Full Description
A superb combination of focused case studies and high level conceptual thinking, this volume is an important monument in the ongoing development of Inter-American studies The articles gathered here closely examine a wide variety of cultural phenomena implicated in the 'entanglements' which have defined the history of the Americas. From religious networks to music and dance, and across a range of literary and artistic works, the mobility of people, objects, and ideas in the Americas is expertly mapped. At the same time, the book represents a serious enterprise of theory-building. Drawing on the histories of postcolonial thought, mobility studies, and work on human migration, Mobile and Entangled America(s) clearly establishes a new interdisciplinary field attentive both to the complexities of cultural form and the pervasiveness of power relations. Each article stands as a significant piece of scholarship on its own, but all are in dialogue with each other. The result is a richly satisfying and important volume of cultural scholarship.
Contents
Lists of Figures and Tables vii
Notes on Contributors ix
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction: Just a Small Step: From Jamaica Kincaid's
A Small Place to Mobile and Entangled America(s) 1
Maryemma Graham and Wilfried Raussert
PART I LITERARY AND CULTURAL MOBILITIES
1 On Routes and Roots: Movement and Rootedness in
Garifuna Culture 13
Paula Prescod
2 CircumCaribbean Sisterhood: Patterns of Migration in
Cristina Garcia's The Agüero Sisters 25
John Lowe
3 Tracing Afro Diasporic Histories: Translocational Storytelling
and Entangled Afro Americas in Ntozake Shange's Sassafrass,
Cypress & Indigo and Edwidge Danticat's Brother I'm Dying 51
Wilfried Raussert
4 "My history is a creature nobody really believes in. My history is
a foreign word." Second-Generation Immigrant Identity in
David Chariandy's Soucouyant 73
Miriam Brandel
5 From Granny's Knee to Graduate Seminar: The Travels of
the Soucouyant 91
Giselle Liza Anatol
6 Translocating the Caribbean, Positioning Im/Mobilities:
The Sonic Politics of Las Krudas from Cuba 103
Julia Roth
vi Mobile and Entangled America(s)
PART II BIOCULTURAL AND NEW MEDIA MOBILITIES
7 Intimate Ties: Biotic Mobility and Inter‑American Studies 131
Rüdiger Kunow
8 Tattoo Travels: On Mobilities and Mobilizations of
American Skin Art 155
Martin Butler
9 United Colors of Belonging? Participatory Culture and
Diversity 2.0 in the Crowd-sourced Documentary Life in a Day 167
Sebastian Thies
10 Transnational Forces, Technological Developments, and
the Role of the State in the Mexican Audiovisual Sector 189
José Carlos Lozano
11 Mission Inverted: Inter-American Religious Flows and
How to Capture Them 203
Heinrich Wilhelm Schäfer
PART III TRAVELING POLITICS, TRAVELING IDEOLOGIES,
AND TRANSMIGRATIONS
12 The Polysemic Use of Identity and Culture in International
Migration: The Case of Central American Migration in Mexico 245
Rodolfo Casillas
13 The Mobility of Hope and Violence in Sin Nombre 265
Josef Raab
14 Mexican Indigenismo in a Hemispheric Context--Elements for
a Historiography of Inter-American Entanglements in the
First Half of the Twentieth Century 283
Olaf Kaltmeier
15 Boas Goes to Americas: The Emergence of Trans-American
Perspectives on "Culture" 301
Afef Benessaieh
16 Moby-Dick and Globalization 321
John Carlos Rowe
Index 337
