Ports of Call: Central European and North American Culture/s in Motion

This volume collects papers put together by an interdisciplinary group of scholars, which explore how the two imaginary geo-cultural spaces Central Europe and (North) America have mutually attributed meanings to each other over the past two centuries, how traveling images of an othered cultural space - inserted into specific regional, national and social contexts and appropriated for negotiations of cultural identity and belonging as well as exclusion and colonization - have laid the basis for a cultural essentialism which thinks culture through space and negotiates cultural status through de-historicized notions of place and territory. It particularly focuses on processes of motion and travel which helped to create these images and discusses in individual case studies a wide variety of cultural phenomena - ranging from music to film, from tourism to world fairs - while sharing the common concern to explore how motion through space - whether physical or imaginary - helped shape, crystallize and negotiate images of the cultural other in contact or transit zones where people, images and cultures meet in asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination, and where tourists, exiles, travelers, displaced commodities and foreign cultural practices generate powerful, as well as potentially subversive, visions and imaginings. Thus this volume invites to find individual paths and ports in/between the subjects presented and in a way to contribute to, to follow up the web of exchange represented by its authors, themselves a (mostly) virtual community of researchers.