Cultural Cringe - Connection With Cultural Alienation

Connection With Cultural Alienation

The cultural cringe is tightly connected with "cultural alienation", that is, the process of devaluing or abandoning one's own culture or cultural background. A person who is culturally alienated places little value on their own or host culture, and instead hungers for that of a – sometimes imposed – colonising nation. The post-colonial theorists Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin link alienation with a sense of dislocation or displacement some peoples (especially those from immigrant cultures) will feel when they look to a distant nation for their values. Culturally alienated societies often exhibit a weak sense of cultural self-identity and place little worth on themselves. The most common manifestation of this alienation among peoples from post-colonial nations at present is an appetite for all things American, from television and music, to clothing, slang, even names. Culturally alienated individuals will also exhibit little knowledge or interest in the history of their host society, placing no real value on such matters.

The issue of cultural alienation has led the Australian sociologists Brian Head and James Walter to interpret the cultural cringe as the belief that one's own country occupies a "subordinate cultural place on the periphery" and that "intellectual standards are set and innovations occur elsewhere." As a consequence, a person who holds this belief is inclined to devalue their own country's cultural, academic and artistic life, and to venerate the "superior" culture of another (colonising) country.

A more sophisticated approach to the issues raised by the cultural cringe, as felt by artistic practitioners in former colonies around the world, was developed and advanced by the Australian art historian Terry Smith in his essay 'The Provincialism Problem'.