ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the application of the notion of transculturality to genre studies yields a novel research agenda and approach to migrant genres. It also argues that the ‘transcultural moment’ of genre transmission tends to retreat into a recessive state once the genre develops its own standing in its new literary environment, and its newness becomes sedimented. While acknowledging a widespread transcultural legacy of many genres, the chapter explains the notions of ‘transcultural moment’ and ‘scales of transculturality’ in order to advocate a properly calibrated use of transculturality in the area of (literary) genre and elsewhere. The link between transcultural moments and novelty is important. The transcultural moment is rather elusive, and decreases in the same measure in which the newly introduced genre establishes itself in the respective reading culture. Certain genre paradigms can be shown to grow out of very specific social institutions or communicational patterns into larger translingual or transcultural formations.
