Streaming the Global Wave: Cross-Border Cultural Circulation, Labour, and Territory

Digital platforms have changed how cultural products cross borders. The question is no longer only what a film, a drama, or a game means, but what infrastructure enacts, channels, and regulates its circulation, and what work makes it land in a receiving public. The Korean Wave is the paradigmatic case, yet the same dynamics run through Chinese TV drama, Japanese anime, Nigerian Nollywood, among others. The desires the Wave sets in motion also travel as bodies, through the beauty and medical-aesthetic corridors it spawns, where migrants and brokers become the infrastructure for a circulated image. This session examines the labour and the territorial effects of cross-border digital circulation comparatively, with attention to the South-South corridors.

We follow two entangled infrastructures. The first is the platform-algorithm apparatus, the licensing, geoblocking, recommendation, and data practices through which platforms and technology firms act as diplomatic agents. The second is the diaspora-human network, the translingual creators, cross-border key opinion leaders, subtitling collectives, and fan communities whose participatory labour translates, recuts, memes, and re-narrates a product until it arrives. Read together, distribution and arrival form one process in which circulation is captured at technical and legal gates and re-territorialised by situated labour at the receiving end.

We invite papers on streaming and platform diplomacy, on secondary creation as the infrastructure of arrival, on diaspora and migrant creators as informal diplomatic actors, and on the territorial effects of this work. Cases grounded in the Global South and in cross-corridor comparison are especially welcome.