Cultural imperialism
Cultural imperialism is the imposition by a dominant community of its own culture onto another community. Imperialists may use wealth, media power, and violence to establish cultural hegemony. Cultural imperialism may take various forms, such as an attitude, a formal policy, or military action—insofar as each of these reinforces the empire's cultural hegemony. Research on the topic occurs in scholarly disciplines, and is especially prevalent in communication and media studies, education, foreign policy, history, international relations, linguistics, literature, post-colonialism, science, sociology, social theory, environmentalism, and sports.
Cultural imperialism may be distinguished from the natural process of cultural diffusion. The spread of culture around the world is referred to as cultural globalization.
Background and definitions
Although the Oxford English Dictionary has a 1921 reference to the "cultural imperialism of the Russians", John Tomlinson, in his book on the subject, writes that the term emerged in the 1960s and has been a focus of research since at least the 1970s. Terms such as "media imperialism", "structural imperialism", "cultural dependency and domination", "cultural synchronization", "electronic colonialism", "ideological imperialism", and "economic imperialism" have all been used to describe the same basic notion of cultural imperialism.The term refers largely to the exercise of power in a cultural relationship in which the principles, ideas, practices, and values of a powerful, invading society are imposed upon indigenous cultures in the occupied areas. The process is often used to describe examples of when the compulsory practices of the cultural traditions of the imperial social group are implemented upon a conquered social group. The process is also present when powerful nations are able to flood the information and media space with their ideas, limiting countries and communities' ability to compete and expose people to locally created content.
Cultural imperialism has been called a process that intends to transition the "cultural symbols of the invading communities from
For Herbert Schiller, cultural imperialism refers to the American Empire's "coercive and persuasive agencies, and their capacity to promote and universalize an American 'way of life' in other countries without any reciprocation of influence." According to Schiller, cultural imperialism "pressured, forced and bribed" societies to integrate with the U.S.'s expansive capitalist model but also incorporated them with attraction and persuasion by winning "the mutual consent, even solicitation of the indigenous rulers." He continues remarks that it is:
the sum processes by which a society is brought into the modern world system and how its dominating stratum is attracted, pressured, forced, and sometimes bribed into shaping social institutions to correspond to, or even promote, the values and structures of the dominating centres of the system. The public media are the foremost example of operating enterprises that are used in the penetrative process. For penetration on a significant scale the media themselves must be captured by the dominating/penetrating power. This occurs largely through the commercialization of broadcasting.The historical contexts, iterations, complexities, and politics of Schiller's foundational and substantive theorization of cultural imperialism in international communication and media studies are discussed in detail by political economy of communication researchers Richard Maxwell, Vincent Mosco, Graham Murdock, and Tanner Mirrlees. Downing and Sreberny-Mohammadi state:
"Cultural imperialism signifies the dimensions of the process that go beyond economic exploitation or military force. In the history of colonialism,, the educational and media systems of many Third World countries have been set up as replicas of those in Britain, France, or the United States and carry their values. Western advertising has made further inroads, as have architectural and fashion styles. Subtly but powerfully, the message has often been insinuated that Western cultures are superior to the cultures of the Third World."
Poststructuralism
In poststructuralist and postcolonial theory, cultural imperialism is often understood as the cultural legacy of Western colonialism, or forms of social action contributing to the continuation of Western hegemony. To some outside of the realm of this discourse, the term is critiqued as being unclear, unfocused, and/or contradictory in nature.The work of French philosopher and social theorist Michel Foucault has heavily influenced use of the term cultural imperialism, particularly his philosophical interpretation of power and his concept of governmentality. Following an interpretation of power similar to that of Machiavelli, Foucault defines power as immaterial, as a "certain type of relation between individuals" that has to do with complex strategic social positions that relate to the subject's ability to control its environment and influence those around itself. According to Foucault, power is intimately tied with his conception of truth. "Truth", as he defines it, is a "system of ordered procedures for the production, regulation, distribution, circulation, and operation of statements" which has a "circular relation" with systems of power. Therefore, inherent in systems of power, is always "truth", which is culturally specific, inseparable from ideology which often coincides with various forms of hegemony, including cultural imperialism.
Foucault's interpretation of governance is also very important in constructing theories of transnational power structure. In his lectures at the Collège de France, Foucault often defines governmentality as the broad art of "governing", which goes beyond the traditional conception of governance in terms of state mandates, and into other realms such as governing "a household, souls, children, a province, a convent, a religious order, a family". This relates directly back to Machiavelli's treatise on how to retain political power at any cost, The Prince, and Foucault's aforementioned conceptions of truth and power.
Post-colonialism
is a founding figure of postcolonialism, established with the book Orientalism, a humanist critique of The Enlightenment, which criticises Western knowledge of "The East"—specifically the English and the French constructions of what is and what is not "Oriental". Whereby said "knowledge" then led to cultural tendencies towards a binary opposition of the Orient vs. the Occident, wherein one concept is defined in opposition to the other concept, and from which they emerge as of unequal value. In Culture and Imperialism, the sequel to Orientalism, Saïd proposes that, despite the formal end of the "age of empire" after the Second World War, colonial imperialism left a cultural legacy to the colonised peoples, which remains in their contemporary civilisations; and that said American cultural imperialism is very influential in the international systems of power.In "Can the Subaltern Speak?" Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak critiques common representations in the West of the Sati, as being controlled by authors other than the participants. Because of this, Spivak argues that the subaltern, referring to the communities that participate in the Sati, are not able to represent themselves through their own voice. Spivak says that cultural imperialism has the power to disqualify or erase the knowledge and mode of education of certain populations that are low on the social and economic hierarchy.
In A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, Spivak argues that Western philosophy has a history of not only exclusion of the subaltern from discourse, but also does not allow them to occupy the space of a fully human subject.
Contemporary ideas and debate
Cultural imperialism can refer to either the forced acculturation of a subject population, or to the voluntary embracing of a foreign culture by individuals who do so of their own free will. Since these are two very different referents, the validity of the term has been called into question.Cultural influence can be seen by the "receiving" culture as either a threat to or an enrichment of its cultural identity. It seems therefore useful to distinguish between cultural imperialism as an attitude of superiority, and the position of a culture or group that seeks to complement its own cultural production, considered partly deficient, with imported products.
The imported products or services can themselves represent, or be associated with, certain values. According to one argument, the "receiving" culture does not necessarily perceive this link, but instead absorbs the foreign culture passively through the use of the foreign goods and services. Due to its somewhat concealed, but very potent nature, this hypothetical idea is described by some experts as "banal imperialism". For example, it is argued that while "American companies are accused of wanting to control 95 percent of the world's consumers", "cultural imperialism involves much more than simple consumer goods; it involved the dissemination of American principles such as freedom and democracy", a process which "may sound appealing" but which "masks a frightening truth: many cultures around the world are disappearing due to the overwhelming influence of corporate and cultural America".
Some believe that the newly globalised economy of the late 20th and early 21st century has facilitated this process through the use of new information technology. This kind of cultural imperialism is derived from what is called "soft power". The theory of electronic colonialism extends the issue to global cultural issues and the impact of major multi-media conglomerates, ranging from Paramount, WarnerMedia, AT&T, Disney, News Corp, to Google and Microsoft with the focus on the hegemonic power of these mainly United States–based communication giants.