social backgrounds and, finally, their adaptation by composers and performers to French societal and popular environments.1 There is a long tradition of American cultural influence in France (Lalanne 1994: 48). The 1920s and 1930s were marked by the discovery of jazz by French enthusiasts. American tunes remained popular into the 1950s until the arrival of rock-and-roll which overpowered French popular music (Rioux 91-139) during the second half of the decade. The American folk revival of the 1960s and the disco wave of the 1970s also

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left traces in French popular musical productions (Prevos 1991: passim). The 1980s were marked by successive changes brought on by movements from other European countries (punk from Britain) or from America (disco, hard rock, 'charity music' etc.), as well as by a development of original French popular styles (nouvelle chanson, French rock like that of A. Bashung, alternative music such as that of Berurier Noir). French and Francophone rap also fall into the new musical categories that emerged during the 1980s. On the back side of Fab Freddy's 12" 45-rpm issued in New York City in 1982, there was a song in French: 'Change de Beat', by B-Side who later recorded a 12" under her own name (Dufresne 1991: 135). In 1982 a group of American rappers toured Europe (with a few dates in France) and helped to introduce the style to new aficionados, essentially youngsters from the Parisian popular suburbs (Beckman and Adler 1991: 17). That same year, the French group Chagrin d'Amour recorded a longplaying album whose songs, all in French, were clearly inspired by rap techniques. The instant popularity of the group attracted the attention of amateurs who, even today, consider them the first example of French rap on a long-playing record (Chagrin d'Amour 1982). The unexpected success by an almost unknown group was seen as both a positive factor and a disadvantage by younger rappers primarily from the northern suburbs of Paris. First, they were glad to see that rap, which they knew already, was gaining acceptance. Secondly, they were disconcerted because they feared that Chagrin d'Amour's innocuous rhymes would be seen as a new norm that would force them to modify their own lyrics. Other French popular artists of the early 1980s used rap techniques in their recordings but they did not see themselves as the originators of a new style. The group Les Gargons Bouchers recorded two versions of their 'Rap des Gargons Bouchers' (Les Gargons Bouchers 1989 and 1991) whose style is close to other recordings of the group but which nevertheless features 'rapped' lyrics and a sampling of Frenchstyle musette accordion music. The French comic group Les Inconnus recorded a popular sketch in which they imitated young French bourgeois attempting to imitate French rappers (Les Inconnus 1991); Manu Dibango, well-known for his recording of 'Soul Makossa', also turned to rap for several recordings (Mortaigne 1991: 24). Nowadays, the suburbs of Paris form a succession of residential neighbourhoods, some of them made up of high-rise apartment buildings, a

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component of the government-subsidized popular housing administration. Some of these places, the northern suburbs in particular, have become hotbeds of violence, drugs, crime and poverty. They have come to be seen as desolate neighbourhoods where the anti-social, the criminally minded, the poor and others on welfare live in semi desolation, a stereotype reminiscent of the American ghetto. This image, different from the reality of the American ghetto owing to the French social laws benefiting the disadvantaged, is often used by rappers as a coded word suggesting the worst possible social surroundings. The French branch of the Zulu Nation was established in one such Parisian neighborhood in the early 1980s by Afrika Bambaataa who had created several such groups in the Bronx section of New York City where gang warfare was much more violent than in France (Louis and Prinaz 1990: 170). Bambaataa also used this occasion to showcase his own musical performances (Silvana 1994: 82). The Zulu movement in France helped introduce both rap music and hip hop culture to youths in the poor suburban neighborhoods of the French capital. These young Srnurfs, as the French breakdancers were known, helped popularize the sidewalk dancing styles and, also, the rappers (that is to say those in charge of the music and, sometimes, accompanying rhymes) who at first were secondary to the dancers. These rappers took more time than their American counterparts to emerge as totally independent from breakdancing. Since 1987 the French branch of the Zulu Nation has progressively lost most of its importance; few fictional examples (hardly positive) of the Zulu phenomenon have been found in French literature (Collard 1989: 197-99; Thomas 1994: 126)2 and, nowadays, only a few rappers (Les Little 1992) claim to promote Bambaataa's ideals. Rap music and hip hop culture arrived in France through borrowings and transmissions from varied sources. These include mainstream pop artists like Chagrin d'Amour, marginal groups and followers of Bambaataa and his teachings. The years of existence of the French branch of the Zulu Nation may also be seen as the formative years for French rap which was to explode on the French popular scene later in the 1980s. Before considering the adoption of American rap by French and Francophone popular artists it is important to underline the fact that French popular music has had a long history of substyles focusing on puns, plays on words and suggestive phonetic combinations. Examples

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from this repertoire, some dating from the late nineteenth century, the golden age of the French music-hall era, were recorded as late as the 1970s. Such is the case with 'Idylle Philomenale' recorded by Yves Montand during a live show at the Paris Olympia music hall (Montand 1972). Songs whose lyrics were made almost exclusively of alliterations, onomatopoeia and puns were the specialty of the late Bobby Lapointe (whose complete recorded output was issued posthumously) whose 'Le papa du papa' provides such an example (Lapointe 1972). If these songs seldom reached the top of the French charts, they nevertheless enjoyed a respectable following. A very popular French singer is Charles Trenet, known for his outlandish double entendres lyrics (Trenet 1989), set to bouncy jazz-inspired music. Trenet is recognized today, after a singing career of more than fifty years, as a key member of the so-called 'classical French popular repertoire' (Prevos 1991). Prose combat, the title of the album by MC Solaar issued in 1994 (Le Guilledoux 1995: 18), clearly illustrates the continuity of this tradition, all the while adding an identifiable element of social and personal protest as well as an identifiable amount of 'signifying' also inspired by African-American hip hop lyrics (Potter 1995: 18-53). Produced by Labelle Noir (a subdivision of the Virgin label) in 1989, the first anthology of French rap was entitled Rapattitudes—a neologism and a pun combining the name of the new music and the most noticeable characteristic of its performers: their deliberate attitude. Names of rap groups (Assassin, New Generation MC) were inspired by the American NWA (Niggers with Attitude) a name that clearly hints at the explicit attitudinizing of its members. The groups featured in Rapattitudes, the spark that started the rap explosion in France, make it evident that they borrowed heavily from their American counterparts and models. Recordings by Supreme NTM, Pouppa Claudio & Ragga, Puppa Leslie and Gom labbar, show that in their introductions, French MCs imitated American models and, like them, included a good dose of boasting and self-aggrandizement in their rhymes, as in 'Rouleurs a l'heure' by the group SaT SaT (Rapattitudes 1989). In songs and albums recorded by French rappers in the late 1980s, several artists reproduce themes encountered in recordings of popular American and African-American artists of the period. French rappers likewise express opposition to the social order and to political and economic systems that have led to what they call the 'oppression' of

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minorities (often from former French colonies). French rappers tell about the hardships of everyday life in the poorer suburbs that they often characterize as the 'ghetto'. Anti-establishment attitudes begin with a criticism of the most evident bodies symbolizing the system (Piot 1993: 58). There are lyrics aimed at those who do not see the deepening of a generational conflict, there are more violent and crudely-worded attacks against France, the French Army and the French public servants (Supreme NTM 1991). French politicians were often presented as 'legal crooks' by some performers (Gom Jabbar and Puppa Leslie 1991) or as members of a political system corrupted by money (Supreme NTM 1991). Recent scandals involving French high-ranking politicians appear to give credence to criticisms and accusations of corruption encountered in the lyrics of rappers in France. An indirect critique of French society and of its normative forces is also found in the lyrics of songs dealing with the everyday life of the youngsters. The majority of French rappers underline the fact that they live on the fringes of French society. They are kept 'outside' because of forces within the societal mainstream (anti-Arab racism, poverty, police etc.) or because of their own inability to correct the negative image they project. Calls for unity among performers and, indirectly among their listeners, are often found in the repertoires of French rappers. Such is the case with calls for a 'nation' by IAM (1993), Original MC (1991) and for 'peace and unity' by Lionel D. (1990). The political agenda defended by the French movement SOS Racisme was also encountered in several recordings, including those by Saliha, one of the very few French female rappers (1991). The least attractive activities of some members of the ghetto, drug dealers in particular, attracted the wrath of rappers who saw themselves as defenders of their own choices but not as promoters of grossly anti-social behavior. By the early 1990s, French rappers had truly covered most of the relevant styles found in the repertoires of their American models, including more commercial styles and less crudely-worded lyrics originally introduced by the group Chagrin d'Amour (1982). Rap artists like Benny B. (1992) in France may be seen as inspired by popular American styles like those of Hammer or even Vanilla Ice. But it was also evident, even during the late 1980s, that some French rappers were trying to inject a 'Gallic ambiance' into their recordings. Since most French rappers were of Arabic origins, and since their parents had fled Algeria

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and other North-African countries because of economic hardships and without taking their musical traditions with them, they could not easily praise Africa in their songs (Phillips 1993: 45-72). Afrocentrism could not be included because (1) the French extreme-right would have reminded Arab immigrants that some of them should go back to Northern Africa (Phillips 1993: 105-33), and (2) the rise of Arab fundamentalism in Northern Africa would make it impossible for rappers to replicate their behaviour in their native land. The only openly proBlack-African song encountered during the late 1980s and early 1990s is 'Lucy' by B-Love; the performer underlines the fact that the oldest skeleton found by anthropologists is that of a black African woman nicknamed Lucy who, thus, is the mother of us all' (Rapattitudes 1992). Several artists expressed views that were developed in the first half of the 1990s. Humour which, according to the American rapper Ice T, is often present in African-American rap recordings (Ice T 1994: 103), was more evidently encountered in French productions. Some artists included puns in their titles; such was the case with 'Do the raT thing' (original title in English), a song by IAM where the allusion to Spike Lee's popular film and to the musical style of Cheb Khaled are brought together: Cheb Khaled, tu connais au moins? Cest le Public Enemy arabe \l raconte tout du debut jusqu'a la fin I ... Do the ra'i thing mon frere. (IAM 1991)

You know Cheb Khaled at least? He's the Arab Public Enemy He tells everything from beginning to end Do the raT thing, brother (my translation). The late 1980s and the early 1990s marked the end of a period of uncritical adoption of African-American musical styles and repertoires by French rappers. To be sure, some continued to imitate their American counterparts, while others developed either French versions of American models or even invented original 'French popular ideologies'. Three such cases are clearly identifiable today. The first two may be

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seen as 'readings' or 'adaptations' of American 'popular ideologies', the last is truly an original invention by a French rap group. French social analysts have argued that, linguistically speaking, French rappers cannot elaborate upon a linguistic invention similar to that of their African-American counterparts. Their dialect of choice (but seldom used exclusively), the so-called verlan, based on an inversion of the phonemes of the original French word, hampers stylistic and phonological invention owing to its heavy dependence on standard French words (Paquot 1994: 106). Both American and French rappers use similar musical techniques and sounds ranging from normal musical instrumental sounds to manipulations, samplings, or distortions of recorded sounds or voices. Musically, however, there is a clearer tendency among French rappers to use stylistic devices associated with reggae and ragamuffin music. In the United States there are only a handful of such artists, most of them associated with the older forms of American rap, the so-called 'New York school' (Potter 1995: 142). In France, more rappers have branched out into the reggae-ragamuffin musical vein and have developed their own styles based on Jamaican-inspired music. One possible explanation for this particularity comes from the significant percentage of French and Francophone rappers from the French-speaking Caribbean. If we are to believe American musical and cultural critics, French rappers would thus have become more attuned to one of the factors in the elaboration of the rap vernacular (Potter 1995: 142). Among the most widely recognized artists in this group are Daddy Yod (1990, 1991), SaTSaT (1992) and Tonton David (1991). Several from the southeastern part of France, primarily around Marseilles (Le Guilledoux 1994: iii), have developed styles incorporating local dialects and, at times, techniques borrowed from the ragamuffin artists; such is the case with the group Massilia Sound System (1991, 1993). The most characteristic adaptations have nevertheless taken place on the so-called lyrical level. The popularity of the gangsta style in the United States has not spread wholesale into the repertoires of French rappers simply because armed gangs and violent drug-dealing gangs in France are still very rare (Olivier 1994: 21). Even the most vocal French rap and hip hop artists see drive-by shootings as typically American (Gamier, Olivier and Hoimian 1994: 24). Three major tendencies expressed by French rappers are evident: 'hardcore', 'zulu', and 'pharaohism'. As suggested above, the first two have been inspired by

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American models while the third one is an original creation by the French group I AM. The first ideological rap style is known as hardcore. The term is used more as a characterization of the lyrics than of a particular school of thought. French rappers who identify themselves as 'hardcore' performers include Supreme NTM, Ministere AMER and Assassin. Such groups do not pretend, nor do they try, to be simple replications of American groups linked to the gangsta rap style. Rather, they insist that what they see as their central 'mission' is a continuation of rap as a vehicle to popularize and vent the anger and the frustrations of many disadvantaged or sometimes mistreated individuals, and to defend the cause of the poorest and least socially-integrated segments of French society (Renault 1994: 32). For members of Supreme NTM, hardcore French rap and hip hop are one of the few possible forms of revolt given to those whose words and acts have traditionally been silenced. Hence, the hardcore performers have a clear anti-establishment slant in their lyrics and a truly oppositional attitude vis-a-vis all the representatives of the establishment or the prevalent social forces. Their lyrics sometimes include words directly borrowed from the lyrics of their American examples but, once again, the French hardcore rappers and hip hop artists hardly ever mention firearms or drive-by shootings. One exception, the 1993 Supreme NTM album, features a picture of a handgun on the cover because the first song of the album deals with the suicide of a young unemployed and lonely individual (Renault 1994: 32). The French hardcore movement has sometimes been seen as an adaptation of the African-American gangsta style because both styles, even though they appear to be oddities in the popular musical repertoire, enjoy a noticeable following and an enduring success. French hardcore performers pride themselves in their adhesion to the 'hardcore ideology'. In their song 'Pour un nouveau massacre,' (For a new massacre) the group Supreme NTM defines itself as wholeheartedly in agreement with the hardcore philosophy and the attitudes that derive from it (Supreme NTM 1993). Members from Assassin, in 'Kique ta merde' (Kick your shit); (here too, one sees how the use of English expressions is incorporated by French rappers), stress the fact that some critics dismissed them at first as simple imitators. They have now reached a level of popularity that allows them to be more brutal: they

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tell their listeners that if they do not like the song they can always switch to another radio channel (Assassin 1992). The songs by Ministere AMER, whose members also pride themselves in having clung to the values of the 'old style', fall squarely within the hardcore ideology. They have gone so far as to compose a song ('Brigitte [femme de flic)', 'Brigitte [cop's wife)') about the fictional wife of a policeman who hides her amorous desires for members of the groups her husband fights (Arabs in particular) in the streets (Ministere AMER 1992, 1994). The importance of the French branch of the Zulu Nation declined significantly after the year 1987 and, today, only a few groups adopt a clear pro-Zulu stance. A noticeable exception is Les Little. Their songs suggest possible explanations for the success of the movement and for its loss of relevancy. First there were 'curious' members who wanted to discover this new movement. When the group became larger there appeared 'vicious' individuals and 'envious' members more attracted by financial or personal gains. In addition, the Zulu Movement always had to fight for its reputation because some individuals borrowed their dress code but did not adhere to their ideals. For the members of Les Little, as the title of one of their songs makes clear, 'Rap is worth the price of life' (Les Little 1992). Members of the Zulu movement also express unambiguous criticisms of the normative forces ruling the society in which they have to live. They also do not forget those among themselves whom they consider as traitors or as 'fakes'. The latter are sometimes portrayed as a 'horde' of contemptible individuals attracted by monetary rewards and personal self-aggrandizement. The contempt towards these individuals, as in Sens Unik's 'La horde des faux,' (The horde of the fakes) is as powerful as that expressed towards the police or the politicians (Sens Unik 1993). As far as has been possible to ascertain, no new group claiming to promote the ideals of the French branch of the Zulu Nation has come out in the past years and, if the history of the French branch of the Zulu Nation serves as a blueprint, it is quite likely that Les Little and Sens Unik will remain the two more significant examples of such rappers and hip hop artists. The ideal promoted by the members of the group IAM is based upon images associated with ancient Egypt and, primarily, upon the mythical allusions to the Pharaohs. Hence, I have decided to call it 'pharaohism'. This concept may be seen as a means to underline Arabic origins all

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the while bypassing the popularly negative representations of North African and Middle Eastern countries often gripped by Islamic fundamentalism or economic uncertainties. It may also be a means to convey positive images, well-known by their listeners, and easily reconciled with the defense of their own Mediterranean (and especially Marseilles) attitudes vis-a-vis Paris and the rest of France. IAM's first album was entitled ... from the planet Mars, the name Mars did not refer to the planet in the solar system but, instead, to Marseilles. It helped underline that the artists, as well as many of the people from that French city, did consider themselves separated from the rest of France and, primarily, from the influence of Paris. Like the planet, which has resisted efforts of exploration and settlement, Marseilles (and other southern cities like Montpellier) has resisted integration into the Parisian sphere of influence. (A similar rhetoric seems to have been at the origin of the title of the American album Fear of a Black Planet.) The recent financial troubles of its soccer team, combined with those of Mr Tapie, its owner, have done nothing to soothe the Marseillais's ruffled sensibilities (Duroy 1994: 150). IAM's second long-playing record underlines these affirmations and insists upon the fact that the differences between Marseilles and the rest of France derive from the Mediterranean heritage of the region, as well as from an original interpretation of the continental drift theory. According to the liner notes of their second album, IAM's members defend an interpretation of the continental drift that would have in fact separated the delta of the Rhone and that of the Nile which, before that time, had been joined together! This theory also helps to explain the link between Marseilles and the southeastern part of France and ancient Egypt (IAM 1993). This pharaohism is also posited as a reaction to the excesses of the Western cultures. In the song 'I could have believed', IAM shows that, for the West, colonialism was sustained by the desire to improve the countries' powers and resulted in an artificial division of the lands invaded by colonial armies and forces (IAM 1993). Another song underlines the symbolism of the number seven with beliefs associated with both ancient Egypt and the Scriptures. Finally, IAM expresses the core of this new ideology. The coming of Pharaoh, presented in 'Contrat de conscience' will mark the end of the decadent world we live in and a renewal of the outmoded and outdated Western ideologies and ideals (IAM 1993).

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IAM's album is not entirely devoted to the presentation and development of this ideology. However, several songs make it clear that, along with the positioning of their city away from Paris (hinting at reproducing the 'Los Angeles gangsta' vs. 'Old—East Coast—rap' schools dichotomy), pharaohism is at the core of their ideals. They intend to develop its formulation and sustain its promotion (IAM 1993). There are also other elements that contribute to the popularity of IAM's songs. Their song using Spike Lee's references has been mentioned above. In their second album, they have included two frankly humourous songs. In the first 'La methode Marsimil' (a pun on the Assimil technique of foreign language learning) they show how a young American who spent two months with them ended up speaking not a word of French but, instead, their own form of local dialect, generously peppered with expletives and dubious puns: (1AM 1993). The second clearly pokes fun at one of their own members who yearns for the chance to sing in English (at least he thinks so!). 'Le retor de Malek Sultan' (The return of Malek Sultan) tells about this member who has gone to America and who, like the young American mentioned above, has learned more nonsensical expressions and slang than straight American English. It is also evident that, by poking fun at themselves, the members of 1AM effectively manage to criticize those who may have fallen into this linguistic trap as well as warn others who may be tempted to follow such an example (1AM 1993). The history of French and Francophone rap is well into its second decade of existence and the past ten years have been characterized by three steps indicated in this essay. First, French and Francophone rappers borrowed from a new African-American musical form whose transfer to France was facilitated both by the development of international record distribution and by the creation of a branch of Bambaataa's Zulu Nation in the suburbs of Paris. Secondly, these French rappers and hip hop artists adopted most of the attitudes, repertoires and musical and performance techniques exhibited by their American and African-American models. They saw themselves, like many black American rappers, as natural commentators and observers of a seldom seen and largely ignored world where poverty, violence and despair are prevalent. They also saw themselves as voices of a criticism of French society at large and of the establishment, as well as of its normative forces that led to the personal and social situations they had to face. Thirdly, most French

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popular artists involved in rap and hip hop adapted some of the ideals, theories and techniques of their models. They could not continue to simply transfer styles from New York City or Los Angeles whose realities and underlying assumptions did not apply to their own situation. Their search for social relevancy and artistic activism led them to either transform pre-existing 'ideologies' (such was the case with hardcore and Zulu performers) or create their own in a piecemeal fashion (such as lAM's 'pharaohism'). This search also led them to become aware of the dual role of the media. Television and show-business have seldom helped rap artists and have tended to favour more popular forms of musical entertainment. For the group NTM, the French show-business establishment lags behind its American counterpart (Supreme NTM 1993). For others, the efforts of Olivier Cachin, the presenter in charge of the program 'Rapline', broadcast by the French television station M-6 (Rousseau 1990: 44), have been appreciated by artists who have also insisted upon the limited outlets available in the French media (Les Little 1992) These steps also characterized the evolution of a French popular style whose African-American origins were undeniable. Its artistic and ideological components resulted from both a 'reading' of pre-existing popular forms by those French performers, as well as from a process of adoption and adaptation brought upon them by peculiar socio-economic forces not found in the societal environment (or even foreign to those in it) that had nurtured the American popular productions thus deciphered and interpreted. Developments in the summer of 1995 brought forth indications that, after all, situations encountered in the United States with so-called 'gangsta artists' emerged in France. The so-called 'Cop Killer' debate in America appeared after several police officers noticed the lyrics of the song performed by California rapper Ice T (Ice T 1994: passim). Members of police unions and fraternal orders throughout the United States launched a well-organized campaign denouncing the performer and the lyrics of his song. However, instead of attacking Ice T directly, these groups and their supporters decided to pressure Time-Warner, the company owning the record label that had issued the record. After several weeks of angry accusations and strongly worded rebuttals, Ice T decided to yield to the desiderata of the police associations and issue the album without the 'offending' song.

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In France, the so-called Sacrifice de poulets affair began when the French group Ministere AMER recorded the tune 'Sacrifice de poulets' (literally 'Sacrifice of Chicken' but a better cultural equivalent would be 'Sacrificing Pigs') for a record made up of songs inspired by the French movie La Haine. Mathieu Kossowitz realized this movie that received a prize at the 1995 French Cannes Festival. It was issued in the Spring of 1995 and underlines the harsh living conditions encountered by the sons or grandsons of Arab immigrants living in poverty and in dire conditions in the Parisian suburbs. The songs included in the record do not constitute the soundtrack of the movie but, instead, are a group of songs composed especially (with only one exception) as a 'complement' to the movie itself. The members of Ministere AMER made declarations expressing their contempt for the police and were quoted at length in several French popular magazines ranging from pop-music publications to contemporary-issues magazines. On 20 June, 1995, the French Syndicat Independant de la Police Rationale (the Independent Union of National Police (SIPN|) lodged a complaint for 'provocation to crime' against Ministere AMER after a live broadcast of the group's interview on French television (Bouilhet 1995: 34). On 19 July, Jean-Louis Debre, the French Minister of the Interior also lodged a complaint with the French Ministry of Justice for 'direct provocation to commit the crime of aggravated murder'. A judicial inquiry was launched on 14 August 1995. This situation is not new to Ministere AMER whose first record, featuring 'Brigitte femme de flic' and 'Garde a vue,' (Police custody) was also at the root of a complaint for defamation and slander by several French police unions asking for its removal from distribution. Nothing happened since the complaints were made more than three months (the legally mandated period) after the original publication of the record. This time, the rappers are not attacked for slander but, instead, for 'provocation to crime' which carries a maximum sentence of five years of imprisonment and a fine of 300,000 FF (about $60,000). It is not likely that they will be condemned to the maximum sentence since this is the first time they will have to answer such a complaint. Lawyers for the police unions were rather dispirited; they recognized that the artists would certainly receive only a suspended sentence and that they would become true heroes ^to their fans and followers (Bouilhet 1995: 34). This case, pitting the 'forces of order' against the rappers, provided an unmistakable illustration of the 'adoption' and 'adaptation' steps

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mentioned above. The complaints by the police unions illustrate the 'adoption' stage since both American and French police forces attacked the rappers. The actions of the forces involved in the fight illustrate the 'adoption' stage: first, French police unions do not carry enough clout, nor are they entitled, to launch a public attack against record companies; secondly, the American counterparts to the French Minister of the Interior and to the French Minister of Justice did not become involved (Mrs Gore's actions with the Parents Music Resource Center cannot be seen as an equivalent). In both cases, nevertheless, the outcome may well be similar: Ice T lost some popularity and a few of his followers thought he had caved in but he is widely remembered for the song and the controversy (Potter 1995: 112-13) in the United States (and to a lesser degree in France). Ministere AMER will likely benefit from this entire episode and symbolize the resilience and strength of the rap movement and its artists in France. Moreover, this episode underlines the lack of understanding among those in charge of 'law and order' as well as those in charge of the analysis of contemporary diasporic cultures, whether African-American in the United States or Arabic-Caribbean in France (Gilroy 1993: 120-48). Both African-American and French rappers are well versed in the techniques of 'signifying', that is to say the practice of using language to have it mean more than what is encountered in dictionaries. The American critics of 'gangsta' rap often failed to see, notice and understand the signifying encountered in lyrics outwardly boastful or violent but much more meaningful to anyone making the effort of understanding what was 'behind' those sometimes shocking lyrics (Potter 1995: 103104). When the members of Ministere AMER were asked about the lyrics to 'Sacrifice de poulets' they answered that 'young people living in the popular suburbs are not idiots, they are not going to mistake a work of art with reality' (Bouilhet 1995: 34). They too underlined the fact that their lyrics involve an element of signifying (here the 'Sacrificing of chickens', in addition to its coded message, also brings voodoo conotations into play) which, once again, hides, disguises and amplifies their meaning. Members of the police unions (like most rap critics) took those lyrics at face value and inferred that the rappers advocated the killing of police-men and -women. The rappers rejected any such interpretation and argued that their lyrics are in tune with the prevailing attitudes of most youngsters living in the impoverished sectors of the Parisian suburbs.

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The 1990s have marked the emergence of rappers in France as a popular force whose strength is derived from a combination of borrowings, adaptations and personal inventions. These developments have led rap music in France to the forefront of popular musical productions. It may be safely surmised that French and Francophone rap will leave a deep imprint upon the history of French popular music.3

Afterword: Downsizing America George McKay

We are not a multinational but a multilocal. — Coca-Cola company executive (quoted in Webster 1989: 72-3) A worldwide story of personal success. — McDonald's advert for trainee managers in Britain, 1996

Maybe it is time to cut America down to size. At the end of a book that has focused on American energy, influence and achievement in popular culture 1 think it is pertinent, even necessary, to offer a small degree of balance, to indicate that the twentieth century is not/has not been just the American century, as Gertrude Stein provocatively suggested. As 1 explained in the introduction with regard to the academic discipline of American Studies itself, critical discourses on Americanization need carefully to consider the extent to which they themselves contribute to Americanization. It is also time to take issue with the aggressive and arrogant self-promoting strategies of the peculiarly American late capitalist insistence on homogenization evinced by Coca-Cola and McDonald's above. If the vision of the global village is transforming into the reality of an American (sub)urban sprawl, as universalization and Americanization imbricate into each other, the so-called 'end of history' proclaimed by Francis Fukuyama can be seen as another instance of aggressive and arrogant American superiority and self-centredness. This apparent triumph of Western liberal democracy (partly in the wake of the fall of communism in eastern Europe) is questioned by Fredric Jameson. An American Marxist turned postmodernist critic, Jameson

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employs some old ideological language as he reminds us that, whether seen in a global, dual or local framework, culture is a bearer of ideology, is always entwined within power: this whole global, yet American, postmodern culture is the internal and superstructural expression of a whole new wave of American military and economic domination throughout the world: in this sense, as throughout class history, the underside of culture is blood, torture, death, and terror (Jameson 1991: 5). Others are less critical than Jameson, or less inclined to identify the interweaving of power and culture. Richard Pells, for instance, argues that 'Europe was not "Americanised" over the past forty years; instead, in its journey across the Atlantic, American culture was "Europeanized"' (1993: 82). Pells is not saying here that American culture is Europeanized, but that the American culture that is exported is Europeanised; a tidy conclusion which potentially overlooks the traces of ideology and power of the exported culture, the culture of the only global superpower we may have left at the moment. Others draw attention to the limitations of the cultural imperialism model in these postmodern times, when apparently the boundary that counts is not a national one or a regional one so much as 'the boundary of the territory of transmission'—of the satellite broadcast: 'Global' mass-mediated culture does not by definition mean American culture. And the cultural imperialist model—nation versus nation—must be replaced by a postimperial model of (in principle) an infinite number of local experiences of and responses to something globally shared (NIAS 1993: 32). The rosy view of 'infinite' local cultural consumption within a 'shared' global experience is only slightly subverted by the implicit admission that this may only be possible in principle and not in practice. The Disneyfication of the world, its transformation to Waltopia, the cocacolonization of the globe, the McDonaldization of society—these terms, processes, myths actually suggest if not an infinite then a multiple phenomenon in which what we share is global American popular culture. In the 1990s, Ford Motors produces a family car for the world market, and gives it a global name, the Mondeo. But of course at least some of this reception of global culture is localized, even resisted. National language can contribute here: General

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Motors tries to market Novas to Spanish speakers when 'No va' translates as 'No Go'. It is fair to say that the degree of appropriation or domination by American popular cultural texts is rooted in the local, in the micropolitical. It is also clear that Americanization through popular culture means different things to different groups at different times: for a young black European in the 1990s it may offer a model of resistance through rap music, while for a young white European in the late 1970s it may be part of the system you construct your identity in opposition to, through punk rock. This range of reactions in part indicates the complexity of America's pivotal position in the global cultural and political economy. (It is also a symptom of the complexity of the way in which, as Andrew Ross notes, 'The category of youth seems inseparably tied, then, to the twin mechanism of rebellion and regulation'; Ross and Rose (eds.) 1994: 12). While focusing on global aspects, it is important not to overlook local differences and tensions that can influence cultural reception, as John Tomlinson explains: The reason why we must engage with this difficult distinction between national identity and cultural identity is that a majority of the discourses of cultural imperialism ... |such as| that thematised by the term 'Americanisation' ... treat the issue as one of domination of national culture by national culture. But this conceptualisation can only be strictly coherent where we can speak of a unified national cultural identity in the supposedly 'invaded' culture. Where we cannot—where, for example, there is a struggle between ethnic or regional cultures within a nation— this discourse of cultural domination will be compromised (Tomlinson 1991: 73). As my second and final point, there is of course another way of signalling a greater balance in the debate about Americanization, which is to indicate the role of Europe and of Europeanization itself. It may indeed be the case that 'the only culture the 320 million people of Europe have in common is American culture' (NIAS 1993: 329; emphasis original), a point developed by van Elteren, when he notes that 'paradoxically, the economic integration of Europe during the 1990s is even providing greater opportunities for exporting "America", as advertisers look for themes that will sell throughout Europe without hints of specifically national, e.g. French or Italian, origins' (van Elteren 1994: 213). On the other hand, a brief survey of postwar youth subcultures in Britain may shed some light on European rather than American cross-cultural

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complexities. By looking at music and related styles we can readily identify non-US models and subcultural templates being adopted and modified by European youth. This may be a significant challenge to the assumption of American cultural hegemony. (It may also be that the template of subculture theory does not fit American experience so well, though a glance from Zoot Suiters to biker boys to surfers to grunge and riot grrrls would suggest otherwise.) Such a survey is also important because it focuses on youth, and so much fear of America(nization) has been born of generational differences. According to Dick Hebdige, 'when it did occur the most startling and spectacular revolution in British "popular" taste in the early 1960s involved the domestication not of the brash and "vulgar" hinterland of American design but of the subtle "cool" Continental style' (Hebdige 1988: 75). Hebdige suggests that the shift in (largely) male working class youth style from 1950s Teddy Boy to 1960s Mod is emblematic of a shift from America to Europe (all those Italian suits and scooters). It is possible to take Hebdige's point further—to widen the range to include both the continent and the Commonwealth—and to challenge it. The point is to illustrate the amount and diversity of non-American signs and styles adopted and adapted by subcultural practice, to suggest that there may be a pop culture world outside Americanization. 1950s:

Teddy Boys look back to British Edwardian style in the recontextualization of their jackets.

1950s:

Beatniks present a youth identity constructed around American Beat writing and jazz music, but also around a set of European subcultural signifiers including Gaggia coffee machines and cafe culture, Gauloises cigarettes and berets, ex-Royal Navy duffle jackets.

1960s:

Mods adore Italian style, and focus the mobility of their individualism on a very specific national mode of transport: Vespa and Lambretta scooters.

1960s:

Skinheads embrace and modify a style and music from Jamaican rude boys and (admittedly US-tinged) ska and rocksteady.

1970s:

The British punk scene is built to an extent around an

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antagonism towards American popular culture, as in the Clash singing 'I'm so bored with the USA in 1977. 1970s:

With Rastafarianism Black Britons look to lamaican roots for spiritual and political ideas, and an identity through the popular music of reggae, rather than to African-American Black Power and soul music.

1980s/90s: Rave culture and dance music comes partly out of the Chicago house and New York disco scenes, but also displays a significant turn to Europe: the Balearic Beat, Ibiza, Rimini, Mediterranean package tour destinations. 1990s:

Britpop is presented as concerned with regional rivalries between the north (Oasis) and south (Blur) of England, and the name itself illustrates an awareness of national discourse, even a nostalgia for Britain's (England's?) own empire of culture.

From such subcultural moments as these we can perhaps begin a reconsideration of the place of America in popular culture, or we can at least offer a small necessary counter in the debates around the extent to which we consumers of American popular culture are Americanized by our actions and cultural pleasures.

Notes McKay, Americanization and Popular Culture 1. Is it fair to say that there is a bit of a gap between students' and lecturers' motivations for doing American Studies? We (I) do it in part because we want to increase our students' and our own understanding of the tremendous—even dominant—political and cultural hegemony, pull, influence, power, of the USA, and the associated dangers of this hegemony; many of our students do it because they want to be American, or work or study there. 2. For further reading on American and British popular music in the context of Americanization see Cooper and Cooper 1993. They argue that cultural imperialism functions as a pendulum, the place of power and creativity through music switching periodically from America to Britain. 3. The processes and problems of 'Americanization' are considered in different contexts by Webster 1988 (especially chapter 7), Hebdige 1988 (chapter 3), Nehring 1993 (chapter 4), Kroes el al. (eds.) 1993, van Elteren 1994 (his introduction). The subject has also been frequently explored in the journal borderlines-. Studies in American Culture. 4. Will the twenty-first century be another American one? Bill Clinton's aides evidently think so: for the 1996 presidential election campaign one of Clinton's soundbites was that voting for a second term for him would be 'a bridge to the twenty-first century'. The image seemed to work, or appeal to enough of the electorate that turned out to vote, anyway. 5. For wider reading on critical and theoretical approaches to mass culture and popular culture see the following books: Collins 1989, Fiske 1989, Storey 1993, Strinati 1995. 6. Stephen F. Mills makes an interesting suggestion here. 'Is not a shift of metaphor long overdue? Geographers, for instance, are increasingly aware that many of their traditional spatial metaphors are highly gendered. Capital has been seen to "penetrate" peripheral areas. American culture "invades" its neighbours. A set of metaphors based upon female sexuality might suggest different modes of representation. Such a set might be ambiguous, embracing and resolving rather than conflict-based' (1993: 103). Of course, in some critical readings mass culture is itself gendered. Andreas Huyssen has written of the notion that 'mass culture is somehow associated with women while real, authentic culture remains the prerogative of men ... In the age of nascent socialism and the first major women's movement in Europe, the masses knocking at the gate were also women, knocking at the gate of a male-dominated culture' (Huyssen 1986: 47). See also Douglas 1977, which deals more specifically with nineteenth-century American mass culture. 7. This can be extended to make it less polite and more political: economic dependency may be covert control, domination by cultural influence may result in destruction of local culture.

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8. John Vidal explains in his book McLibel. Burger Culture on Trial, 'World conquest is on the cards ... In India, where nationalists have targeted US corporations as culturally dangerous, McDonald's presence is being challenged for ecological and animal welfare reasons ... Meanwhile orthodox Jews have been picketing Israeli stores, arguing that it offends the country's identity ... But far more dramatic things happened in Sweden. Bombs placed by left-wingers in protest at what they termed "creeping American Culturalism" exploded in Stockholm in 1975' (Vidal 1997: 43, 41). McDonald's has been received more sympathetically in other European cities. '|T]he reaction to Americanstyle fast-food establishments in France brings into focus the democratic ethos McDonald's sells. French teenagers ... reported valuing McDonald's "American atmosphere" of informality and freedom, a novelty to them. At McDonald's, these young people feel free of the strict rules of decorum that constrain their behaviour in what they regard as stuffy French restaurants ... |T]he association of McDonald's with freedom is ironic in light of its homogenising influence, strict controls on labour, and domination of the industry' (Leidner 1993: 222). 9. Book-length studies exploring local aspects of the reception of American popular culture in different countries include Lealand 1988 (New Zealand), Webster 1988 (Britain), Willett 1989 (Germany) and van Elteren 1994 (Holland). 10. Peter Fuller writes of 1950s and 1960s touring exhibitions of Abstract Expressionist art: 'It may be difficult for an American reader, even now, to grasp the effects of this kind of cultural imperialism. In Britain, a weak, indigenous Fine Art tradition was effectively swamped' (1980: 80). 11. The casual acceptance of cultural imperialism as simply a symptom of the modern, of global development, might be more worryingly considered if we suggested the same for imperialism itself. 12. As with the problematic and problematically universal rhetoric of the American Dream more generally, positing America as Utopia involves long-term amnesia: if it is to be viewed as a Utopia it is one predicated on the dystopia of the genocide of native Americans and the slavery of Africans. 13. Michael Kater also tells of the 'Swing Youth' subculture, and quotes a Gestapo officer: 'Anything that starts with |Duke] Ellington ends with an assassination attempt on the Fuhrer!' (1992: vi). The sheer pull of jazz music and style is felt in other totalitarian regimes, no doubt because of its forbidden nature, and because it connotes pleasure, dance, freedom of expression, sympathy for the oppressed and so on. Ostrovsky tells of the shtatniki (after Shtaty—the States) in Soviet Russia in the 1960s, a group of young intellectuals and artists who listened to jazz, wore American suits, and were seen as resisting communist ideology. Interestingly, like Beck, Ostrovsky connects these jazz youth to later local manifestations of counterculture: The shtatniki gave way to hippies in the early 1970s, but all those non-authorised youth movements were closely related in their eagerness to be different from what they were expected to be and in their love for an America which they did not know' (Ostrovsky 1993: 77). In Britain in the 1950s jazz was also embraced as an egalitarian music, as folk singer Ian Campbell describes: 'We found an underground movement among musicians, a music played by amateurs and by professionals in their spare time, in private clubs and in pub backrooms; it throbbed with life and a spirit of independence, its syncopated rhythms were an affront to the conventions of ballroom dancing, and the words of the songs dealt with unprecedented subjects like work, drink, the sex war, abortion, racial discrimination—all the domestic pleasures! It was trad jazz' (Campbell 1983: 115). In terms of what might be

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seen as a case of special pleading for jazz as a cultural practice of liberation, it is interesting to bear in mind Neil Nehring's perceptive comment that 'jazz had long received an exemption from the Americanization thesis' (Nehring 1993: 203). 14. In Senseless Acts of Beauty (McKay 1996) I trace links between post-sixties countercultural groups and actions from America and Britain in more detail. 15. There was a corresponding moral panic in America too, leading, for instance, to the 1954 Code of self-regulations on the part of the comic industry there, which included rules such as: 'In every instance good shall triumph over evil and the criminal shall be punished for his misdeeds' (Sabin 1993: 251). There may be parallels here with the more recent outrage around video nasties in Britain, again connecting violence and juvenile delinquency in the realm of the consumption of American popular culture. 16. I cannot resist offering this deliciously ironic moment of cross-cultural complexity from Ron Tanner (1994). Japanese toy robots were a runaway commercial success in America for a couple of decades from the late 1950s on. Their ingenious design and manufacture tapped into the burgeoning demand in America for Space Age products and contributed significantly to Japanese economic recovery. What was the source of the scarce raw materials in Japan in the years following the war? 'The first wave of Japanese toy robots were made mostly of tin and some of the earliest were reputedly wrought from recycled tin cans discarded by American GIs during the occupation (1945-53)' (Tanner 1994: 125). Tanner goes on to suggest that the successful Japanese challenge to American automobile production from the 1970s onwards is in part a result of the familiarity of Japanese industry with robots (1994: 149). 17. Other European countries have also mediated American popular culture at different times. 'For instance, for Denmark and the Netherlands the reception of the "roaring twenties" culture (films, the modern body cult, dance etc.) took place partly through Berlin, the "New York" of Europe at that time' (NIAS 1993: 330).

Blair, Blackface Minstrels as Cultural Exports 1. For an assessment of the 'Americanness' of nineteenth-century entertainment forms, see Blair 1996a: 3-12. 2. In Germany attempts to market the genre were defeated by audience hostility once they discovered that what they saw on stage was not authentic blacks. France as well rejected minstrelsy but more on the ground that its humour seemed incomprehensible. Dr Pieter R.D. Stokvis of the Open University at The Hague has turned up visual evidence of a performance in Amsterdam in 1847 by a group identified as the 'Lantum Ethiopian Serenaders', but no reviews have yet surfaced. 3. Recipe for burnt cork: 'take a quantity of corks, place them in a tin pail or dish, saturating them with alcohol, then light. Let them burn to a crisp, when burned out, mash them to a powder, mix with water to a thick paste, place the mixture in small tin boxes and it is ready for use. In applying it to your face it is better first to rub the face and hands with cocoa butter, which can purchased from any druggist at a small cost, as when removing the black it can be rubbed off easily with a dry cloth. It is not necessary to use carmine for the lips to make them appear large. All that is required when applying the black is to keep it about one-half an inch away from the mouth, or more if a larger mouth is wanted. This applies only to end men. The balance of the

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company should black close to the lips so as to appear dignified and neat in appearance' (Haverly 1902: 6-7).

4. Lott 1993 is the best single study of racial ambiguity in minstrelsy. 5. Text as reprinted by Paskman 1976: 8-10. 6. The second blackface character type to emerge a bit later in the 1830s was often called (among other aliases) 'Zip Coon': a posturing urban black who was as overdressed as Jim Crow was underdressed. Zip Coon, according to the songs he sang on stage, was imagined to be a self-important but bumbling lover, out to impress the ladies and the passersby with excessively fancy clothes but always showing his inherent limitations by social maladroitness and pretentious malapropisms. This entertainment premise offered endless possibilities for satirizing whatever was currently fashionable. 7. Nathan 1977: 52.

8. The expandable open-ended modular structure of this 'ballad' would merit its inclusion in a second edition of my study of American cultural patterns at large, Blair 1988, (Modular America: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on the Emergence of an American Way).

9. Bratton 1981: 133. This study, however, mis-assesses blackface minstrelsy in the USA as confronting 'the upper class American culture' with 'the "presumptuous nigger'" (127). 10. During a run of Oh Hush at the Bowery Theatre (as an inter-act or an after-piece), 'he sang 100 verses each night, always upon some new subject. His encores are generally seven or eight times a-night. He "turns about" three times to each verse, so, by multiplying 37,000 by three, we find that he had "wheeled about and turned about" 111,000 times' (25 October 1838). 11. See Mahar 1985. 12. Bratton explains how the black population of the UK declined to virtual invisibility by the 1860s (1981: 129). 13. For a more detailed report on the contents of American minstrel shows and their long-term cultural impact, see Blair 1996b. 14. Crow 1836: 2-3. The song attributed to Mrs Crow suggests that cross-dressing may have appeared thus early in the blackface repertoire. 15. One sign of a genteel presence was the tendency toward 'mammouth minstrels' in the 1870s and 1880s, that is, double-sized companies of musicians and actors on stage, often with elaborate costumes. The genre was already evolving in the direction of the Broadway musical revues, Ziegfield follies and the like. 16. St James's Hall, Piccadilly, from that time until its demolition in 1910, was reserved almost exclusively for blackface minstrels. Harry Reynolds in his reminiscences as a long-time minstrel player recalls it was common to see in the audience a dozen clergymen and 'naturally their flocks followed' (1928: 104). Their participation was insured in part because 'politics and religion were strictly barred' from the shows. 17. The names continue by lists of nobility according to descending order of rank (alphabetical within a given rank: 8 duchesses, 7 marchionesses, 27 countesses, 5 viscountesses, 3 baronesses, 72 ladies, 1 madame, 2 mistresses, 8 misses. A parallel list ranks the male sponsors from Prince Esterhazy down to 8 lowly esquires (pp. 6-10). 18. He successfully recruited British performers who, according to Harry Reynolds,

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'invariably adopted' American ('stage black') dialect and who cultivated family entertainment designed for a variety of tastes (1928: 71). 19. I would not contest that the modularity that made the original ballad so elastic and open-ended as to be adaptable to diverse settings outside as well as inside the USA might still be construed as an 'American' characteristic. See Blair 1988. 20. Waterhouse 1989: 372-73. 21. In a poem entitled 'Aboriginal Songs' published in Melbourne in 1844. See Webby 1980: 55. 22. Waterhouse 1990: 100. 23. In the mid-1920s at least one California mission school for Chinese orphans put on blackface minstrel shows to raise funds. Shepherd 1938; esp. 85-97, 121-26. 24. Coplan 1985. 25. Cockrell 1987: 419. 26. Erlmann 1991: 21-53. 27. Illustrations of such activities but without an adequate historical contextualisation, can be found in Natural History 59 (1950): 366-68. 28. Hamm 1988: 5. 29. See Cole 1996: 183-215. 30. Example: at the Elmwood Park Community High School near Chicago on 22 November, 1957 the Varsity Club performed Minstrel ]amboree in two parts, whose music included a remarkably eclectic range from Stephen Foster to George Gershwin to 'Anchors Aweigh', closing out with 'Dixie', that genuine minstrel song of the late 1850s which was coopted by the Confederacy as its unofficial anthem. The authorship of 'Dixie' has been contested in recent years but whether its originators were white (Daniel Emmett) or black, they clearly came from non-slave-holding Ohio. See Sacks and Sacks 1993. The fact that a minstrel song could so easily be taken as expressing pro-Southern sentiments suggests the complex and elusive tone of blackface minstrelsy in its heyday. 31. See Anon. 1986, and the book-length study, Patrick 1991. 32. An additional complication of our own time needs to be acknowledged: globalization. Item: in early May 1996 the New York Times Service published notice of a remarkable law suit. In the Federal District Court of Manhattan a group of African Americans, including Jesse Jackson and the late Commerce Secretary, Ron Brown, brought suit against the American subsidiary of the French vacation resort developer 'Club Med' (short for Club Mediterranean). Their complaint: on 4 May, 1995 at a Club Med resort near Dakar in Senegal an international meeting of about 700 Africans and African Americans was 'entertained' by two white actors in blackface engaged by Club Med. The complaint notes that some spectators were so angry that it nearly led to a riot. Ron Brown later likened the show to an 'Amos 'n' Andy routine', thereby linking it to the long-running radio/television minstrel series starting on radio in the 1930s which closed out on television in the 1960s. The idea of a suit being brought in New York to protest racially supercharged entertainment in an African country is itself a mind-boggling instance of globalization. 33. International Herald Tribune, 26 March 1996, front page.

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Robin, The War of Words 1. A comprehensive analysis of the re-education program appears in Robin 1995. 2. Major Maxwell McKnight to Major General B.M. Bryan, 'Books for Prisoners of War' (5 June 1945), record group 389, Files of the Provost Marshall General, National Archives, Washington, DC (hereafter: RG 389), box 1646. 3. Henry Ehrmann, 'Justification of the Selection for the First Series of the Buecherreihe Neue Welt' (3 April 1945), 2-3, RG 389, box 1645. 4. Hildebrandt 1945: 4 Der Ruf was the POW newspaper published by the SPD and edited by a group of POW collaborators. 5. Captain Walter Schoenstedt, 'Prisoner of War Newspaper' (19 May 1945), RG 389, box 1599. 6. Ehrmann, 'Justification: 1. 7. Ehrmann, 'Justification': 1. 8. Mumford Jones 1940: 5, 19. For some other very favourable reviews by eminent American intellectuals see Wilson 1940: 591-92. Cowley; 1941: 89-90. 9. Smith 1946: 7. T.V. Smith, a renowned philosopher, and at that time a faculty member at the University of Chicago, was a prominent staff member of the SPD. 10. 'Reactions to Buecherreihe Neue Welt', attached to 'Re-education of Enemy Prisoners of War: A Historical Monograph' (Office of Chief of Military History, Department of the Army, Washington DC)

Dean, The Bohemian Transformed 1. For the Gypsy-bohemian transformation, see Wilson 1992: 145, 94, 197-199. 2. William Blake, Proverbs of Hell, 11. 31-33 (c. 1793). 3. As translated by Elizabeth Wiskermann in her book Fascism in Italy: Us Development and Influence (34 1969). The strongest artistic statements relevant to the artistic-bohemian opposition in the 1940s remain the two movies To Be or Not To Be (1942, dir. Ernst Lubitsch); The Great Dictator (1940, dir. Charles Chaplin); in the 1960s: Fahrenheit 451 (1966, dir. F. Truffaut); 1/... (1968, dir. Lindsay Anderson). It is fascinating that the best US-directed films of the 60s dealt with the artistic-bohemian opposition with an express need to include crowd culture, the sprawling mass that fostered shapeless cinematic narratives: Alice's Restaurant (1969, dir. A. Penn), Woodstock (1970, dir. Michael Wadleigh), Gimme Shelter (1971, dir. Albert and David Maysles). 4. As the summer 1994 advertisement proclaimed. See Woodstock 94: The Guide (New York: Entertainment Weekly Custom Publishing, Summer 1994), back cover blurb. 5. The Dial and The Masses to Ramparts and Rolling Stone development is paralleled in Western European bohemianism. See Cassagne 1906; Easton L. Arnold, (ed.) 1978; while with the British one moves from the time of William Morris and The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine down to 60s London and Oz; see, e.g., Melly 1970. The first man to codify the fertile irregularity of bohemianism was Charles Murger in Scenes de la vie de boheme (1845-49). Murger argued that four kinds of bohemians existed: Unknown, Mediocre, Amateur, Real. Unknowns are those who create and suffer in

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silence, whose work might be discovered after their death. Mediocre go unappreciated because that is what they deserve. Their life and work is ridiculous even if their dream of creativity is genuine. Amateurs lead the wild life while young, then stop, settle down, recall their glory days. They also lead the bohemian life vicariously, as observers, at a distance. Real are very few. These have publicly proved their existence in the literary and artistic market place of ideas, images and sounds. See Murger 1912: xxxvi-xxxvii. 6. See Ellwood 1992: 229; and Harold Macmillan, Speech, Bedford Football Ground, 20 July 1957, in Palmer and Palmer 1985: 164-65. 7. The civilized man is a larger mind but a more imperfect nature than the savage', i.e. than the bohemian, as the American transcendentalist Margaret Fuller wrote in Summer on the Lakes (1844): 6. 8. AFN: American Forces Network, Europe; RIAS: Radio in the American Sector, Berlin. Note: the foundations for this were laid in the previous generation by jazz; see: Zwerin 1985. 9. Norman Mailer (1957), The White Negro', as anthologized in Gene Feldman and Max Gartenberg, Protest (London: Panther, I960): 304. 10. Becker 1977; Carr 1975; 'Cathlyn Wilkerson: "A Radical Who Forgot to Grow Conservative'", R. Cohen, Washington Post, Sunday 20 July, cols. 1, 4; S. Kovaleski, J. Schwartz, 'Unabomber: 'The Journey: From Harvard and Berkeley to Backwoods'", Washington Post-International Herald Tribune, Paris, Friday 5 April, 1996, 1,10. 11. See Watts 1991, 1992:625-60.

12. Woodstock: Rolling Stone, 6 Sept. 1969; Time, 12 September 1969; Hopkins, Marshall and Wolman, 1970; Isle of Wight: Hinton 1990; Sanford and Reid 1974; also used for the Isle of Wight Festival, from the 27-31 August and 1 September issues of the following UK newspapers: Yorkshire Post and Leeds Mercury-, Liverpool Daily Post and Mercury; Daily Express; Daily Mail; The Daily Telegraph; The Morning Star, The Observer; The Sun; Sunday Times Times; Machester Guardian; Western Mail and South Wales News; Altamont: Greil 1977: 302-308; Hotchner 1990. 13. Salon as quoted in 'Webzine Dreams', Economist, 17 February 1996, The Economist Review Section, 12. See also: Margot Williams, 'Getting to Know You', IHT (8 April 8, 1996): 11, 13. 14. Full quote from ruling 'the most participatory form of mass speech yet developed, the internet deserves the highest protection from government intrusion'. Source: CBS Evening News, 12 June 1996, 'Supreme Court—Cyberporn Ruling'. 15. Edgar Allan Poe, Selected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe (London: Penguin, 1976); The Science Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe (London: Penguin, 1976). Quotes respectively taken from: The Man of the Crowd', p. 180; 'Mellonta Tauta', p. 318; Some Words with a Mummy, p. 169; and Marginalia (1844-1849), p. 13.

Walker, I Am the King 1. Dogs in Space, dir. Richard Lowenstein (Central Park Films, 1987). 2. Ian Johnstone's (1995) Bad Seed: The Biography of Nick Cave provides a detailed account of the punk scene in Australia and The Birthday Party from their genesis to their demise

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in 1983. The punk scene is also dramatized in the film Dogs in Space, from which the second of the three epigraphs is taken. 3. Donald Friend, quoted in Campbell 1989: 87. 4. For The Birthday Party's disenchantment with the London music scene see lohnstone 1995: 10-11. 5. Nick Cave, 'Junkyard', in Cave 1988, in which all cited lyrics by Cave can be found. 6. 'H.M.S. Britain 1982'; Cave 1988: 101. 7. For the radical and political collage strategies of bricolage see Hebdige 1979: in particular 104-6. 8. For Cave's interest in Goldman's biography and Vegas-era Elvis in general see lohnstone 1995: 145-6. 9. See Rogers and O'Brien 1975: 21. 10. Tupelo'; Cave 1988: 112. 11. Cave's work with The Bad Seeds has blended blues, country, gospel and the ballad, all traditional mediums, with jazz leanings, white-noise dissonance and references to writers as diverse as Milton, Melville, Nabokov and Ezra Pound. The continuing presence of guitarist Blixa Bargeld, from the experimental German group Einsturzende Neubauten, contributes to the ongoing avant-garde flavour of The Bad Seeds. 12. See Cave 1988: 95, 118.

Prevos, Evolution of French Rap 1. Readers familiar with the reactions of the French during the past decades may wonder why I mention only three steps. Those who have read Seducing the French will remember that its author mentions four stages: resistance, selective imitation, adaptation and acceptance (Kuisel 1993: x). The first stage is not apparent here because of the fact that the musicians who decided to borrow did it as individuals. Secondly, the arrival of rap in France was never originally perceived as a threat to 'Frenchness' as had been the case several decades ago when the first popular productions from America arrived in France. Finally, owing primarily to the popular productions studied here, some of the stages indicated by Kuisel have been renamed: borrowing instead of selective imitation, adaptation has been retained, acceptance has been replaced by adaptation. 2. Readers familiar with these two novels may not remember the context in which the mentions of the Zulus appear. In Collard's book, the narrator encounters a young Zulu who is, at best, a lax follower of Bambaataa's ideals (he drinks, uses drugs, defaces hallways with graffiti and appears to be a homosexual prostitute). In Thomas's novel, the Zulus are part of a litany of names associated with the cellars of the public housing buildings: 'les zoulous, les keufs, Bagdad et Nique Ta Mere'. 3. Early research for this essay and the writing of early drafts were significantly helped by two 'Research Development Grants' (academic years 1994-95 and 1995-96) from the Senior Associate Dean, Commonwealth Education System, The Pennsylvania State University. This support is acknowledged here.

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Index Adair. W. 74, 75 Adler, B. 147 Adorno, T. 19 Anker. R.M. 131 Bailey, W.G. 97 Barthes. R. 22 Bashung, A. 147 Baudrillard. J. 13. 17. 36. 37. 107 Beck. E.R. 41. 42, 167 Beckman, J. 147 Benet, S.V. 73 Bigsby, C. 51 Blair. J.G. 8, 47. 50. 168. 169 Blair, K. 8, 48 Blake, W. 171 Boll, H. 44 Bosscher, D.F.J. 166 Bouilhet, A. 158, 159 Bovenkerk, F. 141 Brantlinger, P. 29, 30, 42, 43 Bratton, J.S. 57, 58, 169 Brooker, P. 32 Brown, N. 98 Buch, B. 133 Buiks. P.E. 140 Burchill, J. 34 Campbell, I. 45. 167 Camus. A. 97 Caputo. P. 104. 109. I l l , 113. 114 Carre. J. Le 102, 103 Cartier, R. 95 Cassagne, A. 171 Cave, N. 117, 121-30, 173 Chandler, R. 38 Chase, M. 144 Clarke, J. 14 Cockrell, D. 63. 170 Cole. CM. 170 Collard. C. 148 Collins, I. 18, 19, 166 Conan Doyle, A. 38 Cooper, B.L. 166 Cooper, L.E. 166

Coplan, D. 170 Crichton, M. 96. 102 Crow 169 Dean, J. 8, 31, 48 Ditreich, M. 74 Donkers, J. 133 Dorfman, A. 24, 25 Douglas, A. 166 Douglass, F. 57 Dufresne, D. 147 Dunn, S. 118 During, S. 32 Duroy, L. 155 Elderen, P.L. Van 135-7 Elich, I. 141 Ellwood, D.D. 172 Elteren, M. van 9, 13, 14, 23, 31, 37, 39, 40, 43, 50, 51, 144, 163, 166, 167 Erlmann. V. 170 Farber, D. 39 Faulkner, W. 123 Featherstone, M. 133 Fiedler, L. 15 Fischer, M.M.j. 139 Fiske, J. 20, 49. 50, 166 Forgacs, D. 28, 33, 40 Frank, L. 71 Frith, S. 39, 40, 131, 133. 135, 145 Fukuyama, F. 161 Fuller, P. 167 Gamier, A. 152 Gilroy, P. 159 Giroux, H. 30 Gold, H. 92 Goldman, A. 125, 173 Gramsci, A. 19 Greene, G. 115 Guilledoux, D. Le 149, 152 Gunther, J. 94 Hall, S. 32, 35, 36

Index Hamm, C. 170 Hammett, D. 38 Hannerz, U. 144 Harris, M. 119 Hasford, G. 104, 110, 112 Hatch, D. 143 Haverly, J. 169 Hebdige, R. 15, 20, 30, 31, 33, 34, 44, 1 166, 173 Helmer, J. 23 Hemingway, E. 73, 74, 109 Herr, M. 104-10 Hinton, B. 49 Hoffer, E. 93 Hoffman, F.W. 97 Hoggard, R. 33 Hoimian, E. 152 Horkheimer, M. 19 Hornung, E.W. 38 Hughes, R. 99 Huyssen, A. 166 Jackson, S.J. 35 Jameson, F. 104, 162 Johnstone, I. 172 Jones, H.M. 72, 74, 76, 77, 171 Kater, M. 167 Kelly, P. 44 Knippenberg, H. 137 Kovic, R. 104, 112-14 Krammer, A. 67 Krasteva, Y. 8, 49 Kroes, R. 14, 15, 37, 41, 46, 47, 1 Lalanne, B. 146 Lapointe, B. 149 Lawrence, D.H. 17 Lealand, G. 167 Leidner, R. 23, 167 Lewis, G.H. 138 Lipsitz, G. 139 Little, L. 154, 157 Lott, E. 169 Louis, P. 148 Mahar, W.J. 56. 169 Malcolm, I. 102 Mann, T. 69, 71, 74, 75 Marcus, G. 125-7, 129 Marcuse, H. 34, 98

189

Maso, B. 141

Mason, B.A. 104, 111, 116 Mattelart, A. 24, 25 Mclnerney, P. 109 McKay, G. 9, 121, 168 McNamara, R. 115 Melly, G. 46 Mills, S.F. 25, 166 Millward, S. 143 Montand, Y. 149 Mortaigne, V. 147 Murger, C. 100, 171 Nathan, H. 169 Nehring, N. 166, 168 Nelson, E. 43 O'Brien, T. 104, 173 O'Connor, F. 123 Olivier, N. 152 Orwell, G. 33 Ostrovsky, S. 40, 167 Oud, J.G. 132, 142 Paquot, T. 152 Parsons, A. 34 Paskman, D. 169 Pater, B. de 137 Patrick, M. 170 Pattison, R. 99 Pells, R. 14-17, 27, 29, 30, 32, 49. 162 Pfaffer, H. 71 Philips, W. 75 Phillips, P.A. 151 Piot, O. 150 Poe, E.A. 102, 172 Pope, A. 77 Potter, R. 149, 152, 159 Pound, E. 17, 101, 173 Pratt, J.G. 115 Prevos, A.J.M. 9, 47, 50, 146, 147 Priestley, J.G. 46 Prinaz, L. 148 Quint, B. 94, 143 Remarque, E.M. 71 Renault, G. 153 Reniers, G. 132 Rexroth, K. 93, 94, 97, 101 Reynolds, H. 61, 169, 170

190

Yankee Go Home (& Take Me With U)

Richards, V. 46 Rioux, L. 146 Ritzer. G. 23 Robin. R. 9. 28. 29, 48 Rogers, B. 173 Rollins, H. 117, 125 Rose, T. 146, 163 Rosenberg, E.S. 132 Ross. A. 163 Roth, I. 70 Rutten, P. 132, 142 Rydell, R.W. 166 Sabin. R. 168 Sacks. H.L. 170 Sacks. J.R. 170 Saroyan, W. 73, 75, 76 Sartre, J.-P. 97 Savage, J. 121, 129 Schmidt, W.E. 131 Schulze, Q.J. 131 Scott, ). 73 Shaw. C. 144 Shepherd. C.E. 170 Silvana 148 Slotkin, R. 115 Stegner. W. 75 Stein, G. 16. 161 Stokvis, P.R.D. 168 Storey, J. 19, 20, 29, 166 Strinati. D. 166 Sturma, M. 17, 118, 119 Tallack, D. 26. 27 Tanner. R. 168

Taylor. F.W. 23 Thomas, B. 148 Tomlinson, J. 21, 24, 32, Twain, M. 11, 12, 56

14, 163

Verne, ). 25 Versteeg, F. 132 Vidal, J. 167 Walker, R. 10, 50 Waterhouse, R. 62 170 Watts, S. 172 Waugh, E. 34 Webby. E. 170 Webster. D. 16. 26, 33-5, 38, 39, 46. 47. 120. 121, 123 128. 129, 134, 161, 166, 167 Wells, H.G. 25 Werfel, F. 70, 71 Wermuth, M. 140, 141 Wilford, H. 26 Willett, R. 167 Williams, R. 29 Willis, P. 112 Willkie, W. 73 Wilson, j.Q. 87 Wilson, S. 94 Wright, S. 104 Yudice, G. 51 Zuckmayer, C. 70, 71 Zweig, A. 70, 71