The contributions in this volume address the ways the two imagined (cultural) spaces commonly designed as ‘Central Europe’ and ‘North America’ have mutually attributed meanings to each other and set out to trace patterns and structures resulting from this process. Rather than concentrate on what happens when cultural forms and practices travel across the Atlantic the focus lies on the contexts of their insertion into the ‘other’ culture. The articles draw attention to how those complexities and contradictions are resolved on an ideological basis in order to produce the kind of stability that is the hallmark of geo-cultural place signification, but also, conversely, the revenge of a spatialized history, the reassertion of their temporality that cultural practices produce when they reverberate in displacement.
