Imported Identity

Barbara Kruger, "Untitled, (You are not Yourself)" 1981

Elvis is growing up in at a time where culture is very much a product of media, and most of the media influencing the culture is imported. Though the use of television is apparently rather slim, other forms of advertisement, imported pop music, and especially movies, are constantly bombarding Elvis and the people of his generation. It is worth noting that a portion art world, and particularly the American art scene, of the early 1980s was often referred to the Pictures Generation, with artists like Robert Longo, Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger, and Richard Prince, artists who often dealt with what it meant to be in a society so heavily driven by mass media and giant corporations, using information “from B-movies to dollhouses that served as training manuals for who and how to be” (Metropolitan Museum of Art). Similarly, Elvis has read so many books and viewed so many American films, his identity has been shaped to reflect those notions. So when Elvis sneaks out to watch American western films, and his friends begin to toss non-sequitur cliches around, “Somehow it all made sense to them, like some bizarre pig latin. And there was a power in the words that elevated them, made them part of something bigger” (150). That something bigger was a shared cultural experience, but an imported, idealized one. 

This particular view of identity and personality doesn’t entirely explain Lagos, though. Lagos has still retained some cultural identity original to the pre-colonial times, but is also informed by colonial practices (i.e. Christianity) that were established long ago. This notion also brings up the issue of the formation of culture and how it is viewed in relation to history. How can we say when one culture begins and another ends? Aren’t all cultures, to some degree, a hybrid of other cultures? Originality is an extremely difficult notion to put a finger on, especially when media and cultures are being distributed so swiftly and widely. The question becomes whether or not any of it is real, which is an exceedingly difficult question to answer.