Cultural Diplomacy: Beyond the National Interest?
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Biographical note
Ien Ang is Distinguished Professor of Cultural Studies in the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University, Australia. Yudhishthir Raj Isar is Adjunct Professor in the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University, Australia, and Professor of Cultural Policy Studies at the American University of Paris, France. Phillip Mar is a Research Associate in the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University, Australia.Cultural Diplomacy: Beyond the National Interest? is the first book bringing together, from the perspective of the cultural disciplines, scholarship that locates contemporary cultural diplomacy practices within their social, political, and ideological contexts, while examining the different forces that drive them.
The contributions to this book have two methodologies: the first, to deconstruct and demystify cultural diplomacy, notably the ‘hype’ that accompanies it, especially when it is yoked to the notion of ‘soft power’; the second, to better understand how contemporary cultural diplomacy actually operates. In applying a cultural lens to the question, this book probes whether there can be such a thing as a cultural diplomacy ‘beyond the national interest’. This book was originally published as a special issue of the International Journal of Cultural Policy.
1. Cultural diplomacy: beyond the national interest? 2. The disjunction of image and word in US and Chinese soft power projection 3. Slow boat from China: public discourses behind the ‘going global’ media policy 4. Pop-culture diplomacy in Japan: soft power, nation branding and the question of ‘international cultural exchange’ 5. Contemporary cultural diplomacy in South Korea: explicit and implicit approaches 6. Australia’s Colombo Plans, old and new: international students as foreign relations 7. The case of Asialink’s arts residency program: towards a critical cosmopolitan approach to cultural diplomacy 8. Living with instrumentalism: the academic commitment to cultural diplomacy 9. ‘Culture in EU external relations’: an idea whose time has come?