Weird how it never struck me until seeing those Canada tweets I just RTed just how strikingly centralized the American cultural imagination is. Even within the majority White+Christian, “All-American” seems to pick out a single archetype (small town football star?) not a spread
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It’s particularly surprising because I grew up in a country that was (at the time) strongly shaped by an actual, rather than theoretical spirit of e pluribus unum. This sort of cheesy essentialist imagery was common in ‘national integration’ public service messaging.
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You can see troubling signs in India now of a shift from a more spectrum-like sense of national identity like Canada to a more US-like centralizing one.
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Humans reduce a problem to a level that is easy to understand. A single identity is always an easily digestible model than one of pluralism which seems like a amalgamation of many.
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I don’t think that’s true. People easily keep track of vast pluralist fictional universes like lord of the rings :)
The key is to live a story together
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American mass culture is centralized in Hollywood and New York, which makes reliance on stereotypes and stories placed "nowhere" (generic suburbia, generic city) almost inevitable. Reality, though, is very, very different.




