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The contributions engage with literary, political and cultural practices in America, past and present, set out to transcend long established paradigms of an American "exceptionalism" or critical approaches that hold on to the notion of a core Americanness as a single nationalist mythology of the United States. "America" then functions as a signifier that is configured in and by its presence outside and beyond the national borders of the United States of America. The overall thrust of our volume draws upon concepts of the "New American Studies," especially "Post-Nationalist American Studies."
American studies has changed drastically over the past few decades, as a new wave of scholars--armed with groundbreaking ideas and more extensive methods of research--flocked to the relatively young field. This focus on scholarship, though necessary to the advancement of the discipline, has left pedagogy largely ignored. In American Studies in Dialogue, Matthias Oppermann consciously resists the traditional academic split between scholarship and classroom practice. His study calls for a radical reconstruction of American studies grounded in an understanding of cultural analysis and critique as genuinely dialogic processes of research and pedagogy. Drawing on case studies ranging from courses in early American civilization to recent multimedia projects, American Studies in Dialogue will be required reading for American studies scholars and teachers.
A superb combination of focused case studies and high level conceptual thinking, this volume is an important monument in the ongoing development of Inter-American studies The articles gathered here closely examine a wide variety of cultural phenomena implicated in the 'entanglements' which have defined the history of the Americas. From religious networks to music and dance, and across a range of literary and artistic works, the mobility of people, objects, and ideas in the Americas is expertly mapped. At the same time, the book represents a serious enterprise of theory-building. Drawing on the histories of postcolonial thought, mobility studies, and work on human migration, Mobile and Entangled America(s) clearly establishes a new interdisciplinary field attentive both to the complexities of cultural form and the pervasiveness of power relations. Each article stands as a significant piece of scholarship on its own, but all are in dialogue with each other. The result is a richly satisfying and important volume of cultural scholarship.
Emphasizing the role of travel and migration in the performance and transformation of identity, this volume addresses representations of travel, mobility, and migration in 19th–21st-century travel writing, literature, and media texts. In so doing, the book analyses the role of the various cultural, ethnic, gender, and national encounters pertinent to narratives of travel and migration in transforming and problematizing the identities of both the travelers and "travelees" enacting in the borderzones between cultures. While the individual essays by scholars from a wide range of countries deal with a variety of case studies from various historical, spatial, and cultural locations, they share a strong central interest in the ways in which the narratives of travel contribute to the imagining of ethnic encounters and how they have acted as sites of transformation and transculturation from the early nineteenth century to the present day. In addition to discussing textual representations of travel and migration, the volume also addresses the ways in which cultural texts themselves travel and are reconstructed in various cultural settings. The analyses are particularly attentive to the issues of globalization and migration, which provide a general frame for interpretation. What distinguishes the volume from existing books is its concern with travel and migration as ways of forging transcultural identities that are able to subvert existing categorizations and binary models of identity formation. In so doing, it pays particular attention to the performance of identity in various spaces of cultural encounter, ranging from North America to the East of Europe, putting particular emphasis on the representation of intercultural and ethnic encounters.
In the 21st century hardly any aspects of human existence are left unexplored by postmodern theories and discourses of subjectivity and individuality, of hybridity and identity, of race, gender and ethnicity. Conspicuous, however, among these critical inquiries is the relatively little attention devoted to the category of class. This absence is particularly alarming at a time when neo-liberalism and post- capitalism feed on cultural fragmentation and ideological relativism. The contributions in Considering Class: Essays on the Discourse of the American Dream address the (dys)functional position of class in American socio-political and cultural reality from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. While it is open to debate whether class is more resistant to being relativized than other categories, there is increasing recognition that class remains a critical category with the potential to transcend the rifts and divisions that run along lines of race, ethnicity and gender, and with the potential to reconfigure the current American political landscape.
No other issue in our times of globalization has aroused such passionate debate as the increasingly complex transborder movements of people of all ethnicities, with the self-perceived “from-heres” often struggling to maintain the illusion of separateness from intruding “come-heres.” The paradigm of transculturality offers prospects to rethink, demystify and represent cultural unity and difference, assimilation and alterity, in a manner that acknowledges the fissures and the fictions in traditional cultural dichotomies such as the melodramatically instrumentalized “national” vs. “foreign.” The interdisciplinary essays compiled in Transculturality and Perceptions of the Immigrant Other focus on the ways in which new diasporic and migrational patterns arouse ill will and conflict, but also negotiation and transcultural impulses, resulting in transformed meso-structures in media, schooling, and business. Investigating regional immigrant groups in the states of Virginia and North Rhine-Westphalia as well as the discourses and images in public media, films, literature, and cultural events, the studies both document the contest for geographical, work, and community space and place it in larger theoretical and specific historical contexts. Arising from an international project undertaken by senior and junior scholars from the fields of cultural studies, history, and sociology at Norfolk State University in Virginia and University of Siegen in Germany, these essays suggest that cultural citizenship can embody dynamic expressions of belonging and strategies of empowerment which shape political and economic communities, engendering in the process innovative forms of constantly negotiated, hybrid identity and transmigratory affiliation.
What is the state of American studies in the twenty-first century?
Mediating Indianness investigates a wide range of media—including print, film, theater, ritual dance, music, recorded interviews, photography, and treaty rhetoric—that have been used in exploitative, informative, educative, sustaining, protesting, or entertaining ways to negotiate Native American identities and images. The contributors to this collection are (Native) American and European scholars whose initial findings were presented or performed in a four-panel format at the 2012 MESEA (Society for Multi-Ethnic Studies: Europe and the Americas) conference in Barcelona. The selection of the term Indianness is deliberate. It points to the intricate construction of ethnicity as filtered through media, despite frequent assertions of “authenticity.” From William “Buffalo Bill” Cody’s claim, extravagantly advertised on both sides of the Atlantic, that he was staging “true-to-life” scenes from Indian life in his Wild West shows to contemporary Native hip-hop artist Quese IMC’s announcement that his songs tell his people’s “own history” and draw on their “true” culture, media of all types has served to promote disparate agendas claiming legitimacy. This volume does not shy away from the issue of evaluation and how it is only tangential to medial artificiality. As evidenced in this collection, “the vibrant, ever-transforming future of Native peoples is located within a complex intersection of cultural influences,” said Susan Power, author of Sacred Wilderness.
A unique and original reading of the American imaginary
Volume 2 of 6 of the complete premium print version of journal forum for inter-american research (fiar), which is the official electronic journal of the International Association of Inter-American Studies (IAS). fiar was established by the American Studies Program at Bielefeld University in 2008. We foster a dialogic and interdisciplinary approach to the study of the Americas. fiar is a peer-reviewed online journal. Articles in this journal undergo a double-blind review process and are published in English, French, Portuguese and Spanish.