Cultural products are increasingly subject to wider and wider circulation throughout the world. For example, the television show Game of Thrones 1 shattered all previous audience records, through a combination of those watching the show live, as well as those streaming or downloading it. Shakira, a Colombian singer turned pop star in the United States, lent her voice to the official song of the 2010 Football World Cup held in South Africa, a tune that was inspired by African music. Naruto 2 has become a childhood hero for many young French people, alongside more traditional national figures like AstĂ©rix . The song âGangnam Style,â performed by the South Korean singer Psy (sung in Korean and complemented by all the aesthetic trappings of K-pop) was downloaded over 2.9 billion times,3 causing YouTube counters to explode. In France, the song was most often downloaded by young individuals with no cultural ties to Korea. These cultural products belong to a number of French youth cultural repertoires, present alongside the Assassinâs Creed video games,4 Daft Punk albums,5 and David Guetta chart-toppers,6 among many other French contributions to the international scene. Over the past several decades, the sites of cultural production have proliferated, while cultural products have benefited from a greater circulation. There are countless examples: the diffusion of Japanese manga and karaoke , Latin American telenovelas , Egyptian and Turkish television series, Algerian raĂŻ music, K-pop and Korean films, Scandinavian crime novels, Bollywood and Nollywood cinema (from India and Nigeria, respectively), and so on. Similarly, as the sphere of recognized artistic production has expanded, high culture has also increasingly opened its doors to artists in all media from different geographical backgrounds and cultural traditions. Some of these artists have moreover become media darlings, either posthumously or during their lifetimeâthere are countless film adaptations of the work of Alexandre Dumas , and the success of the Harry Potter franchise is truly global7âand their works are, in turn, referenced and revisited in contemporary productions, thus continuing to shape transnational cultural imaginaries beyond their own lifespan.
The globalization of cultural industries and the growing circulation of cultural products, facilitated by the rise of digital technologies and social networks, are also major factors contributing to the internationalization of youth cultural repertoires and consumption patterns. Thanks to the many films and manga depicting Japanese warriors, what young French person cannot recognize the figure of the samurai? Who has no idea what the Egyptian pyramids look like? Who does not associate New York City with the Statue of Liberty? And who, setting foot on the American continent for the first time, will not be struck by a strange sense of déjà vu? These examples highlight just to what extent contacts with cultural products and artworks fashioned abroad that shape cultural imaginaries as well as taste profiles are important for us to examine, as they inform how individuals receive cultural products, and in turn, use them to shape their vision of the world (Cicchelli and Octobre 2013).
1 Beyond Cultural Homogenization
Many things have been said about the role of foreign cultural products in France. The French âcultural exceptionâ was, in part, developed as a defensive strategy against (primarily North American) cultural imperialism and its supposed homogenization of culture, whereas the argument for cultural diversity emerged to promote cultural products from less geopolitically prominent regions. As early as 1946, when the Blum-Byrnes agreement established a quota system that limited the number of foreign (mostly American) films that would be shown in France each year, American cultural hegemony became a topic of criticism, in turn justifying a number of policies to support the production and diffusion of national products through quotas and financial subsidies. In France, vociferous critics of cultural homogenization condemned the rise of âmonocultureâ or âworld cultureâ (Martel 2010), while English-language publications researched the âMcDonaldization ,â âAmericanization ,â âDisneyfication ,â and âCoca-Colonization â of culture (Ritzer 1993; Ritzer and Liska 1997; Ritzer and Stillman 2003; Wagnleitner 1994).
This calls for a couple of remarks to be made, however. Without denying the importance of major American cultural industries with regard to the international circulation of cultural products, it is nonetheless possible to avoid reducing the globalization of culture to the sole problem of North American hegemony. Rejecting the idea that local and national cultures have disappeared entirely, many scholars have argued that globalization has, in fact, spearheaded the proliferation of cultural identitiesâvariously suggesting that this proliferation is the result of the promotion of local identities as a form of resistance to hegemony, of the hybridization of existing cultures, or of the local appropriation of global products (Amselle 2001; Canclini 1995; Castells 2010; Hannerz 1992; Pieterse 2009; Robertson 1995; Tomlinson 2003). In other words, for many scholars, cultural dynamics are a foundational element of globalization, a vast phenomenon that cannot be reduced to its economic dimension alone.
At the same time, however, studies of cultural practices have seldom examined the role played by globalization. Numerous scholars have investigated the changing relationships of individuals to culture, framed as shifts in cultural capitalâin particular, Richard A. Peterson (1992), as well as Olivier Donnat (1994), Bernard Lahire (2004), and Philippe Coulangeon (2011)âor from a reception perspectiveâin particular, Henry Jenkins (1992), as well as Patrice Flichy (2010), and Antoine Hennion (2015). Such works have attempted to investigate the relationship between socio-demographic changes (rising education levels, the feminization of the workforce, prolonged adolescence and youth) and cultural transformations (in particular, the increasingly blurry distinction between legitimate highbrow culture and popular culture). Nonetheless, they have, for the overwhelming majority, overlooked the fact that as cultural products circulate more and more widely, they alter youth cultural references and repertoires, thus producing a significant transformation with regard to their relationship to the world. Nowadays, the first contact that young individuals have with a foreign culture most frequently occurs through television series, movies, or musicâmuch more frequently than through books, as was the case for the travellers of Grand Tour in the nineteenth centuryâlong before travel would allow them to experience alterity directly.
2 Ordinary Aesthetico-Cultural Cosmopolitanism
Several researchers have proposed the concept of cosmopolitanism (Beck 2006; Kendall et al. 2009; Skrbis and Woodward, 2013) to describe how individuals relate to globalization, in particular, by analysing migratory flows and voluntary mobility, the pervasiveness of global media, and public awareness of global risks. However, this concept has rarely been used to understand cultural consumption practices and patterns (Sassatelli 2012). While it has been the subject of theoretical discussion, aesthetic cosmopolitanism remains largely unexplored from an empirical perspective (Hannerz 1990; Urry 1995), save for a handful of qualitative studies (Regev 2013; Bookman 2013) and quantitative analyses based on the secondary exploitation of su...