The global struggle to push back against American cultural dominance

This week, in the wake of looming U.S. tariff threats and talk of making Canada the 51st state, Commotion has been having conversations about how culture can be used as a form of resistance and power.

Today on the show, culture critics Matt Amha, Michelle Cho and Louise Bruton join host Elamin Abdelmahmoud to look at examples of how other countries have not only resisted American cultural influences, but also become cultural powerhouses in their own rights.

We've included some highlights below, edited for length and clarity. For the full discussion, listen and follow Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud on your favourite podcast player.

Elamin: That's really what this conversation is about, Matt: it's about the idea of, if you exist in a place and you care about your stories, as we do right here in Canada, then you are looking at a gigantic global production powerhouse that is constantly flooding the zone, constantly introducing more of its stories, then gradually you kind of forget to tell your own…. It can sort of replace the stories that you're trying to tell in that specific place.

Matt: Yeah, definitely.… I think we have established here that the American cultural footprint is ubiquitous. It is almost impossible to completely detach yourself from U.S. cultural products…. I'll be in a rural village in Ethiopia, and I will see Tupac Shakur's face or I'll hear Michael Jackson's music, you know? That is soft power. And I think what America has done well — I say "well" maybe cynically — is they've always acknowledged that culture is an expression of power….

I also think in the African context, I think about Creole, for example, where you have a colonial language — French, Portuguese, English — that is blended with an Indigenous African language, and that is made incoherent to the outsider. That is an act of subversion. I think about all the African cultural workers for whom resisting imperialism has meant essentially rendering your works non-understandable, so it's unintelligible to outside eyes and ears — thus protecting it.

Elamin: You can only talk to your people.

Matt: Exactly, yes. So in some way you're limiting your commercial output or your commercial appeal, but you're protecting the thing that you care about most. African people will recognize Pan-Africanism, they will recognize Négritude, both of which are social movements in both Anglo- and Francophone-Africa that were created as a bulwark against the West. These are also acts of subversion. So it's like, for as long as these cultural impositions have existed, African people have been resisting them in a lot of ways.

Elamin: It's one thing for it to be in conversation with. It's another thing for it to be sort of representative of, or at least like doing the bidding of, America. I think that's what I want to distinguish between here, is that it makes sense to be regularly in conversation with one of the overarching structural cultural powers in the world…. I think Canada has a pretty rich history actually of making a lot of culture that is in conversation with that. But the idea of just making things that resemble what America makes, that's the stuff I'm more wary of. Michelle, I want to come to you on this because I do think that the gigantic global influence of K-Pop and K-dramas matters a little bit that it resembles the way that the U.S. spread its influence…. What does the global popularity of K-Pop and K-dramas tell you right now?

Michelle: Yeah…. I think audiences really matter. It's one thing to circulate your culture by trying to reproduce a cultural form that you know is already popular. But you also have to think about what audience you're kind of aiming to reach, or what kind of community crops up around the cultural products that you're circulating. And so in the case of K-Pop and K-drama, it's really interesting because it's not necessarily just a national, South Korean audience. That's not the aim of the industry. So what it's kind of produced, really interestingly, is a global network of really hard-core fans who connect with each other — often younger people, young women especially, queer people, people who are in a lot of ways minoritized — who are then drawn to a form of culture that's also not dominant in the space that they're in. And so that's been super interesting to see.

Soft power is kind of a complicated concept for me because I find that sometimes it doesn't really work outside of the U.S. case. The concept is coined by a political scientist to explain how the United States has this whole arsenal: it has hard power, which is military and economic, and soft power, which basically softens the hard power, makes those folks out in the world that are being affected by the United States more receptive…. South Korea's cultural products are making people more aware that South Korea exists and what its geopolitical status might be, but I don't know how that soft power actually translates into hard power in any way … because ultimately, South Korea's still basically a U.S. protectorate, in a lot of ways. It's still vulnerable to attack from North Korea, or the influence of China in that region. And it's very vulnerable to economic warfare, if Trump decides to go that way…. So it's very similar to Canada in a sense, because it's been a longtime partner of the United States, and now all of a sudden it's like, we can suddenly become targets of the U.S. hard power. So, it kind of raises that question: what is soft power, then?

You can listen to the full discussion from today's show on CBC Listen or on our podcast, Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud, available wherever you get your podcasts.

Panel produced by Jess Low.