Abstract
In 1991 and 1992, a team of six scholars spent a year together at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study, researching the phenomenon known in the lingua franca as “Americanization.” The project, which focused on Europe, was the brainchild of historian Rob Kroes, and the result was several individual books and six volumes of essays.1 One of these, American Photographs in Europe, is a collection of essays (edited by myself and Mick Gidley) that focuses on the transatlantic movement of images during the twentieth century.2 This chapter reconsiders this theme. Notably, the scholarly vocabulary has changed since the 1990s: while the term “Americanization” endures, it continues to be redefined, expanded, and contested. This chapter recasts the concept of Americanization as creolization. This is a process in which senders and receivers of cultural messages continually reposition and reinterpret cultural icons to suit their needs. The term “creolization” references how American images were changed and adapted, tinkered with and selectively appropriated—in Europe and elsewhere. This chapter examines this often playful reconception of American images outside the United States during the Cold War period and the forms of creolization these images represent. To exemplify this process, the Statue of Liberty provides a case study of an American icon that acquired many new meanings.
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Notes
On photography, see also Rob Kroes, Photographic Memories: Private Pictures, Public Images, and American History (Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 2007).
David E. Nye and Mick Gidley, eds., American Photographs in Europe (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1994).
Patrick Fridenson, “Ford as a Model for French Car Makers, 1911–1939,” in Ford: The European History, 1903–2003, ed. Hubert Bonin, Jannick Lung and Steven Tolliday (Paris: Éditions P.L.A.G.E. 2003), 126–7.
On Fiat and Italian adoption of the assembly line, see Duccio Bigazzi, “Gli operai della catena di montaggio: la Fiat 1922–1943,” in Annali della Fondazione Giangiacomo Feltrinelli (1979–1980) (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1981), 895–949;
Wayne Lewchuk, “Fordist Technology and Britain: The Diffusion of Labour Speed-up,” in The Transfer of International Technology: Europe, Japan and the USA in the Twentieth Century, ed. David J. Jeremy (Aldershot: Edward Elgar, 1992), 19;
J. Ronald Shearer, “The Reichskuratorium für Wirtschaftlichkeit: Fordism and Organized Capitalism in Germany, 1918–1945,” The Business History Review 71 (1997): 569–602.
Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920–1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 154.
See Victoria de Grazia, Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance through 20th-Century Europe (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005), 226–83.
Rob Kroes, If You’ve Seen One, You’ve Seen the Mall: Europeans and American Mass Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996).
George Ritzer, The McDonaldization of Society: An Investigation into the Changing Character of Contemporary Social Life (Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge, 1993).
David E. Nye, America’s Assembly Line (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013), 73–95.
Geir Lundestad, “‘Empire by Invitation’ in the American Century,” Diplomatic History 23 (1999): 189–217.
Robert W. Rydell and Rob Kroes, Buffalo Bill in Bologna: The Americanization of the World, 1869–1922 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
Werner Sollors, “Of Plymouth Rock and Jamestown and Ellis Island — Or Ethnic Literature and Some Redefinitions of ‘America,’” in Multiculturalism and the Canon of American Culture, ed. Hans Bak (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1993), 270–81.
John Higham, Send These to Me: Jews and Other Immigrants in Urban America (New York: Atheneum, 1975), 76.
Pierre Provoyeur and June Hargrove, Liberty: The French-American Statue in Art and History (New York: Perennial Library, 1986);
Michael Grumet, Images of Liberty (New York: Arbor House, 1986).
Sacvan Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978).
The Onion, Our Dumb Century: The Onion Presents 100 Years of Headlines from America’s Finest News Source (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1999).
Max Page, The City’s End: Two Centuries of Fantasies, Fears, and Premonitions of New York’s Destruction (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 120–1.
Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in llluminations: Essays and Refl ections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969).
Jean Baudrillard, The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1998);
Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyperreality: Essays (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986).
National Park Service, “Statue of Liberty: Virtual Tour,” accessed May 24, 2013, http://www.nps.gov/stli/photosmultimedia/virtualtour.htm.
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© 2015 David Nye
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Nye, D. (2015). Americanization as Creolized Imaginary: The Statue of Liberty During the Cold War. In: Lundin, P., Kaiserfeld, T. (eds) The Making of European Consumption. The Palgrave Macmillan Transnational History Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137374042_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137374042_3
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