Special Relations: The Americanization of Britain?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. |
Other editions - View all
Common terms and phrases
academic activist Alistair Cooke American American black Anglo-American antiques antiwar architectural Atlantic audience Black Power Britain broadcast Carmichael City commercial counterculture David decade domestic early seventies embassy English especially event Farren feminism Festival fifties film Gay Liberation Grosvenor Square Hall heritage Hilton hippy History homosexual influence issue John late sixties Left Review lesbian liberationism Listener living London House Malcolm March Michael Mick Farren militant Miss World modern movement nostalgia offered organized Park Penguin Peter play political Pop art popular culture postwar protest psychedelic R. D. Laing race radical feminism Radio revolution rhetoric Richard rock Rowbotham scene sexual social society Street student rebellion style Swinging London Tariq Ali television theater tion tourists traditional transatlantic Underground press United University urban venues Vietnam violence West Indian Wimbledon women Women's Liberation York young youth