Cultural Mobility and Knowledge Formation in the Americas

Edited by Volker Depkat and Britta Waldschmidt-Nelson in collaboration with Jasmin Falk.

This volume collects eleven contributions discussing aspects, dimensions, and major problems of cultural mobility and knowledge formation in the Americas from an interdisciplinary and comparative perspective. Looking at the Americas as a site of multi-directional entanglement and interaction, the chapters highlight the non-English and non-European contexts of the United States from the 16th to the 20th century. They focus on processes of cultural hybridity resulting from the encounter of European, Native American, African, and Asian cultures in the Americas. Contributions to this volume come from the fields of history, political science, geography, literary criticism, and cultural studies. Besides investigating the intellectual construction of the Americas, the texts analyze the history of slavery and emancipation, trace African Diasporas in Colombia and Brazil, critically assess the problem of democracy in Latin America, and scrutinize phenomena of literary entanglements in the Western hemisphere. - Contents: Susanne Lachenicht: How the Americas Came to Be Known as 'the Americas'. A Historical Approach to the Western Hemisphere. - Markus Heide: The Idea of the Western Hemisphere. Imperial Knowledge Production on the Americas in Travel Writing of the Early Nineteenth Century. - Christian Pinnen: The Cultural Transfer of Racial and Legal Traditions. The Natchez District During the Age of Revolutions. - Ursula Prutsch: Slave Emancipation in Brazil and Cuba and Its InterAmerican Dimension. - Valerie V. V. Gruber: Relational Geographies of Afro-Brazilian Identities. What Can We Learn from the Candeal Neighborhood in Salvador Da Bahia (Brazil)? - Gilma Mosquera Torres/Ángela María Franco Calderón: The Value of Collectivism. Property Rights, Urban Patterns, and Traditional Housing on the Colombian Pacific Coast. - Jobst Welge: The Boundaries of Reason. The Legacy of E. A. Poe in Latin America. - Stephen M. Park: NAFTA and the Literary Imagination. - Florian Tatschner: Literary Performance as Border Thinking. A Comparison of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's "Dictée" and Norma Elia Cantu's "Canícula". - Rainer Schmidt: Alternatives to Liberal Democracy, Revisited. Lessons from Latin America. - Alan Siaroff: The Political Regimes of the Americas, 2000-2018, and their Historical Origins. - 232 Seiten mit 9 Farb- und fünf s/w-Abb., gebunden (Publications of the Bavarian American Academy; Vol. 20/Universitätsverlag Winter 2019)