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When we take a critical look at the history of modernity today and attempt to approach the phenomena of transcultural modernism from a post-Eurocentric perspective, we usually operate with a dynamic notion of culture that we have borrowed from postcolonial studies, critical migration and diaspora studies, critical anthropology, and parts of globalisation theory. It is clear that several of the terms used to examine classical modern conceptions of culture have become part of our language through works
This chapter posits some (impossible) encounters between transcultural thinking and modernist art theory in the mid-twentieth century. The regional context of the discussion, which also constitutes a study of contacts between white and Black modernism, is America, with a focus on the United States. During the era in question, modernist art theory and early transcultural studies represented opposing concepts of cultural production, and these contradictory viewpoints have not yet been sufficiently compared
and entitlement that existed at the local, national and international level. Glissant’s multilingual counterpoetic Edouard Glissant’s notion of Relation (Glissant 1981 , 1997 ) has helped me to think more carefully about how everyday multilingual and transcultural encounters at my street market sites were wrought through by historic connections between language and power. Glissant talked about there being two forms of historically inflected identity: ‘root identity’ and ‘Relation identity’. He explained that a pulsation towards monolingualism had been
19 Transcultural projectivism in Charles Olson’s ‘The Kingfishers’ and Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri’s Warlugulong Peter Minter Literal depth Whenever I think about Charles Olson’s projectivism I start out with a visual apparition. Instead of reckoning first with words or language or a language-based grammar of some kind, I see a material apparatus hanging in an imagined space. This apparatus has a plastic, tangible shape, and buoyancy, somewhat like a mobile or constellation hanging in the air as if formed by the condensation of kinetic energy within a field of
When James Baldwin in No Name in the Street discusses the case of Tony Maynard, who had been imprisoned in Hamburg in 1967, he emphasizes that his efforts to aid his unjustly imprisoned friend were greatly supported by his German publishing house Rowohlt and, in particular, by his then-editor Fritz Raddatz (1931–2015). While the passages on Maynard remain the only instance in Baldwin’s published writings in which Raddatz—praised as a courageous “anti-Nazi German” and a kindred ally who “knows what it means to be beaten in prison”—is mentioned directly, the relation between Baldwin and Raddatz has left traces that cover over fifty years. The African-American writer and Rowohlt’s chief editor got to know each other around 1963, when Baldwin was first published in Germany. They exchanged letters between 1965 and 1984, and many of Raddatz’s critical writings from different periods—the first piece from 1965, the last from 2014—focus of Baldwin’s books. They also collaborated on various projects—among them a long interview and Baldwin’s review of Roots—which were all published in the German weekly newspaper Die Zeit, where Raddatz served as head of the literary and arts sections from 1977 to 1985. Drawing on published and unpublished writings of both men, this article provides a discussion of the most significant facets of this under-explored relationship and its literary achievements. Thereby, it sheds new light on two central questions of recent Baldwin scholarship: first, the circumstances of production and formation crucial to Baldwin’s writings of the 1970s and 1980s, and secondly, Baldwin’s international activities, his transcultural reception and influence.
Literary Visions of Multicultural Ireland is the first full-length monograph in the market to address the impact that Celtic-Tiger immigration has exerted on the poetry, drama and fiction of contemporary Irish writers. The book opens with a lively, challenging preface by Prof. Declan Kiberd and is followed by 18 essays by leading and prestigious scholars in the field of Irish studies from both sides of the Atlantic who address, in pioneering, differing and thus enriching ways, the emerging multiethnic character of Irish literature. Key areas of discussion are: What does it mean to be ‘multicultural,’ and what are the implications of this condition for contemporary Irish writers? How has literature in Ireland responded to inward migration? Have Irish writers reflected in their work (either explicitly or implicitly) the existence of migrant communities in Ireland? If so, are elements of Irish traditional culture and community maintained or transformed? What is the social and political efficacy of these intercultural artistic visions? While these issues have received sustained academic attention in literary contexts with longer traditions of migration, they have yet to be extensively addressed in Ireland today. The collection will thus be of interest to students and academics of contemporary literature as well as the general reader willing to learn more about Ireland and Irish culture. Overall, this book will become most useful to scholars working in Irish studies, contemporary Irish literature, multiculturalism, migration, globalisation and transculturality. Writers discussed include Hugo Hamilton, Roddy Doyle, Colum McCann, Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, Dermot Bolger, Chris Binchy, Michael O'Loughlin, Emer Martin, and Kate O'Riordan, amongst others.
Migration, understood as the movement of people and cultures, gives impetus to globalisation and the transculturation processes that the interaction between people and cultures entails. This book addresses migration as a profoundly transforming force that has remodelled artistic and art institutional practices across the world. It explores contemporary art's critical engagement with migration and globalisation as a key source for improving our understanding of how these processes transform identities, cultures, institutions and geopolitics. The book also explores three interwoven issues of enduring interest: identity and belonging, institutional visibility and recognition of migrant artists, and the interrelations between aesthetics and politics, and its representations of forced migration. Transculturality indicates a certain quality (of an idea, an object, a self-perception or way of living) which joins a variety of elements indistinguishable as separate sources. The topic of migration is permeated not only with political but also with ethical urgencies. The most telling sign of how profoundly the mobility turn has affected the visual arts is perhaps the spread of the term global art in the discourses on art, where it is often used as a synonym for internationally circulating contemporary art. The book examines interventions by three artists who take a critical de- and postcolonial approach to the institutional structures and spaces of Western museums. The book also looks at the politics of representation, and particularly the question of how aesthetics, politics and ethics can be triangulated and balanced when artists seek to make visible the conditions of irregular migration.
11 ‘Like a foreigner / in my native land’: transculturality and Otherness in twenty-first-century Irish poetry Michaela Schrage-Früh Ireland in the Celtic Tiger years saw an unprecedented influx of ethnically diverse migrants to a nation formerly perceived as comparatively monocultural. Sketching the two dominant representations of post-Celtic Tiger multiculturalism, Amanda Tucker notes that the first of these ‘emphasizes that fear and hostility continue to characterize Irish responses to inward migration since the Gaelic Catholic monolith remains’ at the heart
expressions of transcultural fraternity and solidarity – which often took the form of gossip, jokes and coded warnings – formed what James Scott has called an ‘infrapolitics’ that created a disguise of ‘ ideological insubordination’ from which people could construct an antihegemonic ‘imaginative capacity’ (Scott 1990 : 19, 90–92). People in Napoli often reproduced the hegemonic public transcript about street vending through performances of dominance, on the part of both the powerful and the marginalised. However, at the same time, infrapolitical verbal styles allowed in
corroborates the postcolonial criticism of the exclusion of non-Western artists by the European modernists. 3 In order to be able to use the ‘African’ for their own aesthetic revolution, the modernists had to negate the presence of Africans as human beings and contemporary cultural producers. 4 In Gikandi’s analysis, the contact case study serves to prove the failure of transcultural relationships that took place on the basis of late colonial power relations and under the premises of modernist assumptions