Special Relations: The Americanization of Britain?

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Stanford University Press, Feb 18, 2011 - History - 392 pages

Special Relations reevaluates Anglo-American cultural exchange by exploring metropolitan London's culture and counterculture from the 1950s to the 1970s. It challenges a tendency in cultural studies to privilege local reception and attempts to restore the concept of Americanization in this critical era of mass tourism, professional exchange, and media globalization—while acknowledging an important degree of cultural hybridity and circularity. The study begins with the influence of American modernism in the built environment and in "Swinging London" generally, and then moves to its central project, the re-exploration of British counterculture—the anti-war movement, student rebellion, hippies, popular music, the alternative press, and the late Sixties triad of black, feminist, and gay liberationisms—as intimately tied to American experience and to American agents of cultural change. Special Relations retrieves these phenomena as more central and enduring in British metropolitan life than the current orthodoxy allows, and subjects to sharp critical scrutiny prevalent assertions of cultural "authenticity" in their British variants. Finally, the book looks at aspects of the turn against modernism and the counterculture in the 1970s.

 

Contents

Trafalgar Square 1920 July
Introduction
MAYFAIR MODERN
Postwar Construction the Promise of Modernism
The Embassy and the Crowd
Saarinens Eagle Protest 17 March 1968
Vietnam War and Transatlantic Alternative Theater
The Tidal Wave of Student Revolution
FREEDOM
The American Civil Rights Movement in London
The American Face of Womens Liberation
AngloAmerican Gay Liberation
POSTMODERN ANTIMODERN
British Heritage and the Transatlantic Marketplace
Mecklenburgh Square
HistoryAmericans Liberation? British Heritage

THE COUNTERCULTURE
Wholly Communion at the Royal Albert Hall
CircularityThe Counterculture and the Media
California Dreamin
To the BicentennialJubilee
Notes
Index
Copyright

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About the author (2011)

H. L. Malchow is Walter S. Dickson Professor of English and American History at Tufts University.

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