Book contents
- The Cambridge History of America and the World
- The Cambridge History of America and the World
- The Cambridge History of America and the World
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Maps
- Contributors to Volume IV
- General Introduction: What is America and the World?
- Introduction to Volume IV
- Part I Ordering a World of States
- Part II Challenging a World of States
- 10 US Foreign Policy and the End of Development
- 11 Oil and American Insecurity
- 12 US Mass Culture and Consumption in a Global Context
- 13 Imperial Visions of the World
- 14 Human Rights
- 15 Compassion and Humanitarianism in International Relations
- 16 Third World Internationalism and the Global Color Line
- 17 The Queering of US Geopolitics
- 18 Migration, War, and the Transformation of the US Population
- 19 Christian and Muslim Transnational Networks
- 20 Native Americans, Indigeneity, and US Foreign Policy
- 21 Environment, Climate, and Global Disorder
- 22 Détente and the Reconfiguration of Superpower Relations
- Part III New World Disorder?
- Index
13 - Imperial Visions of the World
from Part II - Challenging a World of States
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 November 2021
- The Cambridge History of America and the World
- The Cambridge History of America and the World
- The Cambridge History of America and the World
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Maps
- Contributors to Volume IV
- General Introduction: What is America and the World?
- Introduction to Volume IV
- Part I Ordering a World of States
- Part II Challenging a World of States
- 10 US Foreign Policy and the End of Development
- 11 Oil and American Insecurity
- 12 US Mass Culture and Consumption in a Global Context
- 13 Imperial Visions of the World
- 14 Human Rights
- 15 Compassion and Humanitarianism in International Relations
- 16 Third World Internationalism and the Global Color Line
- 17 The Queering of US Geopolitics
- 18 Migration, War, and the Transformation of the US Population
- 19 Christian and Muslim Transnational Networks
- 20 Native Americans, Indigeneity, and US Foreign Policy
- 21 Environment, Climate, and Global Disorder
- 22 Détente and the Reconfiguration of Superpower Relations
- Part III New World Disorder?
- Index
Summary
Imperial visions of the world in US culture from 1945 to the present follow an arc moving from a robust and confident empire that insisted that it was not an empire, but the legitimate leader of the free world, to visions of a troubled empire, dark, morally ambiguous, and embattled from without and within. Exploring popular culture as a critical space of meaning making, fundamental to understanding how Americans imaged themselves in the world, this chapter charts an uneven zig-zag in dominant American constructions of empire. It begins with archetypical cultural expressions of the US relation to the non-American world in the 1950s that celebrated a robust “American Century.” Moving forward, with domestic and global challenges to US racism and the American war in Vietnam, ideas of American innocence and images of US as a benevolent force for good in the world began to unravel. With the exceptionalist narrative in disarray by the mid-1970s, far more critical and/or ambivalent renderings of the role of the US in the world emerged.
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- The Cambridge History of America and the World , pp. 304 - 327Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2022