Cultural Transfer Transferred: Surveying Cultural Transfer in the Twenty-First Century, ACLA 2022

When, in 1985, Michel Espagne and Michael Werner coined the term cultural transfer (“transfert culturel” in French, “Kulturtransfer” in German), they had a non-nationalistic and a non-diffusionistic approach to cultural studies in mind. In the following decades, and especially since the turn of the twenty-first century, their approach has become increasingly important due to the continuous advance of globalization and digitalization. This has led cultural transfer research to evolve in different directions. However, neither its foray into transregional studies (Middell/Dietze 2019) nor into postcolonial studies (Jørgensen/Lüsebrink 2021) were able to completely detach cultural transfer research from its historical anchoring in eurocentrism. Furthermore, not only the much-criticized terms culture and transfer, but also its origin in Franco-German relations and its preference for cultural dynamics of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, have caused some dispersion in cultural transfer research.

In this seminar we would like to build on, and simultaneously move on from almost four decades of European research focus in order to “repair” (cf. Zymner 2021, 55) a very useful approach to the study of culture and especially of literature in the twenty-first century. In this highly globalized and digitalized age, new questions on ways of mediation and types of cultural brokers have arisen. Does cultural transfer in the twenty-first century dissolve or strengthen boundaries? Which factors govern the transfer of culture and of literature in particular? Do forms of digital communication give rise to new types of mediation? What kinds of (posthuman) cultural brokers emerge? Is the discourse, e.g. about disasters changing due to new agents of mediation? Whereas these questions focus especially on the structural aspects of cultural transfer, it is similarly important to keep an eye on what is actually being transferred, e.g. themes, motifs, literary genres, and modes of writing. While trying to answer some of these and other related questions, the seminar also represents an attempt at cultural transfer itself, discussing relevant issues in a non-European context at the ACLA, which is taking place for the first time in Asia.

Possible topics include (but are not limited to):

• Cultural transfer of narratives and discourses
• Cultural transfer and disaster studies
• Cultural transfer and animal studies
• Cultural transfer of literary genres/modes of writing
• Cultural transfer and translation studies
• Cultural transfer and recent theories of World Literature
• Cultural transfer and new (digital) media
• Cultural transfer and popular culture (film, caricature, …)
• Cultural brokers in the twenty-first century

Please send your proposals to culturaltransfer.acla@gmail.com by October 31.