Amerikaner Culture

The Cases of Fantasy Literature and Country and Western Music

Amerikaner Culture: The Cases of Fantasy Literature and Country Western Music.

by

J. Otto Pohl

A fully formed Amerikaner ethnic identity in the sense of the etnos theories of people like Sergei Shirokogorov or Yulian Bromley has still not emerged in my opinion. It still lacks the crucial element of ethnic self consciousness and identification. White Americans descended of various European settlers and immigrants still largely view themselves as being ethnically German, Irish, or Italian rather than a distinct new ethno-cultural group. In this sense the Amerikaner ethnogenesis unlike that of the Afrikaners or Qubecois remains incomplete.

Another aspect of Amerikaner ethnogenesis, however, has largely been completed. That is the creation of a distinct White American culture complete with its own literature, music, and cuisine. It is currently very fashionable by both anti-White radicals in the US and even more so by anti-American Europeans to claim that White American culture does not and never has existed. But, it is obviously not true as even a cursory knowledge of English language literature or music shows. There is indeed a distinct White American culture with a large corpus of output in the last couple of centuries.

I am a political historian specializing in Eurasia so I don’t have specialized knowledge of American literature, music, or even foods. What I know comes almost entirely from being a White American and being immersed in this culture for decades before leaving the US for an extended period in 2001-2004 and again 2007-2019. Nonetheless, my folk knowledge of White American folk culture is enough to recognize that it differs in a number of crucial ways from European culture and that it is also not derived from Black American or African culture. These observations would seem to be self evident. But, there is a a very loud movement with a huge amount of funding in the UK making the repeated claims that White Americans have no culture separate from adopting Black American culture and that Lizzo is representative of the music and visual culture we consume on an everyday basis. Much more so than similar claims by Black nationalists who are very aware of the false nature of such claims, the British accusations are a Blood Libel.

So I am just going to briefly note some uniquely White American cultural achievements here in literature and music. In classic literature the US has Hawthorne, Melville, and Poe. None of whom could have been produced in Europe as opposed to in the US. Despite the heavy emphasis on the British writers Tolkien and C.S. Lewis as the origins of modern fantasy literature, this is in fact a modern day revisionist take that started in the 1970s. Before Lord of the Rings there was a large body of quite good and very different fantasy literature in the US. L. Frank Baum’s, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, came out in 1900 and was made into a movie in 1939. Both the book and the movie still hold up as excellent examples of American fantasy predating Tolkien’s work. Then there are the two largely contemporary giants of Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft. The first the  inventor of Swords and Sorcery and the second Cosmic Horror. Again both predating the fantasy novels of Tolkien and taking very different and very American thematic approaches to the genre. American fantasy in the 1920s and 1930s was thus very unlike Tolkien. This difference persisted with writers like Fritz Leiber who coined the term Swords and Sorcery and Karl Edward Wagner all the way up into the 1980s.

Even more so than literature music tends to be a matter of taste. But, that there are uniquely White American forms of music seems unassailable. I am just going to touch on one such form although others such as American folk music, blue grass, and rock also exist. Despite its recent popularity in Africa and the presence of a very few talented Black musicians like Charley Pride, Country Western music is the quintessential White American music form. The “Honkey Tonk” music of people like Hank Williams and Ernest Tubb in the 1940s that laid the basis of future Country and Western music could only be created by White Americans. Likewise the music of their “Outlaw” successors like Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Merle Haggard, and Kris Kristofferson  could not have come from either Black Americans or anywhere in Europe, especially not England or Wales. At this point I would like to note I am largely talking about the style and content of the music not the race of the writers and performers when I say White American. Which brings me back to Charley Pride. Despite being Black he wrote and performed White American music. When I taught in Ghana I played some of his songs to my students and asked them if they thought the singer was a White man or a Black man. They all answered that they thought he was a White man. This is not that rare, most of Led Zeppelin’s early recorded songs were stolen directly from Black American Blues musicians and Jimmy Page was a White British man playing Black American music. These outliers do not change the fact that in terms of performers, audience, and most importantly themes that Country and Western music is a White American genre and Blues is a Black American genre. From the 1940s up until today Country and Western music remains one of the most popular genres among White Americans even though it has few fans from other racial groups in the US.

To sum up the claim that White Americans have no culture is obviously false. The fact that certain non-Whites in the US as well as  Englishmen, Welshmen, and Persians in the UK dislike us does not make us a people without a culture. We have developed a distinctly White American culture even if we have not fully formed into a self conscious White American ethnos. A lot more could be written about US culture and its divergence from European culture. But, I think I have left enough starting points here for people better versed in the subject matter to do that work.