ABSTRACT

The concept of cultural transfer, conceived in the mid-1980s by Michel Espagne and Michael Werner to outline exchanges between Germany and France in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in non-hierarchical terms, remains a useful tool for studying relational and circulatory processes between cultures. The marginal positions that both geopolitical regions occupied within the colonial and modern world warrant bilateral and reciprocal sorts of cultural exchanges between them. The concept of transculturation, coined by Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz in the 1940s denotes various multidirectional processes of appropriation between cultures as well as their resulting transformations. The concept of transculturation was reworked in the 1990s by members of the Modernity/Coloniality network. This chapter demonstrates that the coloniality of power has tainted Latin American artists' perception of European culture and influenced their ways of relating to it. South–East cultural transfers and circulations have been affected by the colonial matrix of power.