Introduction

The dramatic increase in the density and speed of global circulation and interconnectedness as well as the political and economic shifts and ruptures accompanying the end of the Cold War in the outgoing twentieth century have fundamentally challenged the viability of scholarly approaches that took the nation state as their default mode. Scholars in the humanities and social sciences have begun to respond to challenges that are not contained within geographical compartments, thereby tending to transgress disciplinary boundaries. This new line of thought questioned the centre-periphery dichotomy by demonstrating its Eurocentric pedigrees, as deriving from a position that claims alleged superiority by means of holding the monopoly over knowledge, economy and civilization. Postcolonial theory has largely, and rightly, critiqued such approaches by arguing that a decolonization of knowledge needs a critical re-mapping of traditional monolithic concepts. It was in this context of postcolonial research attitude that transculturality first arose, contesting traditional master narratives and enabling researchers to view research fields from different points of view, for instance by exploring ongoing colonial geographies, subaltern agency and the periphery as a site of theorization (Roy 2011). One of the principal assumptions of transcultural studies has been that a ‘culture’ is constituted by processes of interaction, circulation and reconfiguration. Despite the fact that culture has been considered as genuinely processual in other scholarly fields within the humanities and social sciences (e.g. Appadurai 1995) the impact of a transcultural approach had major effects in that it led to a recalibration of area studies authority and the methodological disciplines. From this perspective, culture is constantly changing, moving, adapting – and is doing this through contact and exchange beyond real or perceived borders.