American Culture through Coming to America
The search for identity in the United States has been a recurrent literary them for ages, addressing the perceived quandaries for social groups, individuals, and the nation in general. While the cultural revolutions in the 80s both strengthened the various subcultures and weakened the hegemony of the dominant European culture, there was a tendency to question and deny the traditional norms, values, and beliefs which formed the foundation of the American cultural diversity (Blair 48). Additionally, there was a powerful human rights movements that drew attention to the American subcultures whose life experience and histories were divergent from the common norms. This essay analysis the American culture as evident through Eddie Murphy’s 1988 drama “Coming to America”.
I chose to analyze Murphy’s Coming to America as the drama highly relates to American culture as it explores the differences in classes among the American Society. The higher and the more successful class in the American community wants to associate only with those of the same class. Additionally, the lower and the less successful class performs all the manual work for low wages. Moreover, the protagonists in Coming to America are embedded with stereotypes because they are from a different country and thus explicitly outlining the long-living American stereotyping of individuals that have raised its momentum in the contemporary days.
Coming to America story follows Zamunda prince, Akeem who turns twenty-one and has never even tied the laces of his shoes. It is the traditions of Zamunda for the potential king to meet his arranged bride for the first time on their twenty-first birthday. However, Akeem is reluctant to marry a lady who does not truly love him and is not independent. Nevertheless, his parents, King Jaffe Joffer and Queen Aeolean reassure Akeem that this is the people’s traditions and soon he will love the bride just as his parents did. After meeting the arranged bride, Imani Izzi, the prince learns that she is nothing more than a glorified servant who has been trained since her birth on how to serve and please a king. This forces Akeem and his close friend Semmi to travel to the United States’ city of New York and look for a real queen.
The primary difference between Zamunda and the United States is how the two states accept other cultures. The prince Akeem and his close friend Semmi start their journey to the United States, they carry with them their habits, cloths, and accents which prompts the New Yorkers to give them nicknames such as “Kunta Kinte”. Although the drama portrays the American as very critical and impugning on the Zamundunian culture, Akeem and Semmi are not portrayed as judgmental throughout the entire. Additionally, the film conveys several stereotypes. For example, when the prince and the king are were walking during the arranged wedding, elephants and zebras casually walked passed them that portrays American culture. Another example of American culture is portrayed when the prince is laughed for using poor worlds when impressing his American lover Lisa.
The most objectified bodies in the film are those of African American women that appear at the beginning of the film, before Murphy’s protagonist, Prince Akeem divorces Zamunda to look for a genuine love out of the arranged marriage. According to Design (6), Murphy uses submissiveness and objectification of African American Women as the basis of exploiting their supposed inferiority to legitimize the male desire to dominate women through permitting male sexual utopia. Apart from the Queen, the only female character that speaks more than a line in the film is Akeem’s initial bride who is depicted as mindless and robotic. The African women in the film rarely oppose anything that goes against human dignity and allows the male characters to dominate them.
Such conceptions are crucial when Akeem deals with qualms at the palace life to his father claiming that it is just not the rose petals thrown wherever he walks bet everything. The pampering, the cooking, the bathing, the dressing, and the bathing. Akeem’s qualms with life in palace originate from the desire for autonomy and individualism that strengthens the conception of his westerns and masculinity, a prominent theme in the American community. He admits that the enjoyment of the African Servant woman ultimately permits the viewer’s desire to acceptation to exploitation by believing in Akeem’s moral correctness due to his distinction from the flawed traditions of his country of origin.
One of the American cultural themes constructed through the film in New York is the place for bustle and hustle where individuals are very rude. According to (Wynter (95), during the 1980s as well as contemporary times, New York is stereotyped as a place for rude individuals. While one can claim the profanity was overstretched in this film, Eddie Murphy did a fantastic work in portraying how New Yorkers conducts themselves. Additionally, the film extensively analysis the hip hop culture in the American city. When the young sister to the prince’s new love was dancing in the house, her sister was watching hip hop videos. It is worth noting that Hip Hop was starting to take off in the late 1980s and its origin is associated with the City of New York. However, while it was mostly associated with the poverty-stricken communities, Murphy used hip hop in the film with the two sisters who were a fortune.
The film also features a sociological and cultural concept that is associated with the American community. For example, the social inequality in the treatment of women compared to men is explicit in the film. African American women are topless and viewed as only domestic objects (Wynter 96). Additionally, the women are viewed as illiterate and the majority of them are submissive and objective. Moreover, the Akeem and his close friend semmi are stereotyped throughout the entire film for being Africans which is a common phenomenon in American even uptown today. A good example is when the Akeem arrives from New York claims that they were viewed as not used to wearing clothes. Akeem’s claims solidify the views of White Americans who view Africans as barbaric with no civilization.
Additionally, social-economic classes are another American culture that is vivid throughout the film. Akeem is stereotyped and prejudged by the father to the woman he falls in love with in New York. He claims the prince is not good enough to marry his daughter because he does not work in a big restaurant and make a lot of money. When Akeem was invited by the father to his house after he saved his restaurant from robbers, the prince thought he will mingle with the rest of the family after his courageous act but he turns out to be a bystander. However, the father changes his attitude when he finds out Akeem was a prince and then wants to share a drink with him and treat him with more respect. If Akeem was not a prince, the father probably will not allow him to marry his daughter. His actions fit Grazian claims that “The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it”(47).
Conclusively, the American cultural aspects that emerge to be the most prevalent, strongest, and largely relates to the contemporary American culture are the treatment of the individuals in the lower class. It is the strongest issue because it was highly candid in modern American communities. The people in the lower class are segregated from the middle and the high-class income earners and each group are treated differently. The lower group has no good jobs and in most cases, they have poor working conditions and low wages. It is clearly exemplified by the people that work in the restaurant with the prince in contrast to the owner of the restaurant.
Works Cited
Blair, Barbara. “Textual Expressions of the Search for Cultural Identity.” American Studies in Scandinavia 27.1 (1995): 48-63.
Design, Andrew deWaard–Web. “An Undergraduate Journal in Media, Information and Technoculture.” (2004).
Grazian, David. Mix it up: Popular culture, mass media, and society. New York: WW Norton, 2010.
Murphy, Eddie. Coming to America. Paramount Home Entertainment, 2007.
Wynter, D. E. “Combat, Couture, and Caribbeana: Cultural Process in Coogler’s Black Panther (2018).” Journal of Pan African Studies 11.9 (2018): 92-95.