This is maybe a bit tangential, and I might’ve mentioned this before, but honestly I kinda miss being a little kid and telling my schoolyard friends that “when I was in America, I got to drink root beer” — and they’d be like, “wow, Americans are so weird and wild, letting children drink beer!”, before I’d reveal that root beer is actually a soft drink, and then we’d have a good laugh. Indeed, back in those days it felt like being an American gave me some sort of esoteric insider knowledge that my peers weren’t privy to — I even remember translating English-language place names in the United States into Norwegian for the sake of my peers who couldn’t yet understand English, not realizing that the English-language names I’d learned were originally translations of names in now-endangered Indigenous languages.
And I have memories of going to “American” stores like the one in this picture. I think that even when I was a kid, I had mixed feelings about them. How on the one hand it felt like it affirmed that feeling of having esoteric insider knowledge, to go to these cramped stores that clearly didn’t see much traffic and were sort of out of the way, and being presented with all of these names and labels unfamiliar to my peers… But on the other hand, so much of the American stores felt “plastic” for lack of a better term. I wouldn’t have been able to tell you what exactly I wanted “American” to mean to me, but, like, Lucky Charms and Reese’s Puffs was certainly not it — stuff like that was just corporations preying on the health of children, right? It was a tasty treat, maybe, but there was nothing special or good about it. Whenever I was in the occupation zone I’d honestly look at my relatives and I’d think, “You people actually eat this poison outside of summertime?”
In any case, nowadays with globalization and cultural imperialism and social media and online streaming and online shopping etc, there’s just fewer uniquely American things. I can’t speak for the exact extent, since I would’ve noticed cultural imperialism less as a child, but it feels like even in the course of my fairly short life that the presence of Usonian shit in Norway has grown exponentially compared to when I was a kid. Nowadays there’s even Dollar Stores in Norway, literally called Dollar Store, in English, despite the fact that Norway doesn’t even use dollars as its currency.
Peculiarly, though, to my knowledge root beer still remains unpopular and comparatively difficult to get in Norway, and root beer is also incidentally one of the few* things that one could genuinely call “American culture” — as in, root beer isn’t a product of cultural appropriation, nor a part of the Anglo puritan core of whiteness, nor a product of consumerism for lack of a better term. Like, we literally do not know who wrote the first root beer recipe, all we know is that by the 1830s, recipes for root beer were being written down and passed around.
*I am being a bit hyperbolic, but I really do wonder how much “American culture” would be left if we got rid of everything that was stolen, puritan, patented or copyrighted, or invented to make a quick buck — or perhaps there are better criteria for separating the wheat from the chaff.
There’d still be a ton of culture, but pretty much all the good stuff came from non-white people. Like the many genres of music pioneered by black people (country, rock & roll, blues, disco, rap, etc) or all the food from immigrants (texmex, Italian food, Chinese food as westerners know it)
Most of those things would not fit the criteria, though, not as far as I know their histories (which isn’t super well tbf)
Like, there’s a reason why people would mention Texmex, Italian-American, and Chinese-American cuisine, but would in all likelihood never even think to mention Ethiopian cuisine, despite the fact that there are plenty of Ethio restaurants throughout the United States. And that is because “American culture” implies general usage throughout American society, implies lowest common denominator, implies appealing to the tastes of mayos. And when the originators were non-white, this generally means that some form of cultural appropriation or at the very least profit-driven modification was at play, and then wrt things like music there’s also all the IP stuff to boot. So that’s between one and three criteria violated.
Now I’m sure if you look hard enough you’ll be able to find some bit of American culture that originated among non-white people, and passed into general usage among all Americans without anything to do with IP nor profit-driven modifications, and where this cultural exchange was favorable for everyone involved. But when the shaping of “American culture” is so clearly defined by an unequal relationship between different groups, I’d have to think that examples of such exchanges would be vanishingly few.
I think the only “American” things are the foodways of displaced populations from different parts of the world colliding with each other in climates that required their palette of ingredients to shift and reconfigure.
it’s a somewhat recent area of scholarship, mostly because it appreciates how domestic workers and farmworking families at the margins were the ones who lead the way in experimentation and intergenerational knowledge transfer of traditional food wisdom. notably, not elite chefs or wealthy patrons demanding “authentic” experiences from whatever old world they imagine is most fashionable to consume in that day.
most of mass produced / industrial foods were inspired by these innovations, but they are pale shadows of the real thing. it is the stubborn and multigenerational households of multi-ethnic influence that are still finding new permutations, combining Grandma’s recipes with different vegetables that come from the nearby ethnic market nobody is connected to by descent. the East Asian family who makes Mediterranean influenced food, the West African guy who puts fried okra in burritos. the Indian grocery store that has more colors of lentils than there are in a rainbow alongside the spice aisle of the gods right in the middle of the historically Mexican neighborhood. just people getting weird where everything collides.
it’s happening everywhere as peoples are displaced and dislocated and resisting the pressure to eat the shelf stable poison that comes in the box.
I had written like three paragraphs of sincere response to this, too, but it’s best to be brief so I’ll summarize:
I feel like “American culture” has the potential to become undeserving of scare quotes once it exists outside of the context of occupation and imperialism. I’ve been writing future fiction about one way that this might happen, based on my own experiences and understanding of theory.
I feel like the USA actively makes my life as the child of a former settler kinda fucky, because settler-colonialism needs not only to attract new settlers, but also needs to prevent old settlers from fully escaping the paradigm. I’m “caught in the middle” so I get to experience this weird tension.
I frankly cannot find any theory about the position of children of former Usonian settlers, nor any language with which to talk about my position. I guess this is because people like me are not yet very numerous, and seemingly not yet considered an object worthy of study.
This is maybe a bit tangential, and I might’ve mentioned this before, but honestly I kinda miss being a little kid and telling my schoolyard friends that “when I was in America, I got to drink root beer” — and they’d be like, “wow, Americans are so weird and wild, letting children drink beer!”, before I’d reveal that root beer is actually a soft drink, and then we’d have a good laugh. Indeed, back in those days it felt like being an American gave me some sort of esoteric insider knowledge that my peers weren’t privy to — I even remember translating English-language place names in the United States into Norwegian for the sake of my peers who couldn’t yet understand English, not realizing that the English-language names I’d learned were originally translations of names in now-endangered Indigenous languages.
And I have memories of going to “American” stores like the one in this picture. I think that even when I was a kid, I had mixed feelings about them. How on the one hand it felt like it affirmed that feeling of having esoteric insider knowledge, to go to these cramped stores that clearly didn’t see much traffic and were sort of out of the way, and being presented with all of these names and labels unfamiliar to my peers… But on the other hand, so much of the American stores felt “plastic” for lack of a better term. I wouldn’t have been able to tell you what exactly I wanted “American” to mean to me, but, like, Lucky Charms and Reese’s Puffs was certainly not it — stuff like that was just corporations preying on the health of children, right? It was a tasty treat, maybe, but there was nothing special or good about it. Whenever I was in the occupation zone I’d honestly look at my relatives and I’d think, “You people actually eat this poison outside of summertime?”
In any case, nowadays with globalization and cultural imperialism and social media and online streaming and online shopping etc, there’s just fewer uniquely American things. I can’t speak for the exact extent, since I would’ve noticed cultural imperialism less as a child, but it feels like even in the course of my fairly short life that the presence of Usonian shit in Norway has grown exponentially compared to when I was a kid. Nowadays there’s even Dollar Stores in Norway, literally called Dollar Store, in English, despite the fact that Norway doesn’t even use dollars as its currency.
Peculiarly, though, to my knowledge root beer still remains unpopular and comparatively difficult to get in Norway, and root beer is also incidentally one of the few* things that one could genuinely call “American culture” — as in, root beer isn’t a product of cultural appropriation, nor a part of the Anglo puritan core of whiteness, nor a product of consumerism for lack of a better term. Like, we literally do not know who wrote the first root beer recipe, all we know is that by the 1830s, recipes for root beer were being written down and passed around.
*I am being a bit hyperbolic, but I really do wonder how much “American culture” would be left if we got rid of everything that was stolen, puritan, patented or copyrighted, or invented to make a quick buck — or perhaps there are better criteria for separating the wheat from the chaff.
There’d still be a ton of culture, but pretty much all the good stuff came from non-white people. Like the many genres of music pioneered by black people (country, rock & roll, blues, disco, rap, etc) or all the food from immigrants (texmex, Italian food, Chinese food as westerners know it)
Most of those things would not fit the criteria, though, not as far as I know their histories (which isn’t super well tbf)
Like, there’s a reason why people would mention Texmex, Italian-American, and Chinese-American cuisine, but would in all likelihood never even think to mention Ethiopian cuisine, despite the fact that there are plenty of Ethio restaurants throughout the United States. And that is because “American culture” implies general usage throughout American society, implies lowest common denominator, implies appealing to the tastes of mayos. And when the originators were non-white, this generally means that some form of cultural appropriation or at the very least profit-driven modification was at play, and then wrt things like music there’s also all the IP stuff to boot. So that’s between one and three criteria violated.
Now I’m sure if you look hard enough you’ll be able to find some bit of American culture that originated among non-white people, and passed into general usage among all Americans without anything to do with IP nor profit-driven modifications, and where this cultural exchange was favorable for everyone involved. But when the shaping of “American culture” is so clearly defined by an unequal relationship between different groups, I’d have to think that examples of such exchanges would be vanishingly few.
I feel like Americans are weird for not letting children drink beer
I think the only “American” things are the foodways of displaced populations from different parts of the world colliding with each other in climates that required their palette of ingredients to shift and reconfigure.
it’s a somewhat recent area of scholarship, mostly because it appreciates how domestic workers and farmworking families at the margins were the ones who lead the way in experimentation and intergenerational knowledge transfer of traditional food wisdom. notably, not elite chefs or wealthy patrons demanding “authentic” experiences from whatever old world they imagine is most fashionable to consume in that day.
most of mass produced / industrial foods were inspired by these innovations, but they are pale shadows of the real thing. it is the stubborn and multigenerational households of multi-ethnic influence that are still finding new permutations, combining Grandma’s recipes with different vegetables that come from the nearby ethnic market nobody is connected to by descent. the East Asian family who makes Mediterranean influenced food, the West African guy who puts fried okra in burritos. the Indian grocery store that has more colors of lentils than there are in a rainbow alongside the spice aisle of the gods right in the middle of the historically Mexican neighborhood. just people getting weird where everything collides.
it’s happening everywhere as peoples are displaced and dislocated and resisting the pressure to eat the shelf stable poison that comes in the box.
When you’re a settler colony with no actual history to fall back on like China, your culture just involves stealing
There’s nothing redeemable about Amerika lmao
Well, except root beer. :P
I had written like three paragraphs of sincere response to this, too, but it’s best to be brief so I’ll summarize: