> (from Le Monde Diplomatique)
> U.S. AS GLOBAL OVERLORD
> Dumbing Down, American-style
> by HERBERT I SCHILLER
Schiller makes some good points, but I have some quibbles:
> Foreign film production is at terrific disadvantage to
> US film producers who enjoy a large, unified and relatively rich domestic
> market. The consequences have been calamitous for foreign film industries,
> reduced and marginalised in the global market.
The EU does a pretty good job of subsidizing its local film industries, and they continue to produce kickass stuff (e.g. Almodovar, Tykwer, Kieslowski). East Asia has a blossoming cinema/video industry. And many Hollywood films are surprisingly and sneakily subversive, especially in terms of micropolitics. Wall Street neoliberalism isn't the same thing as consumerism, which is a much broader and potentially utopian set of narratives.
> The familiarity of American readers with current world literature is no
> less abysmal. In any given year, the PEN list of published translations,
> from all the languages of the world, has not exceeded more than 200 to 250
> titles.
In my own little niche of Comparative Literature, there's been an explosion of translation activity in the past decade, lots of gorgeous new stuff from Eastern Europe, Africa, Latin America, Asia, you name it. This has been matched by as astonishing cosmopolitanization (a clumsy word, but "metropolitanization" would be too neolib) of cultural theory, as all the micropolitical movements sort of converge, Seattle-style, in the field of culture studies. We get grad students from countries all over the world who do world-class stuff, you know, a big change from the 1970s. This hasn't yet begun to filter down to the popular level, sure, but there are powerful undercurrents of cultural, political and social de-Americanization in full swing all around us.
And, lastly, any system which *really* bamboozled people wouldn't need to jail/incarcerate/warehouse 3% of its adult population, as the US does.
-- Dennis