Concept
In the fields of cultural studies and social anthropology, cultural cringe is an internalized inferiority complex that causes the people of a country to dismiss their own culture as inferior (cringe-inducing) when compared to the cultures of other countries. In anthropology, cultural cringe is related to the concept of the colonial mentality (belief of inferiority), and usually is manifested in the anti-intellectualism deployed against intellectuals, scientists, and artists native to a colonized country or a former colony. Moreover, at the personal level, cultural cringe also is manifested as cultural alienation. In 1894, Australian bush poet Henry Lawson wrote in his preface to his Short Stories in Prose and Verse: The Australian writer, until he gets a "London hearing," is only accepted as an imitator of some recognized English or American author; and, as soon as he shows signs of coming to the front, he is labelled "The Australian Southey," "The Australian Burns," or "The Australian Bret Harte," and lately, "The Australian Kipling." Thus no matter how original he may be, he is branded, at the very start, as a plagiarist, and by his own country, which thinks, no doubt, that it is paying him a compliment and encouraging him, while it is really doing him a cruel and an almost irreparable injury. But mark! As soon as the Southern writer goes "home" and gets some recognition in England, he is "So-and-So, the well-known Australian author whose work has attracted so much attention in London lately"; and we first hear of him by cable, even though he might have been writing at his best for ten years in Australia. The term "cultural cringe" was coined in Australia after the Second World War by the Melbourne critic and social commentator A. A. Phillips, and defined in an influential and highly controversial 1950 essay of the same name. It explored ingrained feelings of inferiority that local intellectuals struggled against, and which were most clearly pronounced in the Australian theatre, music, art and letters.