‘This Is What We Share’
This chapter focuses on the joint guests of honour at the 2016 Frankfurt Book Fair, Flanders and the Netherlands – a rare case of two government organisations representing separate national groupings (Flanders and the Netherlands) coming together to present the literature of a single language (Dutch) on the international stage. It recounts how the two delegations’ shared status as guests of honour for 2016 came about through a collaboration between the Dutch Foundation for Literature and the Flemish Literature Fund (now known as Flanders Literature) and analyses the branding decisions made by the 2016 organizers. Conceptually, the chapter engages with perspectives from field theory and the sociology of translation to elaborate branding as a form of position-taking and guest of honour presentations as important mechanisms of transnational capital conversion.