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Cultural Capital Accumulation on a World Scale

The Role of Imperialist Theodicies within Metropolitan Literary Fields

New Mexico State University

Pierre Bourdieu’s work can help to clarify precisely how culture in general and literature in particular operate among and within societies as a form of symbolic violence and as a mechanism of distinction. All agents within any cultural field possess a specific set of cultural interests that are determined by their location within that cultural field as well as in the social field and the field of intersocial relations. The power to represent the world becomes a stake within the literary field, a form of cultural authority that writers and critics have an interest in preserving. Asserting the superiority of national culture and its products yields symbolic profits. These interests fulfill rather than contradict the norms of autonomy within the field. Theoretical attempts to attribute a critical potential to this autonomy may therefore reach their limit at the point where culture and imperialism meet.

Key Words: imperialism • sociology of literature • cultural capital • symbolic violence • Pierre Bourdieu

Space and Culture, Vol. 6, No. 1, 35-51 (2003)
DOI: 10.1177/1206331202238961


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