Politics & Power Quote by Jose Saramago

Saramago opens with a diplomatic feint: yes, North American culture has undeniable “positive aspects,” and pretending otherwise would be performative. Then he yanks the floor out. The concession isn’t generosity; it’s a setup that prevents the familiar rebuttal (“you just hate America”) and clears space for the real target: not art, not people, but a system.

“Cultural lamination” is the loaded metaphor doing most of the work. Lamination protects by sealing, but it also flattens, standardizes, and makes surfaces easier to wipe clean. Saramago is naming a process where difference survives only as a cosmetic layer under plastic: local cultures packaged into export-friendly, marketable versions of themselves, while the American template (language, narrative formats, consumer desire, entertainment rhythms) becomes the default substrate. The phrase “industrial and commercial process” insists this isn’t an organic exchange; it’s mass production with distribution muscle.

Context matters: Saramago, a Portuguese Nobel laureate with communist sympathies, is writing from Europe’s semi-periphery, where American soft power often arrives as inevitability rather than invitation. His real anxiety isn’t “influence” but asymmetry: one country’s cultural outputs, boosted by capital and media infrastructure, can feel less like conversation and more like overwrite.

The sting is in “perpetrating.” That verb frames globalization as an act with victims, not a neutral flow. Saramago’s intent is to make cultural dominance sound like what it is to those on the receiving end: not admiration, but enclosure.