Marketing isn't part of culture? That's a good ol' chicken v. egg conundrum there -- does the marketing labels arise from the culture, or does the culture arise from the marketing labels?
Marketing labels arise from culture. And people making artificial claims about culture often base those on marketing labels and packaging rather than the actual things themselves. That's how we get supposedly "American" tropes and definitions of science fiction as being all one thing thematically and content-wise.
they are folks educated within a culture, selling to a culture. Market research assesses cultural interpretations so that business can best take advantage of existing perceptions
Fiction requires
diversity in the marketplace to sell successfully overall. That's why the notion that one country has one main thing to its market that therefore identifies the country's culture doesn't work. It would be very poor marketing to actually do what she says is happening. She's grabbing one slice of the market and saying this is American, this is European. And she insists that rather than writing from their own traditions -- which American writers frequently borrow as source material in SFFH -- the European writers must be influenced by American culture when they write something she dislikes. This is the same argument used for not-SF SF -- if I like it, it's okay and not a threat in that Other box.
What I am suggesting when I talk spectra and culture -- what most people who engage in cultural studies are talking about -- is that each lightbulb in this picture would be analogous to a particular culture. The total spectrum generated by each culture is unique. Certain bands of colours (cultural elements) are broader in some than in others.
When we get into violence and intelligence of cultures, especially cultures that are polyguts of cultures, this gets too easily into simple discriminatory lumping. It dehumanizes people into simple red and blue symbols and marginalizes quite extensive populations within the cultures as "glowing too softly" largely because the person arguing says so. Eighty percent of Americans live in cities or city suburbs, but it's the rural symbol of America that tends to get declared the bright part of the spectrum. Conservatives of the stereotype make up about a quarter of the population, which is similar to many other countries, yet it is that conservative, far right rhetoric which gets labeled "American" rhetoric. Latinos make up over 16% of the U.S., are the fastest growing group and have a long cultural history in the U.S., and yet are often ignored in discussing American culture in generalities. Black Americans, who have had an enormous impact on American cultures, the same. And that can happen when talking about European culture or the individual countries within it. With our blog writer, she's asserting that a part of the spectrum which exists for all glows brightest for Americans, is therefore owned by them in storytelling, and they are spreading it and corrupting others with it, effecting the others' spectrum make-up. Which is the typical invasion threat of the Other argument.
So when someone says, "American culture is..." they are referring to the whole shebang.
They're referring to one aspect of culture in America, that may be common in other countries too, that they don't like and calling it our glowy part controlling the whole shebang.
Furthermore, there is always an interplay between each band of the spectrum for a given culture. We can't talk one without invoking the other either explicitly or implicitly.
You can if you're doing what she's doing which is to isolate part of the spectrum and make it the identifying factor of a culture. She's saying, here is the American mind's values and how it tends to like to compose its stories. And it's inaccurate and lumping.
My comments were not specific to you, but rather to use what you said as an example of the kind of rhetoric that frequently comes from Americans without qualification.
What I'm trying to say is that you were referring
specifically to me, and so was she. I'm American. So when you say Americans say this, you are saying that I say this. When you say that Americans think this way, you are saying I think that way. And the same if I do it about another country or Europe. When you say SFFH writers, you are stating
all SFFH writers. As my husband likes to remind me when I say a comment about men in general, he's a man, so I'm talking about him.
What we may mean is "some" people are like this. "Some" writers are doing this -- a slice of the spectrum, isolated or related to other parts of the spectrum. But it sounds better to just say people, Americans, SFFH writers, and we don't consider the implications of lumping a large, spectral group under the banner of one color. We can say that writers are effected by the cultures they are in, but which part? The declaration that one part is dominant and shaping the writers above all else is easy to do but seldom accurate.
Success of one color on the storytelling spectrum for some products doesn't wipe out success by other colors' unless you ignore it to press your point. And there is the issue of assessment of the writer, how deep you've looked. Some people look at the packaging and declare the color. Which is what she's doing for the purposes of talking about the colors. She has labeled one of the colors "American" under the claim that it's the dominant color for Americans.
Because an evident American cultural value stems from a firmly implanted belief that America is the land of the free, home of the brave, and with that (to an outsider) comes an evident sense of superiority that causes Americans to perceive most other cultures as weak, fearful, envious, oppressed... America sets itself apart from the world, slightly to the left and above it, and sets out trying to bring everyone the good word and save our small souls.
Again, this is simply far right beliefs that you are labeling particularly American, even though it isn't the majority view in America's culture and certainly is not the majority view of American SFFH writers. If I want to make a sweeping generalization about Americans, it would be that they endlessly disagree with each other and criticize their country about what they think is wrong with it. But you could probably say that about most countries too. Most people believe that their own country is superior and other cultures are worse, weak, envious, misguided, want to invade them and have poor grounds to criticize them back, etc. And European imperialism has the same view about saving souls in other countries, etc. The claim that America's conservative, racist, or imperious sides are its most glowy colors and they are fainter in other countries is not a realistic portrayal of fiction and cultural narratives any more than the conservative, racist or imperious rhetoric from
some Americans is a realistic portrayal of America or the rest of the world. It's good for making an argument that American writers have the cultural subtlety of bears, but, for me, that trivializes what all writers are doing.
You're right, it would be. Yet I hear exactly that assertion all the time!
I hear the assertion that Americans are more violent, racist, imperious, etc. than Europeans all the time. That a person speaks does not make him the cultural spokesperson.
She didn't make that assertion -- you did.
She's talking about cultural scripts which she labels American tropes and saying European storytellers and people in general shy away from such things. She is comparing American writers to European ones and claiming that the American ones are changing the European ones, and that American writers are trumpeting domineering values as positive values because that is the American cultural mindset, but not the European mindset. So I'd say that she is making the assertion.
"US people coming to a foreign country and being more talented than the locals at solving their own problems" -- And Europeans write stories where the U.S. folk are the stupid, obnoxious ones either in the U.S. or visiting.
KatG said:
Again, it's not that she's trashing America.
I meant here: "it's not that she's trashing America that I care about," not that she's not trashing America. I don't care that her target in this is America. I'm not defending America. If she targeted Britain instead, I'd make the exact same argument (and have in the past.) It's the lumping and labeling she's doing about aspects of storytelling being characteristic of one culture or another.
No, that's exactly what she's doing. She's trashing America for X, Y, Z, and suggesting that other people do it differently all over the world.
And that's inaccurate.
Her argument is against American media tropes being pushed onto others, basically due to dominance. And more than that, she's actually trashing Europeans for adopting American tropes.
She assigns approaches in storytelling -- approaches that have been used for thousands of years -- as American media tropes. It's inaccurate. It ignores what thousands of American SFFH writers are doing. It asserts that Europeans are not using their own culture in stories she's deeming too American in type.
that the force of America is threatening to replace all the lightbulbs and make them all the same. She doesn't prop any of them up as paragons -- she says on that they are all different and should be.
Invasion of the Other. Classic argument.
You're right -- she doesn't present European violence in her piece, but then again she's not trying to write a comparison between the two cultures' acts of violence.
She is if she's arguing the American cultural light will replace European cultural light. She's claiming a particular type of violence -- white hat seeking a violent solution, mindlessly, remorselessly killing bad guys -- is the favorite of American culture and values, but that Europeans have revoked it. This is again inaccurate. She's comparing the love of violence of the two and this is related to their histories. She specifically compares American serial killers in history to French ones. (But again, I was trying to move it away from history and more on storytelling.)
Your wording was that the Europeans committed genocide in the new world. You "ignored" the involvement of the post-Colonial states by not mentioning it.
You just misread that part of my post, dude. I made no American superiority claims whatsoever. You just assumed. I was addressing her claims of non-American non-love of violence superiority that runs throughout her rant. Divorcing Americans from their European roots is not an argument that works very well, in my opinion.
Her point is that each culture is different -- not opposite. Just different.
Her point is that she doesn't like what she sees as American approaches to storytelling and doesn't want them to become supposedly dominant in other countries' storytelling and wipe out other approaches. She's casting her own definition of American storytelling and then labeling it as different in a negative, please no way. It's a view of cultures as static and limited and is also isolationist.
That's basically my point -- Americans assume they know Americans place in history, when often they've only ever heard the American version of American history. When people from outside point out that the American version of American history isn't precisely accurate about certain things, they typically get labelled as Anti-American.
You're lumping again.
That has not been my impression of America curricula, where, for example, the Texas education board (which produces the vast majority of textbooks for the couuntry) persistently refuses to include Mexican/Latin American historical figures.
That's a simplistic analysis of a very complicated situation. It's a recent and regional development, not a persistent one, an ideological and political battle regarding the extensive curriculum programs that promoted Latin American cultural studies in Western states. Extreme conservatives got themselves on school boards and push for more power with Republicans, demonizing Latinos to galvanize old white conservative voters. The shifting demographics in America leads to attempts to attack them as non-American by a minority percentage of Americans who've been very good at getting into some statehouses, as happens in other countries too.
Unfortunately, though, there are wingnuts like those in Pittsburgh who have decried the IB curriculum as Anti-American precisely because it promotes a broader worldview that considers multiple perspectives.
And you are labeling the wingnuts as the spokespeople for American culture and values. As is our author under discussion.
It has to do with this discussion. Some folks here are adding meanings to her essay that she did not precisely express. I'm attempting to pull the cultural bias out of them, expose that there are two readings -- which is the point of her essay.
I think you're confusing cultural bias with us saying she is not providing an accurate picture of American cultural values. I'd say the same about Europe too.
I understand what Dawnstorm was saying about the uneasiness, which is kind of interesting given American influence in the world is waning. And U.S. entertainment marketing is the remaining super export. But the lightbulb blending part of the rant doesn't work because it's a false picture.
The guy in white vs. the guy in black. A guy in dirty browny-grey vs. another guy in dirty browny-grey.
This is the big inaccuracy. It is akin to the claim that past SFF writers mainly wrote about happy elves and fearless astronauts. It certainly wasn't true for large amounts of the most successful and/or acclaimed works and wishing doesn't make it so. American writers on average love grey. The whole noir literary movement is about grey, and noir is the favorite of readers, writers, and the movies too. Chivalry -- white vs. black -- is a European invention and one European writers have long used. Colonists brought it with them, but they didn't ignore grey.
And here's the thing about browny-grey guys -- they tend to go for violent solutions to problems. The spaghetti westerns were more violent than U.S. ones. The Cartwrights in
Bonanza tried to avoid shooting. Clint Eastwood saved a town by shooting people and dynamite. The Italians were embracing a mythos, in the same way that some American fantasy writers embraced the European mythos of people trying hard to fight against great evil, as presented in the Lord of the Rings. (In which the hobbits are the outsiders who save the day over the local leaders.)
My views of her rant are not how dare she take potshots at America. It's that A) she's worrying about something that's not there; B) she's being unfair to other writers, especially as she focuses on action movies; and C) she doesn't get that she encourages lumping her work in with what she's railing about.
If she ranted about the problem of breaking into the U.S. market for non-U.S. writers, I would totally agree with her, while noting it's improved the last twenty years. If she said non-U.S. authors are feeling pressured at home by increased U.S. imports, I would be interested. But the complaint she's making I find a non-starter.
) they continued to interact with Europe and the issue that gave rise to the World Wars, the rise of Communism, and the Cold War. America is part of the story -- not beside it; or as Americans frequently talk about it, above it.
Seriously?
