Negotiating Transcultural Lives

In simple terms, transculturation describes the phenomenon of merging and converging cultures. In societies of the early twenty-first century, transculturation is amplified by communication and transportation technology. Global media conglomerates, the Internet, and air travel are bringing cultures together at an accelerating pace. This reality is especially apparent among young people, who routinely negotiate their position with peers from other cultural and socio-economic contexts. In Negotiating Transcultural Lives Dirk Hoeder, Yvonne Hébert, and Irina Schmitt bring together an international group of scholars to reflect on transculturation in the daily lives of youth. The contributors analyze the life experiences of young people in several societies with emphasis on Europe and Canada. Adopting a comparative perspective, the authors argue that in order to understand the issue of cultural belonging in young people today, it is necessary to examine the broader social and historical context while avoiding mono-cultural assumptions. Ultimately, the goal of the collection is to encourage teachers, social workers, journalists, and the media to recognize and appreciate the diverse cultural perspectives and contributions of contemporary youth.

Featuring interviews, conversations and observations from a multi-sited ethnography of Ecuadorean musicians and their families, this book offers an innovative response to previous analyses of globalization and indigenous languages, demonstrating how transcultural practices can enhance the use and maintenance of indigenous and minority languages.

Negotiating Transcultural Relations in the Early Modern Mediterranean is a study of transcultural relations between Ottoman Muslims, Christian subjects of the Venetian Republic, and other social groups in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Focusing principally on Ottoman Muslims who came to Venice and its outlying territories, and using sources in Italian, Turkish and Spanish, this study examines the different types of power relations and the social geographies that framed the encounters of Muslim travelers. While Stephen Ortega does not dismiss the idea that Venetians and Ottoman Muslims represented two distinct communities, he does argue that Christian and Muslim exchange in the pre-modern period involved integrated cultural, economic, political and social practices. Ortega's investigation brings to light how merchants, trade brokers, diplomats, informants, converts, wayward souls and government officials from different communities engaged in similar practices and used comparable negotiation tactics in matters ranging from trade disputes, to the rights of male family members, to guarantees of protection. In relying on sources from archives in Venice, Istanbul and Simancas, the book demonstrates the importance of viewing Mediterranean history from a variety of perspectives, and it emphasizes the importance of understanding cross-cultural history as a negotiation between different social, cultural and institutional actors.

Transcultural Negotiations of Gender probes into how gender is negotiated along the two axes of ‘belonging’ and ‘longing’– the twin desires of being located within a cultural milieu, while yearning for either what has passed by or what is yet to come. It also probes into the category of ‘transculturality’ itself, by examining how not only does it pertain to the coming together of cultures from diverse spatial locations, but how shifts over time and changing performative modes and technological means of articulation, within what may be presumed to be the same culture, can also lead to the ‘transcultural’. The volume comprises four sections. Part I, ‘(Be)longing in Time’, examines negotiation of gender through transcultural acts of myths, rituals and religious practices being revised and revisited over time. Part II, ‘(Be)longing in Space’, studies how gender is renegotiated when people from different spaces interact, as also when public spaces and domains themselves become sites of such negotiations. In Part III, ‘Performing (Be)longing’, such transcultural negotiations are located in the context of changing modes of performance, considering particularly that gender itself is performative. The final section, ‘Modernity, Technology and (Be)longing’, traces how gender becomes transculturally negotiated in a space like India, with the advent of modernity and its companion technology.

What is most strikingly new about the transcultural is its sudden ubiquity. Following in the wake of previous concepts in cultural and literary studies such as creolization, hybridity, and syncretism, and signalling a family relationship to terms such as transnationality, translocality, and transmigration, ‘transcultural’ terminology has unobtrusively but powerfully edged its way into contemporary theoretical and critical discourse. The four sections of this volume denote major areas where ‘transcultural’ questions and problematics have come to the fore: theories of culture and literature that have sought to account for the complexity of culture in a world increasingly characterized by globalization, transnationalization, and interdependence; realities of individual and collective life-worlds shaped by the ubiquity of phenomena and experiences relating to transnational connections and the blurring of cultural boundaries; fictions in literature and other media that explore these realities, negotiate the fuzzy edges of ‘ethnic’ or ‘national’ cultures, and participate in the creation of transnational public spheres as well as transcultural imaginations and memories; and, finally, pedagogy and didactics, where earlier models of teaching ‘other’ cultures are faced with the challenge of coming to terms with cultural complexity both in what is being taught and in the people it is taught to, and where ‘target cultures’ have become elusive. The idea of ‘locating’ culture and literature exclusively in the context of ethnicities or nations is rapidly losing plausibility throughout an ‘English-speaking world’ that has long since been multi- rather than monolingual. Exploring the prospects and contours of ‘Transcultural English Studies’ thus reflects a set of common challenges and predicaments that in recent years have increasingly moved centre stage not only in the New Literatures in English, but also in British and American studies.

In Transcultural Writers and Novels in the Age of Global Mobility, Arianna Dagnino analyzes a new type of literature emerging from artists' increased movement and cultural flows spawned by globalization. This "transcultural" literature is produced by authors who write across cultural and national boundaries. Dagnino's book contains a creative rendition of interviews conducted with five internationally renowned writers-Inez Baranay, Brian Castro, Alberto Manguel, Tim Parks, and Ilija Trojanow-and a critical exegesis reflecting on thematic critical, and stylistic aspects. By studying the selected authors' corpus of work, life experiences, and cultural orientations, Dagnino explores the implicit, often subconscious process of cultural and imaginative metamorphosis that leads transcultural writers and their fictionalized characters beyond ethnic national, racial, or religious loci of identity and identity formation. "The work is a significant contribution to scholorship, for it increases our theoretical awareness of today's literary developments, providing us with critical tools that enable us to approach literary texts with an innovative perspective."-Maurizio Ascari, Universita di Bologna.

This edited volume takes an interdisciplinary approach to the question of how identities are negotiated and a sense of belonging established in a world of increasing migration and diversity. Transcending field-specific approaches and differences in foci, the authors investigate how identity is constructed and mediated in face-to-face interactions (in real time and fictional writing), how writers use narratives to express their reorientation and their identity negotiation in a new homeland, and how material objects convey layered meaning to identity and belonging. This engagement with spoken, written and material mediation of identity resonates with recent sociolinguistic investigations on how language is connected to and intersects with embodiment, materiality and time. The volume will be of interest to students and scholars of globalisation and migration studies, sociolinguistics and narrative analysis, anthropology and cultural studies.