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THE AUTHOR DISCUSSES THE RECENT LIBERALIZATION OF US-SOVIET CULTURAL EXCHANGES AND HOW THE SOVIET ATTITUDE TOWARD SUCH EXCHANGES HAS CHANGED IN THE LATE 1980'S.

This introduction to the special issue on "Contemporary Labor and Cultural Exchange" argues for the importance of the category of labor to the study of contemporary transnational literatures and cultures. Responding to dominant discourses on globalization as well as the debate about "world literature" within literary studies, the introduction suggests that increased attention to the routes of labor migration and cultural representations of exploited migrant labor offers a new, productive approach to the study of contemporary literature and culture. In contrast to the celebratory rhetoric of globalization which represents a "flat" and democratically interconnected world, the focus on labor migration brings to light the persistence of uneven development and exploitation, and the frequent isolation of migrant workers, even as the surplus value they generate plays a major role in the global economy. Written at a time when many U.S.‐based universities are adopting the neoliberal practices of global corporations, the attention to labor in literary and cultural studies also places an emphasis on the material conditions of academic production and scholars' embeddedness in economic processes. An approach to transnational literature which follows the cartography of labor migration and uneven development could become a vital alternative to the "world literature" curriculum which tends to disregard economic inequality.

"Brazil and France have explored each other's geographical and cultural landscapes for more than five hundred years. The Brazilian je ne sais quoi has captivated the French from their first encounter, and the ingenuity à francesa of French artistic and scholarly movements has intrigued Brazilians in kind. Ongoing Brazil-France interactions have resulted in some of the richest cultural exchanges between Europe and Latin America. In Cultural Exchanges between Brazil and France, leading international scholars evaluate these reciprocal transnational explorations, from the earliest French interventions in Brazil in the sixteenth century to the growing mutual influence that the nations have exerted on one another in the twenty-first century. Original interdisciplinary essays examine cross-cultural interactions and collaborations in the social sciences, intellectual history, the press, literature, cinema, plastic arts, architecture, cartography, and sport. The comparative cultural method used in these analyses deepens the collective treatment of crucial junctures in the long history of often harmonious, but also sometimes ambivalent and occasionally contentious, encounters between Brazil and France"--