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This article develops a cultural theory of firstness and argues for its importance in understanding contemporary cultural circulation. It argues that firstness is a metaculture that plays a role in making culture circulation faster, more reliant on quantification, and more promotional. After drawing support from philosophical, historical, and theoretical understandings of firstness, the article pays particular attention to the cases of web-based comment threads and music blogs to showcase how the competition to be first is central to the cultural ecosystem, especially but not only online. The conclusion suggests how firstness might be indicative of a recursive cultural mode.

Der Band basiert auf den Vorträgen, die ExpertInnen aus Nordamerika und Europa bei einem internationalen Kolloquium 2010 an der ÖAW über die historischen, kulturellen und literarischen Beziehungen zwischen Kanada und dem amerikanischen Süden gehalten haben. Die Beiträge zu dem breiten und bisher noch nicht systematisch untersuchten Themenkomplex gruppieren sich um vier Schwerpunkte. Sie erhellen demographische Phänomene (und ihre künstlerische Verarbeitung) wie die Vertreibung der Acadiens im 18. Jahrhundert und ihre Ansiedlung in Louisiana (Cajuns) und die Flucht afroamerikanischer Sklaven nach Kanada im 19. Jahrhundert. Besonders aber werden die intertextuellen Beziehungen zwischen AutorInnen aus den Südstaaten der USA (etwa William Faulkner oder Eudora Welty) und von ihnen inspirierten kanadischen SchriftstellerInnen im 20. Jahrhundert (Alice Munro, Jack Hodgins, Margaret Atwood u. a.) untersucht. Der so geführte intensive Dialog zwischen den beiden Kulturräumen wird aus verschiedenen Blickwinkeln und mit unterschiedlichen Methoden betrachtet und dabei kultur- und literarhistorisches Neuland betreten. Dies gilt auch für die Erörterung von parallelen gattungsspezifischen Entwicklungen in den beiden Gesellschaften. Neben den über zwanzig wissenschaftlichen Aufsätzen kommt auch das ludische Element in phantasievoll-kreativen Dialogen im Buch zu seinem Recht.

This article contributes to the burgeoning literature on transnational politics by bringing tools used by scholars of cultural diffusion and circulation into these debates. We build on research on social remittances and their potential to yield broader and deeper effects or to 'scale up' and 'scale out.' Based on a variety of empirical examples, we propose that processes such as circulation, portability, and contact, viewed through a transnational optic, help to nuance recent research on political transnationalism and its empirical indicators – including, most notably, external voting. ; Peer reviewed

Modernity does not possess a monopoly on mass incarceration, population fears, forced migration, famine, or climatic change. Indeed, contemporary and early modern concerns over these matters have extended interests in Thomas Malthus. Yet, despite extensive research on population issues, little work explicates the genesis of population knowledge production or how the process of intellectual transfer occurred during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This paper examines the Delessert network's instrumental role in cultivating, curating, and circulating knowledge that popularized Malthusian population theory, including the theory's constitutive elements of political economy, philanthropy, industry, agriculture, and botany. I show how deviant, nonconformist groups suffered forced migration for their political philosophy, particularly during the revolutionary 1790s, resulting in their imprisonment and migration to America. A consequence of these social shifts was the diffusion and dissemination of population theory—as a pursuit of scientific knowledge and exploration—across both sides of the Atlantic. By focusing on the Delesserts and their social network, I find that a byproduct of inter and intra continental migration among European elites was a knowledge exchange that stimulated Malthus's thesis on population and Genevan Augustin Pyramus Candolle's research on botany, ultimately culminating in Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection and human evolution.

This article draws on archival research in order to explore the cultural circulation of the early quiz show in Britain-the conceptions, interpretations and evaluations which structured its development. The history of the British quiz show remains particularly neglected in television scholarship, and is often only discussed in relation to the advent of commercial television. Here it is usually invoked as the epitome of ITV's bid to woo the audience with 'cheap', undemanding and 'trivial' fare. This association between the quiz show and commercialism has rendered the BBC, a public service broadcaster, particularly invisible in quiz show history. But the BBC played a crucial role in developing the broadcast conception of the quiz/game show well before ITV was part of the cultural landscape. Ranging across both radio and television, it is this history that is explored here.

The history of organised cricket in Brazil during the nineteenth century presents a compelling case study because of its development as an exclusionary social practice around British expatriate communities. In Brazil, cricket was played in many places well before Association Football became the national game. In contrast to cricket in formal British colonies in the West Indies, or English-speaking independent territories in North America, in Brazil the sport did not reach out to social groups that differed from British expatriates in language, ethnicity or social class. Club initiatives created in six Brazilian cities stand out for their economic power and political influence: the national capital (Rio de Janeiro), three state capitals (Niterói, Recife and São Paulo) and Santos and Campinas. Empire and language played a key role in defining sports cultures, as is shown by the periodicals that circulated in these cities in both Portuguese and English.

An argument is made for the need to conceptualize cultural memory, not as merely derivative of individual psychology, but in terms of a 'working memory' (Assmann) that is constructed and reconstructed in public acts of remembrance and evolves according to distinctly cultural mechanisms. Foucault's 'scarcity principle' is used to show the role of media in generating shared memories through processes of selection, convergence, recursivity and transfer. This media-based approach, emphasizing the way memories are communicated, circulated and exchanged, allows us to see how collective identities may be (re)defined through memorial practices, and not merely reflected in them.

Like other commodities, books have both a material and a sociosymbolic life, whose inherent integration has been too often ignored. Comparative literature and transla­tion studies do not grant sufficient importance to the physical life of the book. Analyses of translation often fail to acknowledge that the (historical) journey by which the book traveled forms an important part of the mental worlds and symbolic mutations that it provokes and undergoes once transported. Scholars of book history, paying much attention to the materiality of the book, usually track a book's existence only within its original language environment. While cultural anthropology and geography offer the best models for bringing a fuller and richer history of the book into world-historical focus, scholars of consumption and material culture have yet to add books to their lists of circulating commodities. By looking at books as both cultural products and physical objects, this article proposes new perspectives for a study of translation as part of world history. Two case studies from the transmission of Russian books to China, a German-language collection of stories by the Russian writer Mikhail Artsybashev and a Modern Library anthology of Russian short stories in English, are offered as illustrations of the ways in which transnational translation practices mediate between the book as object, as cultural-symbolic artifact in motion, and as text.