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Streams of Cultural Capital
This anthology examines the questions arising from the transpositions and recontextualizations of cultural objects across and between national How is culture recognized, reconfigured, disseminated, appropriated, and practiced? How is cultural hegemony refused, diffused, absorbed, reproduced, and reconfigured, given the particularities of its interpolation into multiple contexts and under different pretexts by various agents? How is the materiality of culture correlated (or not) with the materiality of the economic? And how are these questions complicated by the fact that radically new technologies and modes of production have made the mass (and often illegal) (re)production and circulation of cultural objects less and less controllable and predictable and their points of origin more and more difficult to discern?
Transnational movements of cultural objects challenge the notion of a simply produced, disseminated, absorbed, and practiced universal world culture that is often understood simply as an amplified single-nation model. Instead, the essays in this book focus on uneven flows of culture, multidirectional currents of cultural objects, the relative value of these objects determined by the specificity of each transaction, and, perhaps most important, the indeterminate, syncretic nature of culture as capital even as its investment evinces the desire for a particular positionality.
This anthology presents both theoretical and highly empirical studies as an initial attempt to address precisely such issues regarding contemporary cultural formations and their functions. Though acknowledging the need to begin to theorize the impact of flows of cultural objects across diverse spaces, the essayists argue that these phenomena must be recognized as particular, historicized materializations of transnational movements that penetrate specifically constructed localities and demand particular scrutiny of unruly and as yet undisciplined practices.
All the essays, save two, originally appeared in 1993 as a special issue of Stanford Literature Review. For this volume, the editors have written completely new essays, an Introduction by David Palumbo-Liu and an Epilogue by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht.
Transnational movements of cultural objects challenge the notion of a simply produced, disseminated, absorbed, and practiced universal world culture that is often understood simply as an amplified single-nation model. Instead, the essays in this book focus on uneven flows of culture, multidirectional currents of cultural objects, the relative value of these objects determined by the specificity of each transaction, and, perhaps most important, the indeterminate, syncretic nature of culture as capital even as its investment evinces the desire for a particular positionality.
This anthology presents both theoretical and highly empirical studies as an initial attempt to address precisely such issues regarding contemporary cultural formations and their functions. Though acknowledging the need to begin to theorize the impact of flows of cultural objects across diverse spaces, the essayists argue that these phenomena must be recognized as particular, historicized materializations of transnational movements that penetrate specifically constructed localities and demand particular scrutiny of unruly and as yet undisciplined practices.
All the essays, save two, originally appeared in 1993 as a special issue of Stanford Literature Review. For this volume, the editors have written completely new essays, an Introduction by David Palumbo-Liu and an Epilogue by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht.
262 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1998
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
October 25, 2012
The title of this collection seems to push a number of fashionable cultural and theoretical buttons; cultural capital, a idea popularised through various applications of Pierre Bourdieu’s work and the idea of transnational cultural studies suggest an intriguing and challenging set of issues. As readers we are unlikely to be disappointed. The collection disrupts many of our naturalised presumptions about cultural identities by exploring the adoption, development and adaptation of often taken-for-granted ideas in out-of-the-ordinary contexts.
There are essays exploring the changing meaning(s) of democracy in post-Second World War political discourses as seen in US relations with Japan and the Middle East, the shifting meanings and understandings of European theatre (Shakespeare, Ibsen and Brecht) in post-Mao China, or the presence of US movies on German television between the 1950s and 1980s. However, as with several of the other essays here, these have fairly specialist audiences (as do the two very interesting – to my mind – papers dealing with monuments that assert ‘national’ memory in Australia and the literary forms of Corsican national identity). Three other essays, one exploring the meanings of Disneyland as a claim to home, one dealing with post-colonial African literature and the other dealing with impacts and significances of Latin American literature may have wider appeal. The importance of Carlos Rincón’s impressive paper on Latin American fiction is that it is the only case study in the collection where the ‘margins’ write back to the ‘core'.
The difficulty here is twofold; first, this is an issue of the Stanford Literary Review adapted to a book, and as is often the case with special issues of academic journals turned into books much of the content is highly specialised. The second problem is that the papers were first published in 1993, and transnational cultural studies has come a long way in the intervening 20 years. This is not to say that as case studies they are weak – they are, for the most part, sharp, provocative and important (this is, after all, the Stanford Literary Review).
More useful, 20 years later, however are the more ‘theoretical’ essays, along with Jean-Francois Lyotard’s enigmatic, fictionalised and witty essay about a visiting humanities scholar in Japan; he encapsulates beautifully a sense of precariousness and being just out of place. Palumbo-Liu’s introduction asks challenging and still current questions about the meaning and value of a cultural artefact or object as it moves/is moved across national and cultural boundaries. Robert Weimann poses difficult questions about value and authority in post-industrial cultures (as important as this chapter is, his over-reliance on work by Daniel Bell means I tend to disagree, although he poses profound and important challenges to the labour theory of value that remain current and have become only more important as digital technologies redefine production and distribution). In his epilogue, Gumbrecht calls on us as scholars to assert the financial value of what we do. Gumbrecht’s argument resonates with some current debates in British higher education where it seems we might be operating in a market that acts as luxury market, where demand and desirability increase with price.
The chapter that worked best for me however is Arjun Appadurai’s dealing with how we might understand consumption in historical and historicised terms while managing the mitigating the risks of nostalgia. In places it reads like a theoretical exposition of some of the ideas in Douglas Coupland’s novel Generation X but it is so much more than that – he starts to unpick tensions between fashion and nostalgia, in the commodification of time, and the distinction between history as outward looking and genealogy as introspective. It is a fabulous essay that will stand the test of being revisited. These four more theoretical pieces make the collection worthwhile (even or especially when I disagree).
There are essays exploring the changing meaning(s) of democracy in post-Second World War political discourses as seen in US relations with Japan and the Middle East, the shifting meanings and understandings of European theatre (Shakespeare, Ibsen and Brecht) in post-Mao China, or the presence of US movies on German television between the 1950s and 1980s. However, as with several of the other essays here, these have fairly specialist audiences (as do the two very interesting – to my mind – papers dealing with monuments that assert ‘national’ memory in Australia and the literary forms of Corsican national identity). Three other essays, one exploring the meanings of Disneyland as a claim to home, one dealing with post-colonial African literature and the other dealing with impacts and significances of Latin American literature may have wider appeal. The importance of Carlos Rincón’s impressive paper on Latin American fiction is that it is the only case study in the collection where the ‘margins’ write back to the ‘core'.
The difficulty here is twofold; first, this is an issue of the Stanford Literary Review adapted to a book, and as is often the case with special issues of academic journals turned into books much of the content is highly specialised. The second problem is that the papers were first published in 1993, and transnational cultural studies has come a long way in the intervening 20 years. This is not to say that as case studies they are weak – they are, for the most part, sharp, provocative and important (this is, after all, the Stanford Literary Review).
More useful, 20 years later, however are the more ‘theoretical’ essays, along with Jean-Francois Lyotard’s enigmatic, fictionalised and witty essay about a visiting humanities scholar in Japan; he encapsulates beautifully a sense of precariousness and being just out of place. Palumbo-Liu’s introduction asks challenging and still current questions about the meaning and value of a cultural artefact or object as it moves/is moved across national and cultural boundaries. Robert Weimann poses difficult questions about value and authority in post-industrial cultures (as important as this chapter is, his over-reliance on work by Daniel Bell means I tend to disagree, although he poses profound and important challenges to the labour theory of value that remain current and have become only more important as digital technologies redefine production and distribution). In his epilogue, Gumbrecht calls on us as scholars to assert the financial value of what we do. Gumbrecht’s argument resonates with some current debates in British higher education where it seems we might be operating in a market that acts as luxury market, where demand and desirability increase with price.
The chapter that worked best for me however is Arjun Appadurai’s dealing with how we might understand consumption in historical and historicised terms while managing the mitigating the risks of nostalgia. In places it reads like a theoretical exposition of some of the ideas in Douglas Coupland’s novel Generation X but it is so much more than that – he starts to unpick tensions between fashion and nostalgia, in the commodification of time, and the distinction between history as outward looking and genealogy as introspective. It is a fabulous essay that will stand the test of being revisited. These four more theoretical pieces make the collection worthwhile (even or especially when I disagree).
June 5, 2012
Unlike some people, I pay less attention to the commodities that move across borders and more on the intellectual property trade streams. This book may be enjoyable to anyone who shares that interest.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews