Culture, Media and Identity since 1900

Culture is evidence

Songs, films, novels, paintings, fashion and sport are not just entertainment. They are evidence of how people saw themselves and their world, and they can change that world. Expectation E3.4 asks you to analyse the significance of key cultural trends since 1900 in music, film, fashion, literature and art, and the effects of censorship and repression. Since 1900, technology (E1.2) has carried culture across the planet faster than ever.

New media, new audiences

• Film: silent films became a global art form; sound films arrived in 1927. Hollywood dominated world markets, but other great film cultures grew: Soviet directors such as Sergei Eisenstein (Battleship Potemkin, 1925); Japan's Akira Kurosawa (Rashomon, 1950); India's Hindi film industry (often called Bollywood), which produces more films than almost any other; and Nigeria's video-film industry (Nollywood) from the 1990s.
• Radio and television brought news, music and propaganda into homes. In 1967, Our World was the first live international satellite TV broadcast; the Beatles performed "All You Need Is Love" for it.
• The internet and streaming let people everywhere create and share culture directly, and let artists from Seoul to Lagos reach global audiences.

Music that crossed borders

• Jazz grew from African American communities, especially in New Orleans, early in the century, and spread worldwide. The 1920s were nicknamed the "Jazz Age".
• Rock and roll (1950s) mixed rhythm and blues, gospel and country. It became a symbol of youth culture and rebellion, from Liverpool to behind the Iron Curtain, where Western records were often banned or hard to find.
• Reggae from Jamaica, with Bob Marley, spread messages of resistance and Rastafari faith. Afrobeat, pioneered by Nigeria's Fela Kuti, mixed jazz, funk and West African music with sharp criticism of military rule.
• Latin American nueva canción ("new song") carried social protest; the Chilean singer Víctor Jara was killed after the 1973 coup.
• Hip hop began at block parties in the Bronx, New York, in the 1970s; DJ Kool Herc, who grew up in Jamaica, is often credited with starting it in 1973. It became a global form for young people to tell their own stories.
• K-pop and Korean film and TV (the "Korean Wave") show that cultural influence now flows in many directions, not only from the West.

Art, literature and identity

• Modernism: artists broke with realistic traditions. Pablo Picasso helped invent Cubism; his painting Guernica (1937) protested the bombing of the Basque town during the Spanish Civil War.
• Mexican muralism: after the revolution, artists such as Diego Rivera painted huge public murals celebrating Indigenous heritage, workers and revolution. Frida Kahlo's paintings explored identity, pain and Mexican culture.
• Literature of decolonization: Rabindranath Tagore of India became the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature (1913). The Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart (1958) told the story of colonization from an Igbo perspective. Colombia's Gabriel García Márquez (One Hundred Years of Solitude, 1967) brought magical realism to world readers.
• Fashion as identity: 1920s "flappers" with short hair and short skirts shocked their elders; the miniskirt and jeans became symbols of 1960s youth; Mao suits signalled loyalty in Communist China; in many newly independent African states, leaders wore clothing that expressed national and Pan-African identity.
• Sport and politics: at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, Jesse Owens, a Black American athlete, won four gold medals in Nazi Germany. At the 1968 Mexico City Olympics, Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised gloved fists on the podium to protest racism. The U.S. led a boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and Canada and dozens of other countries joined it; the Soviet bloc boycotted Los Angeles in 1984.

Globalization of culture: Americanization or mixing?

Some critics worried that global culture would become Americanized (sometimes called "Coca-colonization"). Others point out that cultures hybridize: borrowed forms are adapted, and influence flows in many directions, as K-pop, anime, Bollywood, Nollywood, Latin music and global hip hop show. Many countries, including Canada with its Canadian content rules, have tried to protect national culture. Historians study both the spread of dominant cultures and the creativity of local responses.