Culture and Globalization: New Approaches (2024-2025)
32M7149
Prof. Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel (Digital Humanities) and Prof. Ludovic Tournès (Global History, UNIGE), in collaboration with Prof. Catherine Dossin (Purdue University).
Monthly seminar, online, in English Fridays from 2:00 PM to 4:00 PM (Central European Time).
This seminar aims to explore new approaches to the historical phenomenon of cultural globalization. Culture here is understood as the entire range of practices and representations associated with knowledge, beliefs, arts, laws, and customs within societies, at both individual and group levels. Moving beyond the simple observation of convergences or divergences in cultural practices on global, regional, national, or local scales, historiography is increasingly attentive to the social life of objects (A. Appadurai), the circulation of forms (images, sounds, texts, and words), as well as the technical, gendered, and ecological conditions of the global circulation of cultural objects since the late 18th century. However, in light of the overdevelopment of "cultural data analytics" for contemporary culture, we must ask whether, how, and under what conditions it is possible to include cross-sectional studies of older cultural forms, their potential convergence, and how these can be articulated with non-computational historical perspectives.
What has been, and still is, the role of museums in cultural globalization, given their association with nationalization? Do we have enough material to consider a history of non-Western museums? If a global (comparative? transnational?) history is possible, how should it be approached, and at what cost?
Museums and the Globalization of Culture.
Krzysztof Pomian, Honorary Research Director at the CNRS (France) and Emeritus Professor at Nicolas-Copernicus University, Toruń (Poland)
History of museum is a chapter of a much longer history of collecting: of treasuries which are an almost universal phenomenon, and of private collections born independently in ancient China and in ancient Rome, and rediscovered in the 15th century CE by social and cultural elites of Italy and France fascinated with the latter. The invention of museum, an act of serendipity, was possible only in such a climate of worship of Roman antiquity. Once invented, museum was confined to Italy, before propagating since the end of the 17th c. in Europe and the world. In the process, collecting focused on antiquity acquired an encyclopedic character being extended to all manifestations of culture and nature, the exhibition of objects according to predominantly aesthetic criteria left place to the one which follows the instructions of history and of science, the reign of laymen, mostly artists, was replaced with that of specialized professionals, and an originally elitist institution became a democratic one.
In the wake of the French Revolution museum was recognized as one of principal national institutions which must be open to all members of a nation. But it was the Industrial Revolution that implemented this idea. The Great Exhibition of Industry of All Nations (1851) launched at he same time the democratization and the globalization of museum: the adaptation of it to the requirements of visitors coming from the working classes; the entrance into European museums of objects coming from extra European civilizations and their promotion to the dignity of Art; the proliferation of museums outside Europe, in the Americas, in India, in Australia, and outside the realm of the European colonization: in the Ottoman Empire, in Egypt, an Japan and in China . In these new environments, in particular in the United States, museum acquired its present day characteristic features and its centrality in the social and cultural life of nations and cities.
Krzysztof Pomian is directeur de recherche émérite at CNRS and professor emeritus of Nicolaus Copernicus University (UMK). Deprived in 1968 of his position of adjunct professor at the Faculty of Philosophy, Warsaw University because of his public criticism of official politics, he worked at the Department of Manuscripts of the Polish National Library (1969-1972). In 1973 he left Poland for France, where in 1984 he became directeur de recherche for the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS). In 1999/2000 – 2005/6 he was professor of the Nicolaus Copernicus University (UMK), Toruń, Poland. Among his numerous publications, the latest is a global history of museums: Le Musée : une histoire mondiale(I. Du trésor au musée ; II. L’ancrage européen,1789-1850; III. A la conquête du monde, 1850-1920), Paris 2020-2022.
2. "The Dragon Has Emerged from the Stream":
Asian Images in Globalization
This session, dedicated to Asia and its growing role in cultural globalization, aims to delve into two key points: 1) the de-Westernization of globalization, as evidenced by the increasing prominence of cultural productions from countries such as Japan, South Korea, and China in the global market; and 2) the strategies developed by governments and private actors to secure their presence in this global market, including through the use of digital media and imagery.
An East Asianization of Pop Culture: Hallyu as a case study.
Vincenzo Cicchelli, Université Paris Cité, Sylvie Octobre, French Ministry of Culture.
The globalization of culture can be seen as a two-fold long-lasting process characterized by a more intense, rapid and broader circulation of goods, flows, imaginaires, iconographies, narratives and memories as well as a stronger competition between nation-states, geographic areas and civilizations to promote their visions of society, values and behaviors, social bonds and humanity. In the realm of pop culture, the contemporary world as never been so shared (in terms of the circulation of cultural references consumed by urban, educated global generations) and so plural (in terms of the multiplication of the centres of cultural productions).
The recent history of the globalization of pop culture is witnessing a great shift between the undisputed hegemony of the US and the emergency of new global actors localized in East Asia: Japan, South Korea and China. Therefore the aim of this seminar is to explore the hypothesis of the East Asianization of Pop culture through a monographic approach (both multilevel and multiscalar) of the paradigmatic case study of Hallyu (the Korean Wave). This approach is based on the following four dimensions: a) the dimension of production by the observation of South Korean version of the global aesthetic capitalism (the entertainment capitalism); b) the dimension of global circulation by the analysis of the cultural counterflows coming from South Korea to the rest of the world (the alternative cultural globalization); c) the dimension of the symbolic and political contents of the South Korean cultural production (that we call sweet powder instead of soft power); d) the consumption of Hallyu in France that allows young people (the cosmopolitan amateurs) to develop skills and empower themselves, to affiliate themselves and tanscend cultural and social boundaries.
Vincenzo Cicchelli is an Associate Professor at Université Paris Cité (Ceped/IRD) and the Director of the International Relations of the Global Research Institute of Paris (GRIP, Université Paris Cité). Sylvie Octobre is a researcher at Deps (Ministère de la Culture, France) and associate researcher at Centre Max Weber (Lyon). Their most recent joint publications include: « K-dramas. Ces séries télé qui vous font du bien », Puf, forthcoming; « Pour l’amour de la K-pop », Réseaux, 2023 / 6 (N° 242), p.89-126; « K-pop, soft power et culture globale », Puf, 2022; « The Sociology of Hallyu Pop Culture », Palgrave, 2021; « La culture à l’âge global », Réseaux, 2021 / 2 (N° 226-227), p.19-43. They are the Editors-in-chief of the « Global Youth Studies » family of publications (BRILL Publishing, Leyden/Boston) composed of the Journal indexed in Scopus « Youth and Globalization »; the book series « Youth in a Globalizing World » and the series of short monographs « BRILL Research Perspective on Global Youth »: https://www2.brill.com/gys
3. Is the Concept of an International Cultural Field Operable?
Cultural Circulations and Globalization in the 19th C.
Christophe Charle, Honorary Professor, Université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne
This exploration, through a series of case studies from different parts of the 19th century and various sectors (theater, opera, visual arts), seeks to illuminate both the processes and the limitations of the emergence of international cultural fields. The larger the target audience of a cultural domain, the more complex the conditions for sustainable transfers and the establishment of a true field, as they require the mobilization of a growing number of resources and intermediaries: economic capital, importers, cultural mediators (such as translators, publishers, impresarios, critics), media, and others. These challenges are fewer or can be more easily overcome in smaller, niche cultural fields (like the visual and decorative arts).
However, while avant-gardism and the "gift economy" that often dominate these niches may seem opposed to the profit-driven economy of mass cultural sectors, they are not immune to it; they are also subject to national interests and the enduring impact of cultural and symbolic hierarchies across different regions. In the cultural sphere, as Pierre Bourdieu described, there are "symbolic revolutions" that shift boundaries and frameworks, but these are rare and come at a high cost of collective effort and prolonged struggle. More frequently, as Bourdieu suggested but did not fully explore, there are "symbolic restorations" and counter-revolutions—what I have elsewhere termed the "discordance of times," intrinsic to the regime of historicity in modernity.
4. Technical Systems and the Global Flow of Images.
The session will focus on the effects of technical systems on the global flow (or lack thereof) of images. With Benoît Turquety (Université Paris 8) and Christine Ithurbide (CNRS Bordeaux)
Technical Networks and Imaginary Flows: Heavy Media Politics.
Benoît Turquety, Professor at the université Paris 8.
For Gilbert Simondon, the industrial phase of technics is characterized by the dominance of technical networks over the individual objects and the small-scale technical ensembles. Technical networks are geographically extended, sometimes to the point of covering the world, and they are massive in every sense, as they are based on extremely heavy infrastructures: factories, laboratories, cables, roads, etc. Their enormous physical weight induces a long historical inertia. The production and circulation of images and sounds around the globe has been historically determined by such networks at every moment. In fact, the infrastructures which have governed cinema and other industrial phase media actually date back from the colonial era. This has engendered several major difficulties in African contexts, leading to dependencies that have continued after the formal national independences. By studying a few local situations, we will try to show how the weight of (post-)colonial infrastructures has been dealt with, and how networks have been deflected, hijacked, or, maybe, simply ignored.
Benoît Turquety is a Professor in film studies at the Université Paris 8 (ESTCA), director of the EUR ArTeC, and director of an SNF project on Nagra sound recorders.
Streaming Bollywood: Digital Platforms Reconfiguring Film Industry, Circulation, and Power Relations in India
Christine Ithurbide, CNRS, Bordeaux
This presentation discusses the role of streaming platforms in the transformation of the film industry in India, especially since the launch of major international (Netflix, Amazon Prime) and national (Zee 5, Eros Now, AltBalaji, Jio Cinema) platforms over the last decade. What are the main evolutions in the organisation and distribution of content production in India? How have some of the most powerful transnational streaming platforms localized their activities in India? To what extent have streaming platforms accelerated both the spread of foreign cinema in India and the export of Indian cinema to the rest of the world? The presentation will also address the recent debates on the generalization of data and algorithms in film production, as well as the ways in which streaming platforms are reshaping or reinforcing power relations in the audiovisual industry, particularly between legacy cultural industry and communication industry players.
Christine Ithurbide is a researcher at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) affiliated to Laboratory Passages, France. Her research focuses on the socio-economic transformation of cultural industries - music, film and crafts - related to digital platforms in India (Audiovisual Industry and Digital Platforms in India, Global Media and Communication, 2022; Locating digital creative industries in India, Contemporary South Asia, 2023) with a focus on the strategies of global technology players (Netflix in India, Annales de Géographie, 2022; Amazon as a digital empire? Development, 2023). She is co-editor of Digital Platforms and the Global South (2023, Routledge). She is also the Principal Investigator of the International Research Network (IRN) SOUTH-STREAM which examines cultural platforms, digital players and policies in Africa, Asia and Latin America.
5. Orientalism and the Wild West. Connected Histories? [Canceled]
This session examines the globalization of imaginations and the broadening of mental boundaries through the construction of representations of “elsewhere” in the 19th century, focusing on two key themes: “The Orient” and the “West” (primarily American, but also potentially South American). We aim to address two central questions:
1. How did 19th-century painting shape mental constructs of “elsewhere”?
2. What connections can be traced between the Orient and the American West, whether through artistic representations by painters or the circulation of people, art objects, or aesthetic models?
The Near East in the Far West: Images of the “exotic” and imperial discourse in turn-of-the-century French and American painting
Dalila Meenen, Sorbonne Université, Institut d'Art et d'Archéologie
This presentation examines the connection between images of the “exotic”, an idea of the “other” and the “elsewhere”, and the evolution of an imperial discourse at the end of the 19th century. Focusing on French and American art, the study argues that a transfer of imperialist ideas has been performed as a consistent part of the construct of one’s own national identity, as opposed to the “other”.
Beneath the charming aesthetics of orientalist imagery, celebrated during the whole second half of the 19th century at the Paris Salon, French artists such as Jean-Léon Gérôme and Benjamin Constant developed a visual language that embodied perfectly France’s image of civilization and refinement by contrasting with the imagined violence, sensuality and opulence of the new colonial territories in the Near and Middle East. Images of Arab soldiers and imprisoned harem beauties multiplied, encouraging the idea of an Orient that needed to be feared, dominated and civilized. In the context of globalization, with a booming transatlantic art market and new fortunes made in the United States, these images traveled quickly across the Atlantic, where they found not only many buyers among the new industrial elite, but also a fertile ground for thoughts related to America’s own expansionist politics.
American artists applied the lessons of their French masters to shape their own new icons of patriotism: the cowboy and the Native American. The comparison between French orientalist painting and images of the American Wild West effectively shows the numerous artistic and ideological parallels, as the expansion into the West progressed and an organized propaganda became necessary to justify the government’s violent subjugation of Native Americans. While patriotic artists such as Frederic Remington or Charles Schreyvogel painted some of the most iconic images of battles between Native Americans and cowboys or the American army based on orientalist models, others would find a more aesthetic approach of these “exotic” strangers living on American soil. Among these can be named Robert Henri or the artists of the Taos Society, living and working among the indigenous tribes in New Mexico, and much like the orientalist artists-explorers, paintings nearly ethnographic images of the “other”.
Dalila Meenen is Senior Lecturer (Maître de Conférences) in Contemporary Art History at Sorbonne University, Paris. She directs the Master's Program "Expertise et Marché de l'Art".
The International Circulation of Popular Fiction, Between Globalised Imaginaries and Industrial Dynamics
Matthieu Letourneux, Professor at Université Paris Nanterre
Since they were designed from the outset to circulate as widely as possible, and because publishers and authors did not hesitate to imitate contemporary successes to achieve such broad distribution, popular fiction quickly gave rise to intense international circulation. What circulated were not only images, stories, and fictional genres, but also the formats and media through which they were conveyed—each shaped by its own constraints—engaging in a continuous dialogue between the homogenization of the imagination and the reconfiguration of narratives according to national contexts.
By drawing on examples from the 19th century (urban mysteries and serialized booklets), the early 20th century (focusing on the European circulation of crime and Western stories inspired by American dime novels), and the 1960s and 1970s (with the intense Franco-Italian exchange of crime and horror novels, photonovels, films, and comics), we will show how this international flow of serialized productions requires us to consider both popular imaginaries and the practices of industry professionals (publishers, producers, distributors) in tandem. These actors play a crucial role in enabling imported images, narratives, and genres to be assimilated into the media and cultural ecosystems that receive them.
Matthieu Letourneux is a Professor at the University of Paris Nanterre and a member of the CSLF. His research focuses on serial and media cultures (Fictions à la chaîne, Seuil, 2017), popular publishing (Aux origines de la pop culture with Loïc Artiaga, 2022, La Librairie Jules Tallandier, with Jean-Yves Mollier), humor (L’Empire du rire, with Alain Vaillant, 2020), and criminal imaginaries (Cinéma premiers crimes, 2015, Fantômas, Biographie d’un criminel imaginaire, 2013). He is the editor-in-chief of the journal Belphégor.
What are the new forms of cultural diplomacy, and their role in globalization? What is the place and role of digital media and algorithms in this process? Do they encourage a global circulation of artistic forms, or the closing of cultural communities?
Digital Soft Power of Heritage Media. Navigating Post-Human Environments
Natalia Grincheva, Program Leader, LASALLE University of the Arts Singapore
Digital Soft Power of Heritage Media conceptualises a phenomenon of digital soft power, identifying, describing, and explaining its main prerequisites, components, and manifestations in the context of online media activities of heritage institutions: galleries, libraries, archives, and museums. It focuses on three foundational digital soft power dimensions: content, audiences, and narratives, revealing how each of them emerge, transform, co-exist in, and shape the global media space. The book exposes cultural mechanics, political technologies, media strategies and global impacts of digital soft power exercised by contemporary cultural heritage institutions.
Dr Natalia Grincheva is a Program Leader in Arts Management at LASALLE, University of Arts Singapore, and an Honorary Senior Research Fellow in the Digital Studio at the University of Melbourne. She is an internationally recognized expert on innovative forms and global trends in contemporary museology, digital diplomacy and international cultural relations. She is the author of three monographs Geopolitics of Digital Heritage (Cambridge University Press: 2024), Museum Diplomacy in the Digital Age (Routledge: 2020) and Global Trends in Museum Diplomacy (Routledge: 2019). Now she is working on a new monograph, Digital Soft Power of Heritage Media, to be published with Cambridge University Press in 2025.
Isabelle Anatole Gabriel, Associate Researcher, Ministry of Culture; Former International Civil Servant, UNESCO.
Since the creation of the international lists (World Heritage and Intangible Heritage) by UNESCO, heritage has been understood as a major and exemplary object of the process of cultural globalization, as evidenced by the abundant Anglo-Saxon literature and particularly the Routledge Series. Considered a tool of soft power by some, a site of an authorized and standardized—if not neo-colonial—discourse by others, or also a resource for emancipation or solutions for the future, heritage serves both as a vehicle for cultural globalization and a site of resistance against it.
From the perspective of global history of culture, this fragmented, complex, and often critical landscape of heritage in the 21st century raises the question of whether it is possible to identify analytical categories that clarify the generic value of heritage for our societies. Building on previous research on the first globalization of the heritage concept (from the late 18th century to the second half of the 20th century), the talk will present current research on the author’s identification of a second phase of globalization and a major turning point at the end of the 20th century, which the author terms the "post-conservation turn."
Isabelle Anatole-Gabriel holds a Ph.D. in the history of international heritage, is a heritage curator, and a former international civil servant at UNESCO. She teaches Museum and Heritage Studies at the École du Louvre (Paris) and Central European University (Vienna) and is an associate researcher at the Heritage.s Laboratory (CYU/CNRS/Ministry of Culture - France).
Latest publication in English: “The search for Virtue - Sustainability and systemic protection of agricultural heritage”, in Fouseki, K., Cassar, M., Dreyfuss, G., & Ang Kah Eng, K. (Eds.). (2022). Routledge Handbook of Sustainable Heritage (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003038955 .
9. Cancelled:Music in the 20th Century. A Global Field?
This session is unfortunately cancelled due to health reasons.
Anaïs Fléchet, Professor in Cultural History at Sciences Po Strasbourg.
This session, focused on music, raises three key questions: 1) the issue of the de-Westernization of cultural globalization, particularly through the growing role of non-Western countries in the process, while acknowledging that the channels of diffusion are still predominantly controlled by Western countries; 2) on a broader level, initiating a comparison between the processes of globalization in the field of music with those occurring in cinema and visual arts, specifically to explore whether a global field of music exists, similar to the international fields of publishing (as studied by Gisèle Sapiro) and art (as examined by Larissa Buchholz); and 3) how to incorporate the question of imagery into the discussion, for instance, by considering the global circulation of album covers and their visual impact.
