Cultural Mobility - A Manifesto

Cultural Mobility is a blueprint and a model for understanding the patterns of meaning that human societies create. Drawn from a wide range of disciplines, the essays collected here under the distinguished editorial guidance of Stephen Greenblatt share the conviction that cultures, even traditional cultures, are rarely stable or fixed. Radical mobility is not a phenomenon of the twenty-first century alone, but is a key constituent element of human life in virtually all periods. Yet academic accounts of culture tend to operate on exactly the opposite assumption and to celebrate what they imagine to be rooted or whole or undamaged. To grasp the shaping power of colonization, exile, emigration, wandering, contamination, and unexpected, random events, along with the fierce compulsions of greed, longing, and restlessness, cultural analysis needs to operate with a new set of principles. An international group of authors spells out these principles and puts them into practice. • Brings together a group of international authors under the guidance of Stephen Greenblatt, one of the most distinguished and visible cultural critics in the world • Provides both a coherent set of guidelines to be followed and a set of detailed examples of cultural analysis • Draws together contributors from different disciplines, applying these guidelines to their particular areas of interest

1. Cultural mobility: an introduction Stephen Greenblatt 2. 'The wheel of torments': mobility and redemption in Portuguese colonial India (16th century) Ines Zupanov 3. Theatrical mobility Stephen Greenblatt 4. World literature beyond Goethe Reinhard Meyler-Kalkus 5. Mobility between Boston and Berlin: how Germans have read and reread narratives of American slavery Heike Paul 6. Struggling for mobility: migration, tourism, and cultural authority in contemporary China Pal Nyiri 7. Performativity and mobility: Middle Eastern traditions on the move Friederike Pannewick 8. A mobility studies manifesto Stephen Greenblatt