Udo Hebel – författare

The volume gathers twenty original essays by experts of American memory studies from the United States and Europe. It extends discussions of U.S. American cultures of memory, commemorative identity construction, and the politics of remembrance into the topical field of transnational and comparative American studies. In the contexts of the theoretical turns since the 1990s, including prominently the pictorial and the spatial turns, and in the wake of multicultural and international conceptions of American history, the contributions to the collection explore the cultural productivity and political implications of both officially endorsed memories and practices of oppositional remembrance. Reading sites of memory situated in or related to the United States as crossroads of transnational and intercultural remembering and commemoration manifests their possibly controversial function as platforms and agents in the processes of cultural exchange and political negotiation across the spatial, temporal, and ideological trajectories that inform American Studies as Atlantic Studies, Hemispheric Studies, Pacific Studies. The interdisciplinary range of issues and materials engaged includes literary texts, personal accounts, and cultural performances from colonial times through the immediate present, the significance of war monuments and ethnic memorials in Europe, Asia, and the U.S., films about 9/11, public sculptures and the fine arts, American world’s fairs as transnational sites of memory.

The volume gathers twenty original essays by experts of American memory studies from the United States and Europe. It extends discussions of U.S. American cultures of memory, commemorative identity construction, and the politics of remembrance into the topical field of transnational and comparative American studies. In the contexts of the theoretical turns since the 1990s, including prominently the pictorial and the spatial turns, and in the wake of multicultural and international conceptions of American history, the contributions to the collection explore the cultural productivity and political implications of both officially endorsed memories and practices of oppositional remembrance. Reading sites of memory situated in or related to the United States as crossroads of transnational and intercultural remembering and commemoration manifests their possibly controversial function as platforms and agents in the processes of cultural exchange and political negotiation across the spatial, temporal, and ideological trajectories that inform American Studies as Atlantic Studies, Hemispheric Studies, Pacific Studies. The interdisciplinary range of issues and materials engaged includes literary texts, personal accounts, and cultural performances from colonial times through the immediate present, the significance of war monuments and ethnic memorials in Europe, Asia, and the U.S., films about 9/11, public sculptures and the fine arts, American world’s fairs as transnational sites of memory.

Rooted in Transnational American Studies, this collection explores German-American encounters in Bavaria since 1945. Spanning a trajectory from the end of World War II to the contemporary American presence in the region, the articles and visuals discuss the impact of the transnational contact zone on negotiations of democratization, historical guilt, cultural diplomacy, identity politics, military cooperation, economic interaction, pop and folk culture, literature, memory, museums, and tourism. Articles on Rhineland-Palatinate, Austria, and the Netherlands signify the complexity of European-American relations. The volume complicates bipolar, solidifying comparative approaches in favor of multidirectional, fluid conceptualizations of intercultural transfer and transnational entanglements.

Native American cultures have always succeeded to varying degrees in negotiating a balance between their tribal cultural heritage and the ‘dominant culture.’ In the present study, the meeting between these cultures is not interpreted as a clash, but as a cultural encounter in a contact zone. The concept of transculturation serves as a theoretical model to analyze how history and culture are fictionally constructed in contemporary American Indian literature. Developing a dynamic, dialogic, and reciprocal relationship between their native worldviews and literary techniques, on the one hand, and those of the larger society, on the other, the writers examined in this study – Anna Lee Walters, Diane Glancy, James Welch, Linda Hogan, Thomas King, and Gerald Vizenor – stress the processual nature of culture. These writers demonstrate that transculturation functions as a major strategy of survival for Native Americans in the past and in the present.