American culture in the Netherlands

In various ways American culture has permeated Dutch society in the 20th century, especially in the post-World War II era. This volume provides an overview of that process. It focuses on what is presented in some historical accounts as the triumphal procession of a culture thought to be the wave of the future, in an environment eager to try new things and to abandon what was regarded as old or old-fashioned. American Culture in the Netherlands investigates how various manifestations of American culture were diffused, mediated and received in the Netherlands, and which groups took a negative, positive, neutral or ambivalent stance towards these cultural forms, for what reasons and due to what causes. Attempts are made to explore the roots of the rise, prosperity and decline of expressions of American culture in Dutch society. This book includes articles on American influences in leisure, with special emphasis on jazz and pop music; the cultural critique of American movies by leading Dutch intellectuals in the 1920s and 1930s; the American cultural impact on Dutch higher education and literature; images of America as presented and represented in Dutch tourism to the United States, in popular Dutch magazines and comics, and as communicated to the Dutch in the foreign cultural policy programmes of the American government. In brief, this study introduces and explains a great many findings on the complexities of Americanization in a small culture such as that of the Netherlands.