Cultures of Cultural Globalization: How National Repertoires and Political Ideologies Affect Literary and Artistic Circulation

Abstract

While prior research foregrounds the economic and political conditions that shape cultural globalization, we focus on the effects of culture. We argue that diffusion itself is a cultural practice, and that two types of cultural schemas – ways of conceptualizing national belonging, on the one hand, and geopolitical ideologies, on the other – shape the people, policies, and infrastructures actors deploy to insert their cultural products into the global art and literary worlds. Based on fieldwork in Argentina, South Korea, and Lebanon, we show how two forms of trans-border nationalism – those that incorporate the diaspora based on ethnic or ancestral similarity, and those that incorporate regional neighbors based on common civic norms – are mobilized to circulate art and literature internationally. Who participates in these diasporic and regional networks, however, depends on diffusers’ ideological commitments. We identify two types of aspirational visions for a global (art) world order, which influence which people and institutions cultural makers and managers draw on to diffuse art and literature: a reformative vision, in which the core institutions in traditional centers of power maintain their centrality but become more inclusive of creators from historically underrepresented countries, and a transformative vision, in which the global art and literary world are restructured and power redistributed via new nodes and circuits that circumvent these traditional centers.