A world republic of film

Abstract

This article, originally written as a tribute to Pascale Casanova at the time of her untimely death in 2018, aims to show that her book The World Republic of Letters may be of interest to social scientists beyond literary scholars and sociologists of literature. Indeed, this book is among the works that were the first, in the 1990s, to develop a reasoning in terms of field on a transnational scale and it proposes, through the analysis of the “international literary space”, a model that can be a source of inspiration in the study of international power relations in other social activities than literature. Our article, after some preliminary comments on the book, shows how the model proposed by Pascale Casanova can be exported or transposed to the film industry, with some adaptations due to the differences between the literary and cinematographic fields.