The Globalization of American Culture.

• Author: Brown, John H.
• Position: 'Modernist America: Art, Music, Movies, and the Globalization of American Culture' - Book review

The Globalization of American Culture

Richard Pells, Modernist America: Art, Music, Movies, and the Globalization of American Culture, New Haven and London, 2012, ISBN-13: 978-0300181739, 498 pp, in paperback edition $24

"The best history books do one of two things: they change one's mind or they tell a terrific story." So says Theodore K. Rabb, a distinguished Princeton University historian. *

Unfortunately, the book under review fails on both these counts. In a tome of nearly 500 pages, far longer than it need be, Richard Pells, a University of Texas professor emeritus and frequent Fulbright program grantee who specializes in twentieth century American cultural history, has produced neither a groundbreaking study nor an engaging historical narrative.

The main point of Pells's opus is that "the United States was, and continues to be ... a consumer of foreign intellectual and artistic influences." But this self-evident assertion, according to Pells a refutation of the notion "that America was once a cultural backwater and is now a cultural behemoth," is common sense to most people, even without a doctorate, who have suffered indigestion from a Domino's pizza. Harping on the obvious, Pells falls victim to intellectual misdirections that don't persuade the reader, for several reasons.

First, Pells--stressing how twentieth-century American culture was shaped by foreign influences to an unmatched extent but not comparing the cultural impact that outsiders (except Americans) had in other countries--suggests that cultural "borrowing" is uniquely American. But in fact cultures have borrowed from other cultures throughout history. The Romans were influenced by the Greeks and created a civilization of their own that defined (at least for historians) the Mediterranean world for centuries. Renaissance writers imitated the classics. In more recent times, transnational cultural interactions have taken place among many countries, with numerous states (as a result of such exchanges) creating their own "special" culture.

Pells underscores that modernism--vaguely defined by him as "the effort--beginning in the early twentieth century--to invent a new language to describe the scientific, political, and social upheavals of the modern world"--uniquely influenced today's American culture, including when introduced in the U.S. by the foreign-born. But America was certainly not alone in its "willingness to ignore cultural boundaries" by "intermingling elements...