Contact Spaces of American Culture

Contact Spaces of American Culture PDF Author: Petra Eckhard
Publisher: LIT Verlag Münster
ISBN: 3643504349
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
What do tent cities, basketball courts, slave ships, and Facebook have in common? They are spaces of American culture where an idea of 'Americanness' emerges through a concrete form of contact on the one hand and through its mediated representation on the other. This collection of essays examines these contact spaces - and their myriad and complex configurations of culture - along a spatial axis, highlighting the interconnectedness of the local and the global in concrete spaces of American culture, both inside and outside the US, and from the world wide web. One line of inquiry studies metaphors of contact, the other one reads media texts as contact spaces and investigates the role of mediation. (Series: American Studies in Austria - Vol. 12)

Contact Spaces of American Culture

Contact Spaces of American Culture PDF Author: Petra Eckhard
Publisher: LIT Verlag Münster
ISBN: 3643504349
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
What do tent cities, basketball courts, slave ships, and Facebook have in common? They are spaces of American culture where an idea of 'Americanness' emerges through a concrete form of contact on the one hand and through its mediated representation on the other. This collection of essays examines these contact spaces - and their myriad and complex configurations of culture - along a spatial axis, highlighting the interconnectedness of the local and the global in concrete spaces of American culture, both inside and outside the US, and from the world wide web. One line of inquiry studies metaphors of contact, the other one reads media texts as contact spaces and investigates the role of mediation. (Series: American Studies in Austria - Vol. 12)

Space in America

Space in America PDF Author: Klaus Benesch
Publisher: Rodopi
ISBN: 9042018763
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 589

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Book Description
America's sense of space has always been tied to what Hayden White called the narrativization of real events. If the awe-inspiring manifestations of nature in America (Niagara Falls, Virginia's Natural Bridge, the Grand Canyon, etc.) were often used as a foil for projecting utopian visions and idealizations of the nation's exceptional place among the nations of the world, the rapid technological progress and its concomitant appropriation of natural spaces served equally well, as David Nye argues, to promote the dominant cultural idiom of exploration and conquest. From the beginning, American attitudes towards space were thus utterly contradictory if not paradoxical; a paradox that scholars tried to capture in such hybrid concepts as the middle landscape (Leo Marx), an engineered New Earth (Cecelia Tichi), or the technological sublime (David Nye). Not only was America's concept of space paradoxical, it has always also been a contested terrain, a site of continuous social and cultural conflict. Many foundational issues in American history (the dislocation of Native and African Americans, the geo-political implications of nation-building, immigration and transmigration, the increasing division and clustering of contemporary American society, etc.) involve differing ideals and notions of space. Quite literally, space and its various ideological appropriations formed the arena where America's search for identity (national, political, cultural) has been staged. If American democracy, as Frederick Jackson Turner claimed, is born of free land, then its history may well be defined as the history of the fierce struggles to gain and maintain power over both the geographical, social and political spaces of America and its concomitant narratives. The number and range of topics, interests, and critical approaches of the essays gathered here open up exciting new avenues of inquiry into the tangled, contentious relations of space in America. Topics include: Theories of Space - Landscape / Nature - Technoscape / Architecture / Urban Utopia - Literature - Performance / Film / Visual Arts.

Hospitality in American Literature and Culture

Hospitality in American Literature and Culture PDF Author: Ana Maria Manzanas Calvo
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1317236491
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 214

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Book Description
This book examines hospitality in American immigrant literature and culture, situating it at the crossroads of space and border theory, and exploring themes of migration, citizenship, identity formation, and spatiality. Assessing the conditions, duration, and shifting roles of hosts and guests in the US, it visits recent representations of immigrant spatiality, from the space of the body in film to the ways in which immigrants are incorporated into the US in a range of literary examples. Timely and imperative in light of the legacies of colonialism, and the realities of modern-day globalization, this book will be of value to fields including post-colonialism, American Studies, and others.

Creative Spaces

Creative Spaces PDF Author: Niall H.D. Geraghty
Publisher: University of London Press
ISBN: 9781908857484
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Creative Spaces: Urban Culture and Marginality is an interdisciplinary exploration of the different ways in which marginal urban spaces have become privileged locations for creativity in Latin America. The essays within the collection reassess dom

Culture Works

Culture Works PDF Author: Arlene Dávila
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 081474432X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 243

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Book Description
Culture Works addresses and critiques an important dimension of the “work of culture,” an argument made by enthusiasts of creative economies that culture contributes to the GDP, employment, social cohesion, and other forms of neoliberal development. While culture does make important contributions to national and urban economies, the incentives and benefits of participating in this economy are not distributed equally, due to restructuring that neoliberal policies have wrought from the 1980s on, as well as long-standing social structures, such as racism and classism, that breed inequality. The cultural economy promises to make life better, particularly in cities, but not everyone can take advantage of it for decent jobs. Exposing and challenging the taken-for-granted assumptions around questions of space, value and mobility that are sustained by neoliberal treatments of culture, Culture Works explores some of the hierarchies of cultural workers that these engender, as they play out in a variety of settings, from shopping malls in Puerto Rico and art galleries in New York to tango tourism in Buenos Aires. Noted scholar Arlene Dávila brilliantly reveals how similar dynamics of space, value and mobility come to bear in each location, inspiring particular cultural politics that have repercussions that are both geographically specific, but also ultimately global in scope.

The Airplane in American Culture

The Airplane in American Culture PDF Author: Dominick Pisano
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 9780472068333
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 420

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Book Description
A fascinating account of America's relationship with the airplane

US American Expressions of Utopian and Dystopian Visions

US American Expressions of Utopian and Dystopian Visions PDF Author: Saskia Fürst
Publisher: LIT Verlag Münster
ISBN: 3643909314
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 217

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Book Description
This collection takes stock of current discourses in American studies on the political valence of American utopias, be they as religious diasporas or as socialist experiments, fantastic or realist, successful or failed. The included essays take into account the spatiality of utopias (especially in their visionary scope), analyze currents in literary utopias, and look at dystopian visions in literature. This volume strives to keep alive the long tradition of writers, artists, and scholars who warned against imminent disasters and envisioned ways to counter such ruinous bearings. (Series: American Studies in Austria, Vol. 17) [Subject: Sociology, Literary Studies]

No Requiem for the Space Age

No Requiem for the Space Age PDF Author: Matthew D. Tribbe
Publisher:
ISBN: 0199313520
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
This fluidly written first book uses Americans' reactions to the Apollo moon landings to examine cultural and social trends in the 1960s and 70s.

Culture and Environment

Culture and Environment PDF Author: Irwin Altman
Publisher: CUP Archive
ISBN: 9780521319706
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 356

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Book Description
It covers a wide range of topics dealing with the complex relationship between people and the environment.

Spatializing Culture

Spatializing Culture PDF Author: Setha Low
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317369637
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 385

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Book Description
This book demonstrates the value of ethnographic theory and methods in understanding space and place, and considers how ethnographically-based spatial analyses can yield insight into prejudices, inequalities and social exclusion as well as offering people the means for understanding the places where they live, work, shop and socialize. In developing the concept of spatializing culture, Setha Low draws on over twenty years of research to examine social production, social construction, embodied, discursive, emotive and affective, as well as translocal approaches. A global range of fieldwork examples are employed throughout the text to highlight not just the theoretical development of the idea of spatializing culture, but how it can be used in undertaking ethnographies of space and place. The volume will be valuable for students and scholars from a number of disciplines who are interested in the study of culture through the lens of space and place.