CR

By examining cultural consumption, tastes and imaginaries as a means of relating to the world, this book describes the effects of globalization on young people from an aesthetic and cultural perspective. It employs the concept of aesthetico-cultural cosmopolitanism to analyse the emergence of an aesthetic openness to alterity as a new generational "good taste". Aesthetico-Cultural Cosmopolitanism and French Youth critically examines the consumption of cultural products and imaginaries that provide genuine insight into social change, particularly in regards to young people, who play the largest role in cultural circulation. This book will be of interest to students and academics across a wide range of readers, including cultural theorists, and students engaged in debates on cultural consumption, the globalization of culture and transnational aesthetic codes. “This excellent book brings together original ideas about globalization and cosmopolitanism in a rich empirical study of the consumption practices of French youth. Because it brings together the sociology of culture with the anthropology of globalization, it will be of great interest to all those who care about the future of transnational cultural practices.” (Arjun Appadurai, New York University, USA) “The authors offer the reader an original and innovative analysis of contemporary global cultural tastes and passions. The fivefold configuration models proposed in this book will undoubtedly become a template to which forthcoming studies will have to confront themselves.” (Stéphane Dufoix, University Paris Nanterre, France) “Based on an innovative survey revealing young adults’ cultural preferences, this book sheds unexpected light on contemporary forms of appropriation in a world now structured by the international circulation of symbolic goods.” (Jean-Louis Fabiani, Central European University, Hungary)

Based on a French survey designed to understand how young people appropriate internationally disseminated cultural products, this article explores the social stratification of everyday aesthetico-cultural cosmopolitanism in France among them. Using two classification techniques (ascending hierarchical classification and k-means clustering) and a polytomic logistic regression, we demonstrate that this cosmopolitanism can be viewed along a continuum of configurations rather than in a number of pure types. We identify five configurations: inadvertent cosmopolitans, specific cosmopolitans, cosmopolitan fans, national fans and impossible cosmopolitans. These configurations are not uniformly distributed across society: socio-demographic factors do not have a single, unambiguous effect, but are in fact combined with individual resources (experiences, competences and aspirations).

: Contemporary aesthetic cosmopolitanism studies have focused on the comprehension of the consumption both of exotic and ordinary products, and are sometimes connected to a possible consciousness of the individuals regarding the Other. Considering that the aesthetic cosmopolitanism is ambivalent and does not necessarily produce an ethical, moral or political consciousness of living together, we propose the discussion around the new figure of a cosmopolitan amateur. Our aim is to develop a discussion on the emergence of cosmopolitan consciousness, practices, as well as imagination, from the perspective of cultural participation and consumption, as examples of the so-called “ordinary cosmopolitanism” that complete the approach in terms of omnivorousness. Keywords: Aesthetic Cosmopolitanism; Omnivore; Amateurship, Global Culture

euro-festival.org

Poetics, 2010

Sociology has long identified place as an important theoretical category, and a basic element of social life, but the discipline has largely left implicit the role of place as a structuring element of social perception. We reinterpret two debates in cultural sociology—cosmopolitan omnivorism and cultural reception—to show how place has been used as a static category, not a productive source of meanings, in these fields. We then introduce how scholars can further develop an analysis of place meanings, and apply this fresh perspective to our empirical study, a discourse analysis of elite music critics’ taste for rap music.We find that critics base their judgments of the genre on three place-based criteria, that: (1) rap must be ‘‘emplaced’’ to be meaningful, (2) ‘‘ghettoes’’ are central to rap’s meaningfulness and (3) international scenes are privileged as politically and aesthetically more important than American scenes. These data suggest that the omnivorous taste pattern among American elites follows an intra-genre logic of appropriation that incorporates or rejects cultural objects influenced by the meanings associated with their context of production. We conclude by highlighting the analytic benefit of recognizing place as a constituent element of social perception in cultural sociology.

Brill ISSA, 2018

We live in a globalized world in which a person in Burkina Faso can identify with Star Wars heroes, and in which a New York trader drinks the same Starbucks coffee as his Taiwanese counterpart. How are individuals socialized in Rome, Bombay, and Tokyo? To answer this question, a unique investigation has been carried out using two scales of analysis usually tackled separately by global studies: the scale of the cosmopolitan world and its global narratives, imaginaries, iconographies; as well as the scale of everyday life and socialization to otherness. This two-fold perspective constitutes the innovative approach of this volume that endeavors to address an operationalization of the cosmopolitan perspective and reacts to current debates and new research findings. This book was first published in 2016 as Pluriel et commun. Sociologie d’un monde cosmopolite by Les Presses de Sciences Po. Vincenzo Cicchelli is Associate Professor of Sociology at Université Paris Descartes and Research Fellow at GEMASS, Université Paris Sorbonne/CNRS. At Brill, he is the co-editorin-chief of Youth and Globalization (with Sylvie Octobre), the series co-editor of Youth in a Globalizing World (with Sylvie Octobre), and the series co-editor of Doing Global Studies (with Stéphane Dufoix). He has published (with Sylvie Octobre) Aesthetico-Cultural Cosmopolitanism and French Youth. The Taste of the World (Palgrave, 2018). “Vincenzo Cicchelli has written a new and much needed book. He explores people’s experiences of a shared and plural world, and the tangible, ordinary mechanisms of global society that are shaping the cultural imaginaries and the lives of individuals today. Plural and Shared is a major contribution to understanding the cultural shifts of our time and how cosmopolitanism may be understood in this context.” – David Held, Professor of Sociology, Durham University “Timely and important, […] a well-written and meticulously researched monograph that stands as a major contribution to the growing body of literature on cosmopolitanism. It is a ‘must read’ for anyone wanting to understand the historic and modern forces shaping our increasingly globalizing and cosmopolitan world.” – Elijah Anderson, Professor of Sociology, Yale University “Cicchelli has written a thought-provoking book about an important and timely topic: how can we come to terms with the cosmopolitan world, which we share but which is inherently plural, composed of different cultures and outlooks on life? To address that conundrum, the book lays foundations for a cosmopolitan sociology and shows how it can be applied to examining the cultural, subjective and experiential dimensions of global society. It is a must read for all interested in global studies and cosmopolitanism.” – Pertti Alasuutari, Professor of Sociology, University of Tampere

Culture and Empathy, 2019

In this volume, Cicchelli and Octobre sail straight into this oceanic conundrum. The authors describe their central concern as being the fact that “no institutional structure presently exists to accompany or facilitate the transition from...a budding shared awareness of the world and its problems to targeted action designed to tame globalization and create the conditions for a cosmopolitan coexistence” (p. xiii). How, Cicchelli and Octobre wonder, might “conditions for a cosmopolitan coexistence” emerge from the miasma of personal, local, and national partialities and self-flatteries that have accompanied, if not derived from, globalization up to this point? What, if any, signs are there that globalization might be eroding or counter-acting parochialism and narrow-mindedness?

American Behavioral Scientist, 2018

This article explores how foreign, recently imported cultural forms can redefine dynamics of legitimation in national cultural fields. Drawing on archival research, the article discusses the early consecration of Anglo-American pop-rock in 1970s Italy and analyzes the articles published by three specialist music magazines. Findings reveal the emergence of a shared pop-rock canon among Italian critics, but also that this “cosmopolitan capital” was mobilized to implement competing editorial projects. Italian critics promoted both different strategies of legitimation vis-à-vis contemporary popular music, and opposite views of cultural globalization as a social process. Theoretically, the article conceptualizes “aesthetic cosmopolitanism” as a symbolic resource which can be realized through competing institutional projects, rather than as a homogeneous cultural disposition.

with chapters by David Harvey, Paul Gilroy, Jacqueline Rose, Jackie Stacey, Gyan Prakash, Atreyee Sen, Tariq Ramadan, Madeleine Reeves, Felicia Chan, Heather Latimer, Galin Tihanov, Sivamohan Valluvan, Ewa Ochman, Robert Spencer

2018

This article analyses what Anacharsis Cloots (1755–1794) meant when he chose the name Anacharsis and called himself ‘Orator of the human race’. It argues that it was an act of self-fashioning by a foreigner in the French Revolution trying to find his place by representing other foreign populations in the new nation of free and equal citizens. Cloots, therefore, saw the Revolution as a performance on the global stage. Cloots chose Anacharsis as first name as an act of rejection against Christianity, but also because Anacharsis was a philosopher of Ancient Greece he identified with. Cloots chose the function of orator against ‘feudalism’ because, in the Roman republic, Cicero described the orator as a hero— a philosopher pondering the truth and convincing his audience with rhetorical skills. The orator is delivering universal truths and that is also why Cloots chose to publish pamphlets rather than treatises, in line with the rhetoric of the Enlightenment and the rhetoric of the Revolution. His political thought should therefore be considered seriously as the work of a political philosopher.