Kirjahaku

The Dutch scholar Rob Kroes argues that American culture is "modular," continually fragmenting, disassembling, and reassembling itself--and in the process creating something new. In a series of topical essays that show why he is one of Europe's leading authorities on American culture, Kroes probes trends in American advertising, the image of the Vietnam war in American films, the implications of American vernacular culture as represented in rap music, and other topics.

At the dawn of the twenty-first century, all of us consider ourselves to be citizens of something-–but of what? Nation-states? Regions? Ethnic groups? Corporations? An accomplished set of meditations by one of Europe's leading Americanists, Them and Us is a rich comparative study of European and American cultural traditions and their influence on conceptions of community. In contrast with the ethnic and nationalist allegiances that historically have splintered Europe, Rob Kroes identifies a complex of cultural practices that have mitigated against ethnically rooted divisions in the United States. He argues that the American approach–-articulated by a national rhetoric emphasizing openness rather than closure, diversity rather than uniformity--has much to offer a Europe where the nationalist and ethnic conflicts that spawned two world wars continue to sow terror and destruction. Kroes discusses European and American attitudes toward the welfare state, the human rights tradition in the United States, and the role of regionalism in shaping conceptions of national identity. He also considers new, transnational forms of cultural membership that are emerging to take the place of nation-based citizenship. He contends that the frame of reference Europeans now use to make sense of their collective situation draws on ingredients provided by the worldwide dissemination of American mass culture. He investigates the way this emerging world culture, under American auspices, affects the way people in their local and national settings structure their sense of the past and conceive of their citizenship. Imagining a new set of cultural relationships that could serve as the basis for global citizenship, Them and Us is an insightful consideration of the types of solidarity that might weave humankind together into a meaningful community.

Soldiers and Students (1975) adopts an original approach to the confrontation of deprived and possessing parties under conditions of scarcity. With reference to the course of conflict, the actions of the competing parties are shown to be interlinked, yet the difference between their strategies are clearly defined. Right-wing radicalism is treated through a study of military intervention in domestic politics; left-wing radicalism through analysis of student radicalism. The case studies are centred on recent Dutch history, but the theoretical perspective underlying the argument is essentially comparative. Thus Dutch military responses to the decolonisation of Indonesia serve to illustrate the strategies of a military apparatus on the brink of politicisation, radicalism among Dutch students in the sixties offers the empirical reference for the analysis of left-wing radicalism.

Soldiers and Students (1975) adopts an original approach to the confrontation of deprived and possessing parties under conditions of scarcity. With reference to the course of conflict, the actions of the competing parties are shown to be interlinked, yet the difference between their strategies are clearly defined. Right-wing radicalism is treated through a study of military intervention in domestic politics; left-wing radicalism through analysis of student radicalism. The case studies are centred on recent Dutch history, but the theoretical perspective underlying the argument is essentially comparative. Thus Dutch military responses to the decolonisation of Indonesia serve to illustrate the strategies of a military apparatus on the brink of politicisation, radicalism among Dutch students in the sixties offers the empirical reference for the analysis of left-wing radicalism.

The study of prisons brought Tocqueville to America. For Rob Kroes, one of Europe's most distinguished authorities on contemporary American culture, it was rather the other way around. For Kroes, it was deep knowledge of American culture that brought him back to America and face to face with a couple of highway signs, Tocquevillian in their portent, that invited motorists to exit from Interstate 80 in Nevada toward a place called Independence Valley and to keep their eyes open for a "Prison Area." In this collection of essays, Kroes invites us to take these two signs seriously for their capacity to deepen our insights into America's cultural contradictions, especially how, after the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, the US government's response altered the meaning of America for Americans and Europeans alike. The author's fascination with the myriad ways in which America changes face, from hard power to soft, from uses of force to the power of entertainment, but always holding the attention of publics across the globe, is what ties his work together. The essays here touch on diverse topics such as photography ("Falling Man" and Holocaust imagery), music (in Broadway and Hollywood musicals), film (Django Unchained), American exceptionalism (in an interesting counter to dog-eared dogma), and the difficulties of the first "white president of color." Like his predecessors, Tocqueville and Johan Huizinga, Kroes offers a clear-eyed assessment of America on the ground, love it or hate it. This readable and sharp-penned critique of America and American culture and power will appeal to Americanists across a broad swath of disciplines.