| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

Heide Fehrenbach and Uta G. Poiger, editors. Transactions, Transgressions, Transformations: American Culture in Western Europe and Japan. New York: Berghahn Books. 2000. Pp. xl, 258.

During the 1970s and 1980s, scholars and intellectuals—both abroad and in the United States—competed with one another to see who could sound most indignant about America's "cultural imperialism." But in the past few years, a new consensus has emerged among cultural historians, and with it a more neutral language to describe the impact America has had on the world. Now we hear about cultural transfers and transactions, about complexity and "creolization." No longer are foreign audiences regarded as collections of zombies, spellbound by the images and messages transmitted by the American media, having their subconscious colonized by the Yanks. It turns out, according to the revisionist view, that those in other lands are perfectly capable of adapting American culture to their own needs, tastes, and traditions. 1

This is the main argument of this book, whose title itself suggests how complicated and ambiguous are the cultural encounters between Americans and "others." The essays originated at a conference held at Brown University in 1996. But the appearance of this collection coincides with a recent roundtable discussion of "Cultural Transfer or Cultural Imperialism?" (Diplomatic History 24 [Summer 2000]) to which this reviewer contributed, and with the publication of a group of essays with a comparable perspective (Reinhold Wagnleitner and Elaine Tyler May, eds., "Here, There and Everywhere": The Foreign Politics of American Popular Culture [2000]). And, of course, there have been numerous books published during the 1990s that also emphasize the ways that American culture has been modified, rather than merely accepted, by other cultures throughout the world. . . .

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