Modernist America: Art, Music, Movies, and the Globalization of American Culture

Abstract

In his new book Modernist America, the incisive, far-ranging cultural historian Richard Pells rejects the notion of American cultural imperialism—that is, the eroding of the supposedly more authentic cultural production of other countries by flooding the global marketplace with meretricious mass culture from the United States. Cultural imperialism denotes a one-way transmission from center, in this case the United States, to periphery, the rest of the world. The book’s brief is to demonstrate that twentieth-century America’s cultural exchange with other parts of the globe has been neither coercive nor one-sided but rather a rich and mutually beneficial interchange. To that end, and with only an occasional nod toward African and Asian cultural resources, Modernist America charts a series of reciprocal relationships between early to mid-twentieth-century European modernism and American popular culture. The book describes a three-stage process. First, European modernists, troubled but also stimulated by the great upheavals of modern times, created new forms of artistic expression that mirror, celebrate, or decry those times. Second, American artists and entertainers, imbibing the modernist ethos and its avant-garde techniques, endowed them with mass appeal (think Charlie Chaplin and George Gershwin), or at least extensive popularity (Marlon Brando, Miles Davis, and Jackson Pollock). In the third stage, arcane and often rebarbative early modernism, tempered by American vernacular and pragmatic traditions, influenced a new generation of European artists and intellectuals and reshaped public awareness of what it means to be modern.

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