Friday, December 16, 2011
December 16, 2011: Cross-Culture 5: Not to Mention…
[To follow up and complement last week’s posts on how our understanding of historical periods and communities looks very different through a cross-cultural lens, this week I’ll focus on five seminal moments in American popular culture for which the same is true. This is the fifth in that series.]
A few more quick hits on dominant American cultural icons that also happen to be thoroughly cross-cultural:
1) We probably wouldn’t have a Constitution at all, and it and all the other founding documents definitely wouldn’t exist in their current form, without the French;
2) The Transcendentalist movement, long defined as the first genuinely American philosophy, was centrally influenced by Eastern (or at least Orientalist) thought and spiritually;
3) Some of the most innovative and important 20th century American artists, including Jackson Pollock, Jasper Johns, and Roy Lichtenstein, were directly inspired—not only overall, but in the creation of many of their individual works—by their obsession with Pablo Picasso;
4) The only apples that were native to the Americas were crabapples, so the first English settlers brought their own apples; while apple pie’s immigrant status might indeed make it “as American as” anything in this nation, it’s pumpkin pie that more uniquely originated here;
5) THIS SPACE FOR RENT: What part of American popular culture has cross-cultural origins or influences or identities that you think we should better appreciate?
More this weekend,
PS. See #5 above!