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Buffalo Bill in Bologna: The Americanization of the World, 1869-1922 ReviewThis slim volume offers an elegant, useful overview of the scholarship on mass culture in the US. It extends the picture of American mass culture to include forays into Europe and the reception of European audiences and critics.It doesn't offer much in the way of new archival work; it largely relies on the studies by other historians on separate areas of mass culture, from Wild West shows and amusement parks to world's fairs and early cinema. But this is what makes the book particularly useful: it brings this work together in order to think through the larger questions of mass culture as a whole.
Does mass culture ultimately represent a regressive ideological force, one that has united Americans by disseminating an implicitly white nationalist idea of what America is? Or is it a more equivocal force through which consumers have sometimes been able to refashion their own meanings and spaces? The authors examine these questions in a fairly even-handed way, and recognize the arguments on both sides. They don't go into these questions in great depth, however. But there is an extremely helpful bibliographic essay at the end of the book that maps out the major critical arguments, from the early 20th century to the present, and that includes both American thinkers and European intellectuals. I would recommend this essay for anyone wanting to get a quick overview of this scholarly terrain.
My one reservation about this bibliography, however, is that it doesn't give any attention to the important scholarship on mass culture and the public sphere that has been produced in the wake of Habermas's book on the public sphere. There is a whole area of scholarship, from Negt and Kluge's response to Habermas, Miriam Hansen's work on Kracauer, and Michael Warner's work on counter publics, that is vital to thinking through questions of mass culture. The authors of this book have too quickly classified the Frankfurt School as one of "pessimism" about mass culture, but the picture is more complicated than that.
Buffalo Bill in Bologna: The Americanization of the World, 1869-1922 OverviewWhen it comes to the production and distribution of mass culture, no country in modern times has come close to rivaling the success of America. From blue jeans in central Europe to Elvis Presley's face on a Republic of Chad postage stamp, the reach of American mass culture extends into every corner of the globe. Most believe this is a twentieth-century phenomenon, but here Robert W. Rydell and Rob Kroes prove that its roots are far deeper.Buffalo Bill in Bologna reveals that the process of globalizing American mass culture began as early as the mid-nineteenth century. In fact, by the end of World War I, the United States already boasted an advanced network of culture industries that served to promote American values. Rydell and Kroes narrate how the circuses, amusement parks, vaudeville, mail-order catalogs, dime novels, and movies developed after the Civil War—tools central to hastening the reconstruction of the country—actually doubled as agents of American cultural diplomacy abroad. As symbols of America's version of the "good life," cultural products became a primary means for people around the world, especially in Europe, to reimagine both America and themselves in the context of America's growing global sphere of influence. Paying special attention to the role of the world's fairs, the exporting of Buffalo Bill's Wild West show to Europe, the release of The Birth of a Nation, and Woodrow Wilson's creation of the Committee on Public Information, Rydell and Kroes offer an absorbing tour through America's cultural expansion at the turn of the century. Buffalo Bill in Bologna is thus a tour de force that recasts what has been popularly understood about this period of American and global history.
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