From Yeah to Yo! our language bears traces of American influence. We can do little to escape the experience of America through many media: TV, pop music, youth culture, Hollywood, fast food. How do these traces and images affect us? Do we internalize them, want to be American? Do we (can we?) resist them, see America as still at cultural Cold War? Is our desire for them a symptom of European pop culture's crisis? From blackface minstrelsy, rap music and fiction to McDonald's, rock festivals and Star Trek, the cultural conception of America is critically unpacked by contributors from Europe, Israel and the USA. George McKay rounds off the picture by offering a comprehensive introduction that explains theoretical approaches to Americanization from the thesis of Yankee cultural imperialism to America as site of liberation or fantasy.

George McKay is Professor of Media Studies at the University of East Anglia, UK, and an AHRC Leadership Fellow for the Connected Communities programme (2012-15). He was a researcher on the HERA/EUFP7 project Rhythm Changes: Jazz Cultures and European Identities (2011-13). Among his books are Shakin’ All Over: Popular Music and Disability (University of Michigan Press, 2103), Radical Gardening: Politics, Idealism and Rebellion in the Garden (Frances Lincoln, 2011), Circular Breathing: The Cultural Politics of Jazz in Britain (Duke University Press, 2005), Community Music: A Handbook (joint ed. with Pete Moser, Russell House, 2004), Glastonbury: A Very English Fair (Gollancz, 2000), DiY Culture: Party & Protest in Nineties Britain (ed., Verso, 1998), and Senseless Acts of Beauty: Cultures of Resistance since the Sixties (Verso, 1996). He has been Professor in Residence at EFG London Jazz Festival (2014) and Kendal Calling (2011). His website is http://georgemckay.org.