"And this fear that US models are replacing everything else now spills over from the sphere of culture into our two remaining categories: for this process is clearly, at one level, the result of economic domination - of local cultural industries closed down by American rivals"
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Jameson is diagnosing a particular kind of panic: not just that American movies, music, or narrative styles are everywhere, but that their spread feels like a hostile takeover dressed up as taste. The line is built to make “fear” sound reasonable. He grants the emotional register up front, then slides quickly into his real claim: this isn’t cultural osmosis, it’s structural power. “Spills over” does quiet work here, suggesting contamination and inevitability, as if culture can’t stay safely quarantined from economics once the market gets involved.
The subtext is anti-innocence. When people complain about “US models replacing everything,” they may think they’re talking about aesthetics or identity. Jameson insists they’re also talking about political economy: distribution networks, capital advantages, ownership, advertising, and the brutal fact that “local cultural industries” can be “closed down.” That passive construction matters. It frames the outcome as systemic rather than the result of a few bad choices by local elites, and it implies that what looks like consumer preference may be manufactured by unequal competition.
Contextually, this is the Jameson of late-20th-century globalization debates, when “Americanization” became shorthand for a world market with one dominant cultural exporter. He’s not romanticizing the local so much as pointing out what gets erased when culture is treated as a free-floating realm: jobs, institutions, and the capacity of a society to tell its own stories at industrial scale. The fear, he suggests, is less about jeans and Hollywood than about dependency.
The subtext is anti-innocence. When people complain about “US models replacing everything,” they may think they’re talking about aesthetics or identity. Jameson insists they’re also talking about political economy: distribution networks, capital advantages, ownership, advertising, and the brutal fact that “local cultural industries” can be “closed down.” That passive construction matters. It frames the outcome as systemic rather than the result of a few bad choices by local elites, and it implies that what looks like consumer preference may be manufactured by unequal competition.
Contextually, this is the Jameson of late-20th-century globalization debates, when “Americanization” became shorthand for a world market with one dominant cultural exporter. He’s not romanticizing the local so much as pointing out what gets erased when culture is treated as a free-floating realm: jobs, institutions, and the capacity of a society to tell its own stories at industrial scale. The fear, he suggests, is less about jeans and Hollywood than about dependency.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
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