Transatlantic Encounters

Paris was the artistic capital of the world in the 1920s and '30s, providing a home and community for the French and international avant-garde. Latin American artists contributed to and reinterpreted nearly every major modernist movement that took place in the creative center of Paris between World War I and World War II, including Cubism (Diego Rivera), Surrealism (Antonio Berni and Roberto Matta), and Constructivism (Joaquin Torres-Garcia). Yet their participation in the Paris art scene has remained largely overlooked until now. This book examines their collective role, surveying the work of both household names and an extraordinary array of lesser-known artists. Michele Greet illuminates the significant ways in which Latin American expatriates helped establish modernism and, conversely, how a Parisian environment influenced the development of Latin American artistic identity.

In the last twenty years, transnational perspectives have gained momentum in the field of historical-educational research. Scholars have made substantial efforts to rethink nation-based historiographies by reconstructing and reinterpreting the cross-border encounters and intertwined processes that have turned the history of education into a transnational enterprise. A closer look at specific transnational spaces furthers a better understanding of these processes. Against this backdrop, the book offers case studies focusing on transatlantic encounters with special regard to the manifold entanglements between Germany and the United States of America that represent one of the most complex, dynamic, and vivid educational spaces between the eighteenth and twentieth century. Drawing on excellent source material, each contribution examines interaction processes as the genuine transformative moment within any cross-border transfer, and investigates exchanges of concepts, institutions, and materials. Under this premise, the book draws attention to shifting trajectories in the German-American history of education that can be identified by focusing on long-lasting transnational entanglements. By offering a wide range of research approaches, the publication furthermore contributes innovative methodological thoughts to transnational histories of education that go beyond the German-American context and will interest students, emerging researchers, and experts of history of education.

Publisher description

Transatlantic historians are dedicated to analyzing the dynamic process of encounter, interchange, and creolization that was initiated when peoples on different sides of the Atlantic Basin first made contact and continues until the twenty-first century. The forty-ninth annual Walter Prescott Webb Memorial Lecture Series —“Currents in Transatlantic Thought”—was organized to commemorate the fifteenth anniversary of the University of Texas at Arlington’s doctoral program in transatlantic history. Six alumni of the program were invited to return and present their ongoing research in this new approach to history that focuses on the complex process of interchange and adaptation that began when Africans, Amerindians, and Europeans first came into contact. The essays stemming from those lectures cover a variety of topics grouped around three unifying themes—encounters, commodities, and identities—that illustrate the potentiality of transatlantic history.

In the first major study of twentieth-century feminism as an Anglo-American phenomenon, Lucy Delap offers a unique perspective on the politics of gender. By exploring the intellectual history and cultural politics of Anglo-American feminism Delap challenges the reader to re-think the nature of both the 'avant-garde' and 'feminism'.

Discussions about fundamental historical events of the past century have invaded the public domain; Public opinion and policy-makers ask framers of the public image of the past to provide guidance, reassurance, and legitimisation. Increasing social heterogeneity and cultural difference force us to revise our traditional concepts of culture and examine the public, social and pedagogical implications of multiculturalism in an explicitly comparative perspective. This book explores how history has been used to support or oppose the political orders of our century as well as its great themes, and how historians have dealt with issues of scholarly objectivity, personal beliefs, and public commitment.