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Americanization and Australia. Ed. by Philip Bell and Roger Bell. (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 1998. xii, 282 pp. Paper, $29.95, ISBN 0-86840-784-4.)
In 1993 Philip Bell and Roger Bell sparked considerable discussion in the United States and Australia with the publication of their book, Implicated The United States in Australia. Bell and Bell argued that the United States was "implicated" in Australia through complex historical processes of cultural and political influence. Australians did not passively accept Americanization, Bell and Bell contended, but rather they modified, negotiated, and sometimes resisted United States influence.
Implicated was an early representative of a growing field of Americanization studies that is informed by history, cultural studies, anthropology, and postcolonial theory. Americanization and Australia, an edited collection of essays written by fifteen authors, tends to confirm the findings that Bell and Bell outlined in Implicated. Collectively, the contributors...