Transnational American Memories

Udo Hebel

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9783110224214
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

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.

Table of contents

• Frontmatter
• 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
• Backmatter