
Embodiments of Cultural Encounters
Waxmann (Publisher)
1st Edition
Published in August 2011
Book
Paperback/Softback
272 pages
978-3-8309-2548-4 (ISBN)
Description
The meeting of members of different cultures, frequently conceptualized in abstract terms, always involves the meeting of human bodies. This volume brings together contributions by scholars of various disciplines that address physical aspects and effects of cultural encounters in historical and present-day Settings. Bodies were and are not only markers of cultural identity and difference, endlessly inscribed and represented as the 'body politic' or 'the exotic other'; as battlegrounds of cross-cultural signification and identification bodies are also potential agents of change. While some essays address the elusiveness of the 'real' or material body, forever lost behind a veil of textual and visual representation, others analyze the performative effect of such representations - their function of disciplining colonized bodies and Subjects by integrating them into Western systems of cultural signification and scientific classification. Yet, as the volume also shows, formerly colonized people, far from Subjecting themselves completely to Western discourses of physical discipline, retain traditional body practices - whether in food culture, religious ritual, or musical performances. Such local reinscriptions escape the grip of Western culture and transform the global semantics of the body.
Reviews / Votes
This impressive publication [...] is part of a valuable Series of intellectual explorations in negotiating the intercultural journey. - Bruce Harding in: Jahrbuch für Europäische Überseegeschichte, 13/2013More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Munster
Germany
Target group
Adult education
Edition type
New edition
Illustrations
mit zahlreichen, teils farbigen Abbildungen
mit zahlreichen, teils farbigen Abbildungen
Dimensions
Height: 24 cm
Width: 17 cm
ISBN-13
978-3-8309-2548-4 (9783830925484)
DOI
https://doi.org/10.31244/9783830975489
Schweitzer Classification
Persons
Editor
Sebastian Jobs is post-doctoral fellow at the Graduate School "Cultural Encounters and the Discourses of Scholarship" in RoStock and at the German Historical Institute in Washington, DC. He earned his Ph.D. in U.S. History from the University of Erfurt, Germany.
Sebastian Jobs, Dr. phil. (2009, Universität Erfurt), Historiker; seit 2015 Juniorprofessor am John-F.-Kennedy-Institut für Nordamerikastudien (FU Berlin); davor Postdoc an der FU Berlin, Universität RoStock und dem Deutschen Historischen Institut in Washington, DC; Studium der Geschichtswissenschaft in Erfurt, Beloit, WI und Berkeley, CA. Forschungsschwerpunkte: US-Geschichte, Alltagsgeschichte, Sklaverei, Gerüchte, Politische Aufführungen und Rituale, Geschichte und Erinnerungspolitik.
Gesa Mackenthun is professor of American Studies at RoStock University, Germany. Her books include Metaphors of Dispossession. American Beginnings and the Translation of Empire (1997), Fictions of the Black Atlantic (2004), and the co-edited volumes Decolonizing 'Prehistory'. Deep Time and Indigenous Knowledges in North America (with Christen Mucher, 2021), Sea Changes. Historicizing the Ocean (with Bernhard Klein, 2004), Entangled Knowledge. Scientific Discourses and Cultural Difference (with Klaus Hock, 2012), and DEcolonial Heritage: Natures, Cultures and the Asymmetries of Memory (with Aníbal Arregui, 2017). Her current research deals with representations of the transatlantic history of enclosures, evictions, and ecocide.