Transnational Fields of Cultural Production

Pierre Bourdieu’s model of cultural production has been used to study a wide variety of cultural phenomena—including art, literature, and music. Most empirical studies of cultural production employing a Bourdieusian methodology still focus on nationally-based fields at the expense of a more dynamic and accurate transnational field. Understanding cultural production in a transnational field requires an adaptation of Bourdieu’s theory. This paper will reframe national fields within a transnational context while simultaneously illustrating the transnational components of national fields. This adaptation will thus reveal the nationalist roots and transnational routes of cultural production. We will examine literature and music as transnational fields of cultural production: fin-de-siècle avant-garde artists who were the focus of Bourdieu’s own research, and a set of contemporary musicians and music-makers. Using qualitative and historical methods, we argue that the ways in which transnational fields operate cannot be reduced to a single blueprint, but must be induced from the grounded reality of the intellectuals and artists themselves.