Imagining America: The Simpsons and the Anti-Suburb Go Global.

This paper takes a text and audience approach to the Americanisation thesis, looking at which USA is being exported in global phenomenon The Simpsons. In contrast to the warm, enlightened, and idyllic suburb of countless other American family dramas and sitcoms, The Simpsons?s Springfield is a dark zone of xenophobia, provincialism, and dysfunction, a realm where American life is satirised and held up to ridicule. However, if the family sitcom has traditionally been a major tool for exporting the American Dream and all that is supposed to be comfortable about capitalism, this paper asks what we are to make of the success of The Simpsons?s anti-suburb moving across the globe. The paper mixes textual analysis with audience research of non-Americans watching The Simpsons to connect with, contribute to, and further complicate debates on cultural imperialism and Americanisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]