![]() But it is China’s ways of opening itself up and its ability to domesticate the Hollywood monster-to the point that, at present, it appears to have gotten the better of it-that deserve the most attention, as it is the manner in which the Middle Empire neutralizes the most spectacular and compelling expressions of the western imagination that prefigures the actions it may pursue in other, equally crucial domains. Hollywood’s offensive could encounter both total closure (as in Mao’s China) and, more rarely, a cinematographic response equivalent to the power wielded by the Californian studios themselves, as in India. In other words, there can be no study of Americanization without an analysis of its reception and the strategies of delocalization that it used to bypass the protective measures implemented by various governments-strategies that often depended on the collaboration of colonized countries. Thus “films made in Hollywood-on-the-Tiber, as Cinecittà was then dubbed, contributed significantly to the popularity of Hollywood movies, as well as to the prosperity of Italian cinema as a whole.” With the triumph of epics and the spaghetti western fad, Italian movie production rose to the second place globally. Still haunted by the Americanization of France (as with Robert Dhéry’s 1961 film, La Belle Américaine), we tend to forget or overlook the fact that, in other countries, Hollywood’s conquest took different paths. At a time when China has raised itself to this industry’s forefront, it is worth reconsidering this past, which, because it forged the west’s collective imagination over the last century, concerns us all. The internationalization of American cinema offers a perfect illustration of a process that went through various stages over the twentieth century, operating in different ways in different continents and countries. ![]() Consider the case of film production and the movie industry as a way of illustrating the accuracy of these analyses. It is worth recalling the importance of mestizajes to the takeoff of the American “cultural dynamic.” While the example of jazz is well known, the role of painting in the give-and-take between the Old World and the New is less familiar, though it is equally important. The explanation lies in the failure of a process of cultural submersion that was widely anticipated the erosion of American prestige since the 1960s and the related rise of “structural anti-Americanism” due to the international disengagement initiated by Obama and accelerated by Trump. This approach informs his questions: what is the relationship between Americanization and globalization? To what extent does democratic messianism embody the American model? How is this model disseminated and what is its cultural striking power? Tournès also offers helpful considerations on mass production, Fordism, and the “American way of life,” leading him to ask: “is global culture American?” He concludes: “the twenty-first century will not be American.” The United States is no longer modernity’s driving force and primary symbol. What is Americanization? In his book, Ludovic Tournès, a professor of international history at the University of Geneva who has written several noted works on music and the United States, provides a series of clear and precise answers to this question, digging into the meaning of an often hackneyed term while also probing its material foundations, exploring its political, mythical, and artistic expressions, and examining, in turn, painting, music, and film-domains often neglected by generalist historians. It is so important that it cannot be left to think tanks or sociologists of culture, who are generally indifferent to historical perspectives, without which Americanization’s rise and evident decline cannot be analyzed. Was this the triumph of Americanization over Mao’s China, just a few steps from a building devoted to his thought, or did it represent, to use a term coined by the Brazilian writer Mario de Andrade, a Chinese-style “anthropophagy” of the mythical universe of my childhood, as well that of millions of Westerners? This question is important, as it concerns our planet’s looming future. In the hallway, a television screen was showing, on a loop, the inauguration of Shanghai’s Disney Park. In 2016, when I had been invited to a major Chinese university, I was waiting for an elevator on campus.
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