Transcultural Localisms

This volume presents original research from the 4th MESEA conference, 'Ethnic Communities in Democratic Societies," May 2004, Thessaloniki, Greece. The original title was replaced by the current one as the present volume took shape. The new title, 'Transcultural Localisms," focuses on the common thread running through the sixteen essays of the volume: in the twenty-first century, flows of culture, capital and labor cannot curb the resurgence of local resistances that contest global dynamics. Today's global culture cannot integrate everything; rather, its terrain is open to challenge and its borders are constantly in flux. If anything, local resistances appropriate elements they find useful from that same global culture which they are forced to accept. As a result, their own projects of cultural, economic and political survival are expedited. The essays collected in this volume emphasize the potential of the local to challenge rather than submit, and to defy those discourses which protect the interests of institutional control, thereby creating possibilities for alternative discourses.

Table of Contents:

Yiorgos Kalogeras, Eleftheria Arapoglou, Linda J. Manney:

I Anti-Essentialist Configurations
Pin-chia Feng: Transcontinental Writing: Reconfiguring the Politics of Home in Maryse Condé's The Last of the African Kings
Gary Y. Okihiro: Toward a Pacific Civilization
Elke Sturm Trigonakis: Global Playing in Poetry: The Texts of Juan Felipe Herrera and José A. Oliver as a New Weltliteratur
II Western Political Unilateralism and Local History
Chris LaLonde: Place, Displacement, and a Pathway Home
in Kimberly Blaeser's Poetry
Linda J. Manney: Soliloquy, Story, and Song: Language as a Social Practice
and Social Change
Kaeko Mochizuki: Duras, Ibuse and Silko: Narrating Nuclear Destruction
in Atomic Societies
John Purdy: Drawing the Line: Native American Fiction and National Identities
III Auto-ethnography and Self-invention
Mita Banerjee: Skunk's Gall Bladders in Gin: Normalizing Chinatown in Denise Chong's The Concubine's Children
Sophia Emmanouilidou: Mythography and the Reconstitution of Chicano Identity in Rudolfo Anaya's The Legend of La Llorona (1984)
Sidonie Smith: Narrated Lives and the Contemporary Regime of Human Rights: Mobilizing Stories, Campaigns, Ethnicities
IV Cultural Incommensurability and Hybridity
Pirjo Ahokas: Constructing a Transnational, Postmodern Female Identity in Bharati Mukherjee's Desirable Daughters and Monica Ali's Brick Lane
Anjoom Mukadam and Sharmina Mawani: Nizari Ismailis in the West: Negotiating National, Religious and Ethnic Identity
Ilana Xinos: Narrating Captivity and Identity: Christophorus Castanis' The Greek Exile and the Genesis of the Greek American
V The Challenges of Ethnic Incorporation
Stefano Luconi: Italian-American Historiography and the Search for a Usable Past
Stepanka Korytova-Magstadt: The Elite, the Peasants, and Woodrow Wilson: American Slovaks and their Homeland 1914-1918
Hale Yilmaz: Constructing a New Laz Identity in Turkey and its Future Prospects
Contributors and Editors