CULTURAL IMPERIALISM: A Journey to Disaster
BY AYSHA KHAN
“The world has literally become a Mickey Mouse operation…the
US reigns supreme as an exporter of music, film, television, sports, food, and
hundreds of consumer products.” –author and travel writer William Ecenbarger.
According to statistics taken in 1995, 80% of the movie
receipts around the world were from American movies. American software,
television, and music are so dominant and so sought after, that you will find
them readily available anywhere in
the world. The global trends witnessed a massive turnover after the Cold War
where the world is now being led by the US. American
Imperialism has taken the world by storm. The US has been influencing the
lives and aspirations of virtually every nation. Pakistan, too, is one of those
countries where everything Western is the ‘new cool’. Teenagers look up to Western celebrities;
they prefer Western food chains, authors, songs and movies over their own.
McDonalds, Dominoes, Linkin Park, Beyonce – what do all of these
have in common? They are all aspects of American culture – proudly adopted by
our teenagers in an attempt to fit in – not remotely linked to who we are as
Muslims or Pakistanis, yet a constant part of our routines.
A tiny portion of our youth might have read Umera Ahmed or
Nemrah Ahmed, but a significant fraction of them desperately count down the
days to the release of the new Paulo Coelho novel. Our course books constantly
tell us about the various discoveries of Newton, Boyle or Edison, but what they
fail to tell us is that it was great minds like Jabir bin Hayan, Ibne Sina and
Al Biruni who provided these Western scientists the base upon which they made
those discoveries.
This is not an era of conventional warfare; it is an era of
the war of narratives. Today, the strength of a state’s cultures and traditions
are an important determinant in understanding the degree of its independence.
No matter how repeatedly this may be said, the importance of the fact that the
youth of any country is imperative in
shaping its future, cannot be overstated. It is indeed important for cultures
to dwell in mutual peace and understanding, but a nation, especially its youth,
completely adopting a foreign culture, while forgetting its own, is only going
to lead to disarray and confusion, resulting in an eventual identity crisis. We
need to realize this before we go any further on this journey to disaster and
lose, as Pakistanis, the distinctness of our identities to this evil of
cultural imperialism.
