"Fabricating the Absolute Fake: America in Contemporary Pop Culture": A book talk with Jaap Kooijman
Jaap Kooijman is Associate Professor in Media & Culture and American Studies at the University of Amsterdam and, in the spring of 2009, is a visiting professor in the department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota.
American pop culture - Hollywood cinema, television, pop music - dominates the rest of the world through its hegemonic presence. Does that make everyone a hybridized American, or do these elements find mediation within the other cultures that consume them? Fabricating the Absolute Fake applies concepts of postmodern theory - Baudrillard's hyperreality and Eco's "absolute fake," among others - to this globally mediated American pop culture in order to examine both the phenomenon itself and its appropriation in the Netherlands, as evidenced by such diverse cultural icons as the Elvis-inspired crooner Lee Towers, the Moroccan-Dutch rapper Ali B, musical tributes to an assassinated politician, and the Dutch reality soap opera scene.
Question and Answer