Explaining the mechanisms behind the larger processes of globalization, modernization, and cultural imperialism, this book explores the realms of daily life in Sweden and how cultural impulses are actually integrated in the lives of ordinary people. The dreams, opinions, actions, and consumption desires of individuals with different social backgrounds are considered, determining the significance the processes of Americanization have had in shaping and influencing the form and content of everyday life in Sweden.

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 - Turbulence in the Flow: Considering Americanization
  • Through the Flow of Time
  • Speed
  • The Linguistic Measure
  • Points of Norwegian Saturation
  • The Consuming Flow
  • The Impurity of the Uprooted
  • Constructing Local Problems
  • The Weight of Words
  • Swedish and American?
• Chapter 2 - Becomings and Goings: Looking for Vingandacoa
  • Vingandacoa
  • Children of the Revolution
  • Time, Space, and Fantasy:Vernacular Landscapes of the Beyond
  • Things to Come: Yankee Know-How
  • And the Pigs Drink Wine
  • The Wild West
  • Telling Tales of Difference
  • The Art of Forgetting and its Significance
• Chapter 3 - The Othering America: Proximities, Tensions, and Moving Targets
  • The Emigration Threat
  • Maja-Lisa and the Narrative Weave
  • An Other Time
  • Caught in the Reflection
  • The Allegorical America
  • Cultural Discontinuity in the Continuous Space
  • The Centrality of the Periphery
• Chapter 4 - A Path of its Own: The American Car and the Pyramid of Dreams
  • The Material World
  • Consumption: the Art of Choosing
  • Cadillac and the Class of its Own
  • The Aesthetic Chasm between Blood and Action
  • Behind the Car: Swedish Modern, the Aesthetics of a Modernity
  • New Ideas and Rewrapped Forms
  • Swedish and American Identities: the Aesthetics of Alternate Modernities
  • Visions of Gray, Pyramids of Chrome
  • Disjuncture in the Transnational Flow
  • Foreigners in the Folk Home
  • Freedom of the Road, Swedish Style
  • The Invasion of Jönköping
  • Myth and Reality
  • Fences, Trophies, and Mirrors
  • Cruising the Nineties
  • The Contextual Difference
• Chapter 5 - Peace, Love, and Imperialism: Sideswiped by the Sixties
  • Disposable Culture
  • Looking Out
  • Boiling Points in the Transnational
  • Split Image
  • Making Flags and Burning Flags
  • The Banishment of the Swedish Flag
  • Flags, Peoples, and Nations: Subtle Differences
  • Marching for the Nation and the World
  • Uneasy Riders
  • Glocal Familiarity
  • Internationally National
• Chapter 6 - Culture Unbound: Defining the Doors of Perception
  • Contesting Modernity
  • The Tribe
  • The Experience
  • The Inner Peace
  • The Freedom
  • Positions in the Here and There
  • Another Place, Another Time
  • Shaping Things to Come
  • Modernizing the Nation or Americanizing Modernity?
• Notes
• Bibliography