This volume collects papers put together by an interdisciplinary group of scholars, which explore how the two imaginary geo-cultural spaces «Central Europe» and «(North) America» have mutually attributed meanings to each other over the past two centuries, how traveling images of an «othered» cultural space - inserted into specific regional, national and social contexts and appropriated for negotiations of cultural identity and belonging as well as exclusion and colonization - have laid the basis for a cultural essentialism which thinks culture through space and negotiates cultural status through de-historicized notions of place and territory. It particularly focuses on processes of motion and travel which helped to create these images and discusses in individual case studies a wide variety of cultural phenomena - ranging from music to film, from tourism to world fairs - while sharing the common concern to explore how motion through space - whether physical or imaginary - helped shape, crystallize and negotiate images of the cultural other in contact or transit zones where people, images and cultures meet in asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination, and where tourists, exiles, travelers, displaced commodities and foreign cultural practices generate powerful, as well as potentially subversive, visions and imaginings. Thus this volume invites to find individual paths and ports in/between the subjects presented and in a way to contribute to, to follow up the web of exchange represented by its authors, themselves a (mostly) virtual community of researchers.
About the Author: The Editors: Susan Ingram has a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Alberta and is currently working on a postdoctoral project in the History Department at the University of Victoria on the technologies of self-representation. In addition to women's writing and auto/biography, she has also published on topics in Translation Studies.
Markus Reisenleitner has a Ph.D. from the University of Vienna and joined the Department of Cultural Studies at the Lingnan University Hong-Kong in the capacity of Associate Professor in 2001. Areas of interest include cultural history and cultural studies (urban studies, theories of space, place and identity, popular culture in public entertainment and spectacle, popular literature and themed environments).
Cornelia Szabó-Knotik has a Ph.D. in Musicology from the University of Vienna and is Associate Professor at the Institute of Analysis, Theory and History of Music at the University of Music in Vienna. Interested in the aesthetic content as well as the social and cultural importance of music, her main subjects are the history of music-life, the many phenomena of reception, including the importance of new media (film) for the way the musical heritage is confronted.