Cultural imperialism

Cultural imperialism (also cultural colonialism) is the imposition by a dominant group of its own culture onto another community. As a mode of imperialism, it uses cultural practices to enforce a way of life, systematically attempting to transform or erase aspects of the subordinate culture. Cultural imperialism endeavours to create and maintain unequal social and economic relationships among social groups. Imperialists may use wealth, media power, and violence to establish cultural hegemony. Cultural imperialism may take various forms, such as an attitude, a formal policy, or military action—insofar as each of these reinforces the empire's cultural hegemony. Research on the topic occurs in scholarly disciplines, and is especially prevalent in communication and media studies, education, foreign policy, history, international relations, linguistics, literature, post-colonialism, science, sociology, social theory, environmentalism, and sports.

Cultural imperialism may be distinguished from the natural process of cultural diffusion. The spread of culture around the world is referred to as cultural globalization.

Background and definitions

Although the Oxford English Dictionary has a 1921 reference to the "cultural imperialism of the Russians", John Tomlinson, in his book on the subject, writes that the term emerged in the 1960s and has been a focus of research since at least the 1970s. Terms such as "media imperialism", "structural imperialism", "cultural dependency and domination", "cultural synchronization", "electronic colonialism", "ideological imperialism", and "economic imperialism" have all been used to describe the same basic notion of cultural imperialism.