Cultural Brokers and Mediators

Abstract

The figure of the cultural broker or mediator has gained remarkable prominence in transregional studies as well as in transnational and global history over the last decades. This chapter gives an overview of research on brokerage and mediation in different transregional and transnational constellations. It turns toward a more general discussion of the different aspects of mediation as a complex field of activity that should not be narrowed down to connection and transmission. Cultural brokers and mediators have also started to play a larger role in transnational and transregional history. Cultural brokers are thus not representations of the other but are figures of interaction in a globally connected modern world as a ‘brokered world’. Mediation has been described as a transitory phase in the entangled development of societies or as a fundamental aspect of cultural relations that is constantly changing its form and function. The different meanings of the term ‘mediation’ stem from varying historical usages and philosophical traditions.

Biographical Note

Dr. Antje Dietze (SFB 1199)

I am a senior researcher in the Collaborative Research Center (SFB 1199) “Processes of Spatialization under the Global Condition”. I teach courses in transnational history and transregional studies at the Global and European Studies Institute, the Institute for the Study of Culture and the Graduate School Global and Area Studies at Leipzig University. In 2014/15, I was a German Academic Exchange Service P.R.I.M.E. research fellow at the Centre canadien d’études allemandes et européennes at Université de Montréal, Canada. My main areas of research include the social and cultural history of Germany, Europe and North America in the 19th and 20th century, entangled histories of Cold War and post-socialist cultures, as well as the transnational history of the cultural economy. My current research project investigates the production and circulation of mass entertainment in North America and Europe from the 1830s to the 1930s.