Floodgates : Technologies, Cultural (Ex)Change and the Persistence of Place

This volume collects papers put together by an interdisciplinary group of scholars from Central Europe, North America, and Asia to explore how the imaginary geo-cultural space of Central Europe has acquired meanings over the past two centuries and how traveling images of an othered cultural space - inserted into specific regional, national and social contexts and appropriated for negotiations of cultural identity and belonging as well as exclusion and colonization - have laid the basis for a cultural essentialism which thinks culture through space and negotiates cultural status through de-historicized notions of place and territory. It particularly focuses on the specific factors and forms of mediation that mobilize, inhibit or prevent culture/s from traveling. More specifically it asks for the technologies, media, and forms of representation that render im/possible cultural ex/change. The case studies are intended as probes into a wide variety of contexts. Approaches to the highly complex processes delineating cultural mobility, they interrogate the instability of cultural flows and attempt to determine how these flows are re-territorialized into stable spatialized forms of identification and imaginings of culture.