[ecrea] CFP - Global tastes: the transnational spread of non-Anglo-American culture

Poetics: Journal of Empirical Research on Culture, the Media and the Arts

Special Issue on Global Tastes: The Transnational Spread of 
non-Anglo-American Culture

Deadline for abstracts: 15 September 2017

**

Guest editors: Simone Varriale (University of Warwick, UK), Noa Lavie 
(The Academic College of Tel-Aviv Yaffo, Israel)**

CALL FOR PAPERS

Globalization’s cultural effects have gained significant attention in 
the sociology of culture. Especially from the early 2000s, a growing 
literature on transnationally-connected cultural sectors has started 
exploring the asymmetries of economic and symbolic power between 
‘centers’ and ‘peripheries’ of cultural production, the role of 
gatekeepers and organizations in mediating globalization processes, and 
the limits of cultural imperialism as an exhaustive framework for 
interpreting cultural globalization. Similarly, consumption studies have 
started focusing on preferences for globally spread cultural products, 
suggesting that theories of cultural hybridity need to pay more 
attention to how class and other inequalities influence practices of 
appropriation.

Despite these contributions, research on ‘global’ tastes and new, 
transnational forms of cultural capital remains limited to some cases of 
European high culture - like French literature - and to American and 
British popular culture. Consumption research has focused on the growing 
significance of Anglo-American pop music and television on a 
transnational scale, but it has paid little attention to other forms of 
global taste - e.g. Japanese anime and manga, South Korean cinema, 
Brazilian bossa nova, reggae music - and their role in different 
national and local contexts. Similarly, research on cultural production 
has considered mostly the American and European centers of 
well-established cultural sectors, like literature, television and 
popular music. It is evident, however, that other contexts, 
transnational connections and networks remain to be explored, and that 
the impact of globalization on other fields, sub-fields and genres - 
e.g. gaming, comics, hip hop, reality TV - is underresearched.

Since cultural sociology has dealt mostly with the consequences of 
Americanization, it remains difficult to construct a clear and precise 
definition of what ‘global taste’ is and what it contains, and to 
understand which actors and networks sustain these forms of distinction 
and, potentially, cultural capital. We provisionally define global taste 
as a taste for non-national cultural products and genres, one made 
possible by transnational networks of producers, mediators and 
consumers, as well as by cross-national connections between cultural 
fields, policy makers and/or political institutions.Likewise, we wish to 
adopt a broad, inclusive definition of global culture, one that moves 
cultural sociology beyond its focus on the US, the UK and West/North 
Europe, and which helps develop the concept of global taste beyond its 
Anglo- and Euro-centric premises.

This Call for Papers thus encourages original, empirically-based 
contributions that explore the production and global spread of African, 
Asian, Australasian, Caribbean, Middle Eastern and Latin American 
cultural forms, and their consumption, mediation and evaluation in a 
variety of national, regional and local contexts. Our definition of 
global taste also includes the cultural practices of migrant populations 
and their descendants, and we also welcome research about the 
transnational circulation of culture produced in peripheral and 
semi-peripheral European contexts - i.e. East and South European 
countries - as these remain underresearched in cultural sociology.

LINES OF INQUIRY

We seek contributions focusing on the ways in which non-Anglo-American 
culture is produced, circulated, consumed and evaluated around the 
globe. Papers engaging with issues of cultural production, consumption, 
mediation and diffusion are hence welcome, and papers updating or 
revising established theories of cultural research - e.g. art worlds, 
field theory, neo-institutionalism, production of culture - are 
particularly encouraged. We are also interested in work that draws 
innovative connections between these established approaches and new 
areas of social theorizing, such as post-colonialism, decolonial theory, 
transnationalism and cosmopolitanism.

We welcome papers focusing on all actors, organizations and/or 
networks**involved with the aforementioned processes, and analyzing the 
meanings, aesthetic values and boundaries of globally-oriented tastes, 
including their relationship with cosmopolitan, nationalist and/or 
localist discourses, and with different social groups - in terms of 
class, gender and age, as well as nationality, ethnicity and race.

INSTRUCTIONS FOR AUTHORS

The deadline for proposals is 15 September 2017. We ask for a 1500-word 
abstract including the following: research questions, theoretical 
framing, and description of the paper’s methodology - including a 
specification of whether the data is already collected.

Please email your abstracts to Simone Varriale ((s.varriale /at/ warwick.ac.uk) 
<mailto:(s.varriale /at/ warwick.ac.uk)>) and Noa Lavie ((lavie /at/ mta.ac.il) 
<mailto:(lavie /at/ mta.ac.il)>). Please also include your institutional 
affiliation and a brief biography (max 100 words). Complete manuscripts, 
if ready, can also be submitted at this stage.

Authors will be notified by mid-October. Proposals will be selected by 
the Special Issue’s editors - Dr Simone Varriale and Dr Noa Lavie - and 
by the editors of Poetics.

The deadline for submission of complete manuscripts is 15 April 2018. 
Papers will be subject to an internal and external round of 
peer-reviewing. The Special Issue is expected to be published in 2019. **

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