Fredric Jameson Quotes

I presume that nobody will deny the positive aspects of the North American cultural world. These are well known to all. But these aspects do not make one forget the disastrous effects of the industrial and commercial process of 'cultural lamination' that the USA is perpetrating on the planet.

The French view globalization as synonymous with Americanization, the cultural imperialism that has filled France with bad food, bad films, and English words.

The standardization of world culture, with local popular or traditional forms driven out or dumbed down to make way for American television, American music, food, clothes and films, has been seen by many as the very heart of globalization.

The problem in Hollywood is that they try to become the only kind of cinema in the world, okay? The imposition everywhere of a unique culture, which is Hollywood culture, and a unique way of life, which is the American way of life.

So ubiquitous is Western influence that most of the time it is no longer seen as an alien element intruding into non-Western societies. It is an influence that has become integrated into the mind and body, the heart and soul of the non-Western human being. Western dominance, in other words, has become normal, it has become natural. By making it so natural and so normal to be 'Western', the centres of power in the West have achieved their ultimate triumph.

The opponents of this process have always tried to vilify westernization as a poor imitation.

I'm of course disillusioned with what has happened to World cinema. Now cinemas in both Eastern and Western Europe are filled with the same blockbusters from Hollywood.

Suddenly, the screens were dominated by American entertainment to the extent of something like 95 percent. As a result, audiences turned away from the kinds of films that we used to make.

Countries have lost their culture because what they wanted was money. Money became the running theme in every country and culture was sacrificed.

The tourist transports his own values and demands to his destinations and implants them like an infectious disease, decimating whatever values existed before.

We cannot sit in the West and prescribe for peoples in the East, whose societies and ways of life are being destabilized by Western and imperialistic religious, economic and technological initiatives -- without having walked in their shoes

Often, these downplay the power of cultural imperialism - in that sense, playing the game of US interests - by reassuring us that the global success of American mass culture is not as bad as all that.

The domination of western values, beliefs and way of life has angered many from the east and in developing countries.

Through my youth, there was imposed on us a culture relentlessly English. English books were all you could buy; English television filled our screens, and in consequence, England seemed to matter in a way that our world didn't.

The loss of national identity is the greatest defeat a nation can know, and it is inevitable under the contemporary form of colonization.

Things are so much global and Americanised.

A monoculture is not only Hollywood, but Americans trying to export democracy.

Unlike more traditional conquerors, we are not content merely to subdue others: We insist that they be like us.

Take up the white man's burden — Send forth the best ye breed — Go bind your sons to exile To serve your captives' need.

Europe, mourning the loss of its century-old supremacy, either resorts to insulation (by quotas and “cultural exception” clauses) or seeks solace in the disparagement of American culture as vulgar, inauthentic, or stolen.

Societies, which were separated earlier by distances and borders and therefore predominantly homogeneous, now come in touch easily and become multicultural. This process, however, has been accompanied by attempts to establish the dominion of the rich elite over the rest of the people and of some cultures and world views over others, which is especially intolerable in the religious field

It is control and domination over information, ideas and knowledge that has enabled the centres of power in the West to shape the world in its own image. More than information and ideas, the West has also succeeded in molding some of our most fundamental values through a whole variety of avenues ranging from comics and cartoons to films and music. The attitudes of significant strata of non-Western societies towards attire and architecture, fashion and food, life and leisure have been determined to a large extent by values transferred from the West. Indeed, it has reached a point where even our thinking on certain aspects of male-female relations, on the position of the woman, on the upbringing of the child, on the family, and on the community are now being conditioned by Western values and worldviews …. Long before Western values and ideas on these aspects of life began to penetrate our societies, we had already structured law, administration, government and the economy on Western models.

The US became arrogant because of what it owns of weapons and technology. For that, it handles the world as it pleases, and changes the ideologies of people, their habits and ethics in order to spread Western culture at the expense of Islam.

The things and ways the West took to the rest have become the ways of the world.

We should be obliged to admit that Europe is Americanizing herself with disconcerting rapidity.