Floodgates

This volume collects papers put together by an interdisciplinary group of scholars from Central Europe, North America, and Asia to explore how the imaginary geo-cultural space of Central Europe has acquired meanings over the past two centuries and 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 the specific factors and forms of mediation that mobilize, inhibit or prevent culture/s from traveling. More specifically it asks for the technologies, media, and forms of representation that render im/possible cultural ex/change. The case studies are intended as probes into a wide variety of contexts. Approaches to the highly complex processes delineating cultural mobility, they interrogate the instability of cultural flows and attempt to determine how these flows are re-territorialized into stable spatialized forms of identification and imaginings of culture.