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Transnational mobility is a widespread phenomenon. It has a big impact on the lives of the individuals who travel or migrate. In order to survive and achieve their goals, they have to go through a process of learning with regard to the cultural texts and practices they now confront. They have to cope with a range of rules and tools with which they are not familiar. In some cases, migrants will simply adopt these rules and practices. In others, their engagement with them will lead to fundamental changes in the host culture. Wolfgang Berg and Aoileann Ní Éigeartaigh interrogate the notion of "transculturalism" in an interdisciplinary way and explore the tensions inherent in contemporary theories of culture and identity. Exploring the (auto)biographical writings of transcultural protagonists, the authors show that crossing borders remains a difficult and challenging experience.
The book will be of interest to researchers and students in the fields of cultural/intercultural studies, literature, and social science.
List of contents
Aus dem Inhalt:
With contributions by Wolfgang Berg, Christin Buchheim, Cristina Cheveresan, Magda Danciu, Márta Fülöp, Serine Haghverdian, Catherine Leen, Janina Lehr, Aoileann Ní Éigeartaigh, Gerald David Naughton, Franziska Scholze
About the author
Dr. Wolfgang Berg is a professor for European Studies at the University of Applied Sciences in Merseburg, Germany.
Dr. Aoileann Ní Éigeartaigh is a lecturer in literature and cultural studies in Dundalk Institute of Technology, Ireland.
Summary
1. 2 Culture and Identity in a Postmodern World Michel Foucault’s statement that: “The present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space. We are in the epoch of simultaneity; we are in the epoch of juxtaposition” (M. Foucault 1986: 22) heralded a new approach to identity in the contemporary world by suggesting that one’s identity is formed not as a result of the cultural and national values and history one has inherited, but rather as a result of the different spaces through which one travels. In other words, one’s identity is no longer perceived as an inherited construct but rather as something flexible that changes as one moves through the more fluid spaces of the contemporary, globalized world and internalizes a mixture of the different cultures and ideas that one encounters. The idealized contemporary traveller will thus effortlessly cross national and cultural borders and negotiate a constantly changing and flexible identity for himself. Andy Bennett argues that it is no longer even possible to conceive of identity as a static entity, forged from a communal history and value system, because all of the traditional certainties on which identity formation were based in the past have been fatally undermined by a postmodernist flux and fluidity: “Once clearly demarcated by relatively static and ethnically homogenous communities, the ‘spaces’ and ‘places’ of everyday life are now highly pluralistic and contested, and are constantly being defined and redefined through processes of relocation and cultural hybridisation” (A.
Foreword
A Biographical Approach
