Transnational American memories / edited by Udo J. Hebel.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Hebel, Udo J.

Series:

Media and cultural memory; 11.

Media and cultural memory = Medien und kulturelle Erinnerung

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

American literature--History and criticism.

American literature.

History in literature.

Collective memory in literature.

National characteristics, American, in literature.

Literature and history--United States--History.

Literature and history.

Collective memory and literature--United States--History.

Collective memory and literature.

United States--Historiography.

United States.

United States--In literature.

United States--In motion pictures.

United States--In art.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (468 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

New York ; Berlin : Walter de Gruyter, c2009.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

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 1990's, 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.

Contents:

Front matter

Contents

Introduction

Transnational Recastings of Conquest and the Malinche Myth

Performing Cultural Memory: Scenarios of Colonial Encounter in the Writings of John Smith, Cabeza de Vaca, and Jacques Cartier

Saving the Circum-Atlantic World: Transnational (American) Memories in Julia Álvarez's Disease Narrative

Intruders on Native Ground: Troubling Silences and Memories of the Land-Taking in Norwegian Immigrant Letters

Tribal or Transnational? Memory, History and Identity in James Welch's The Heartsong of Charging Elk

Arabs Looking Back: William Peter Blatty's Autobiographical Writing

Roots Trips and Virtual Ethnicity: Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything Is Illuminated

Terrorist Violence and Transnational Memory: Jonathan Safran Foer and Don DeLillo

Remembering War the Transnational Way: The U.S.-American Memory of World War I

"Let Him Remain Until the Judgment in France": Family Letters and the Overseas Burying of U.S. World War I Soldiers

Liberating Dachau: Transnational Discourses of Holocaust Memory

Remembering the 'Forgotten War' and Containing the 'Remembered War:' Insistent Nationalism and the Transnational Memory of the Korean War

Celluloid Recoveries: Cinematic Transformations of Ground Zero

(Re)Visions of Progress: Chicago's World's Fairs as Sites of Transnational American Memory

Between Diaspora and Empire: The Shevchenko Monument in Washington, D.C.

Of Routes and Roots: Topographies of Transnational Memory in the Upper Rio Grande Valley

"A Lens into What It Means to Be an American": African American Philadelphia Murals as Sites of Memory

Artistic Inspiration and Transnational Memories in the Twentieth Century

Magna Carta 1215 and the Exercise of Transnationalism in the Twenty-First Century

Commentary Epilogue

Back matter

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN:

9786612345425

9781282345423

1282345427

9783110224214

3110224216

OCLC:

557704192