ABSTRACT
Popular culture has been “global” for a long time. In the broad and sometimes contradictory range of issues covered by the term “globalization,” few are as visible and pervasive in the daily lives of people around the world as popular culture. While one adolescent in South Africa wears an Eric Cartman t-shirt, another in the U.S. watches hours of the Japanese anime series, Gurren Lagen. While the phrase “Rambo politics” has become a pejorative term in political discourse from France to Ireland to Canada, protests take place from Greece to India to South Korea over a Hollywood film such as The Da Vinci Code. I’ve discussed World of Warcraft with students in Beijing and browsed video shops in Beirut stocked with films produced from the U.S. to Europe to Lebanon. And, when I recently checked into a hotel in Indiana, I found, in addition to the U.S. television channels, four channels of Bollywood movies and South Asian news and sports, and two channels of Spanish-language programming. It is almost impossible to open one’s eyes without encountering examples of globally circulating popular culture.
