Streams of Cultural Capital

This anthology examines the questions arising from the transpositions and recontextualizations of cultural objects across and between national borders: 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.